The gap between what performs well on social media and what actually drives results for brands is becoming harder to navigate. Platforms are more measurable than ever, but the metrics brands rely on don’t always translate into long-term impact.
Callum McCahon, chief strategy officer at Born Social, is confronting that shift head-on. This year, he will also serve as a judge at the IPA Effectiveness Awards for the first time.
We sat down with McCahon to talk about what makes an effective campaign today, why brands are misreading social metrics, and how distribution is reshaping the way content works.
Is there still a gap between award-winning work and work that actually drives results?
I’m really excited to be judging the IPA effectiveness awards this year because they have been the bastions in the industry for long-term brand building. Historically there was definitely a gap and awards came under a lot of criticism for that. But I think it is starting to close now. The pendulum is swinging away from celebrating those one-off moments to rewarding the things that actually create sustained growth.
The things I will be looking for is whether the work is repeatable and if it’s rooted in something that only that particular brand could have done,
How has your definition of effectiveness changed in the last few years?
We’re at a really interesting time in content and creative where there’s now more AI created content than human content. What that means is we’re now in this era of what I call infinite content, where there’s no competitive advantage in volume anymore. It’s not about just making more creative. It’s about really focusing on the creative that makes you distinctive and is ownable by that brand and is generating momentum over the long term.
What’s an example of a brand that’s adapting well to that shift?
There’s a few but I’m going to plug our work for Guinness.
Guinness has been on a really interesting journey. Their big challenge has been how do we recruit a younger, more diverse audience and get new people enjoying Guinness.
The campaign we’re really excited about at the moment is our Pint of View campaign, which is based on the idea that people are already sharing these moments in pubs. They’re taking photos of the communion that happens around the pint. That’s what we needed to showcase on social.
We thought about a way we could encourage people to share those moments in a way that feels natural and fluid. The execution was using beer mats. We cut a pint-shaped hole in the middle of them that acts as an aperture for the photo. So people hold up the beer mat, frame the moment behind it, take the photo and then upload it to social.
What I love about it is we launched it with no influencers, no instructions, no big media spend behind it. We just put it into pubs and saw what happened. What we got back is all these moments of communion and play and people having an amazing time around the brand. That is now fuelling so much of our creative mix, just from these really natural moments coming from communities.
What are the most common ways brands misread effectiveness?
Speaking from a social perspective, the biggest one is an overreliance on platform metrics. We’re in an era where engagement, views and clicks are really easy to measure and see, so they become the default for a lot of brands. But they’re not the same as impact, and a lot of brands mistake those short-term activity metrics for actual effectiveness.
The brands that do this well link what’s happening on social to meaningful outcomes like brand growth and long-term memory structures. And that often requires going beyond what the platforms show you.
If platform metrics aren’t enough, what should brands be focusing on?
What I think is really interesting at the moment is that a lot of the most important brand building is happening through proxies.
So rather than what the brand is putting out as its own content, it’s happening through creators, influencers, communities, comment sections on TikTok and Reddit, search and AI. It’s all these places that are one step removed from what the brand says.
Those things are a lot harder to measure, so they don’t often show up as strongly in effectiveness case studies. I think that’s really interesting because my suspicion is that a lot of what makes up what a brand is today is how it shows up in those environments, rather than what the actual content says.
It’s just so hard to measure and therefore it’s undervalued. I’d love to see more effort to quantify that and treat it really seriously.
How does Born Social try to measure those less visible effects?
In the campaigns that we run with our clients, when we’re doing influencer campaigns, we will run brand-lift studies on the creator content. So not just looking at how many views it got, but actually polling people before and after on what the content did to their perception of the brand, whether they are more likely to buy and so on.
We also try to tie it through to sales uplift and investigate the relationship between when we invest in this kind of content and what we’re seeing in terms of results through to sales.
What’s the most common misunderstanding brands have about social media?
I think brands are undervaluing the distribution side of social, and I see it as as important as the creative itself. Up until a few years ago, distribution kind of took care of itself on social. What has changed now is what I call the three horizons of discovery.
It’s not just going to people who follow you [Horizon 1]. That’s actually a tiny segment of who will see your content. You get earned distribution through the feed [Horizon 2], but the really growing element is social search and long-tail distribution [Horizon 3]. The rise of people using TikTok as a search platform, Reddit, YouTube, and how all of that is informing AI results.
Brands are still thinking about social as we’ll put content out and distribution will take care of itself. But actually, thinking about distribution as strategically as the creative itself is really important.
With people posting less, how should marketers adapt their approach?
The key social KPI you should be looking at is not likes or comments, it’s how many of those share icons you’re seeing. A lot of that is people sharing into group chats, WhatsApp and DMs.
It’s challenging to measure because it’s hidden. It’s not as obvious. But when brands optimise towards on-platform metrics like likes and comments, they’re only looking at a small part of what social is about.
So brands need to adapt to that environment rather than optimising for how social used to work.
People are still sharing, it just happens in private spaces now. You can see that in how platforms have evolved as well. Look at how Instagram has reordered their app, the DMs page is now front and centre and you don’t see content from your friends as the default. That’s the way social’s been going for years.
So brands need to adapt to that environment rather than optimising for how social used to work.
How are brands reacting to the recent court losses for Meta and Google?
We’re always advising our clients on diversity of investment across social. We haven’t seen a real tone shift in that respect [since the court cases]. It’s more we’ve always been advising to not be too reliant on one platform. Spread your investment across.
It came up a few years ago with X and and the controversy around that and that was our advice as well.
As social becomes increasingly mainstream, is there still a place for specialist agencies like Born Social?
We talk a lot about being social-first, not social-only.
Our view is that the future of creative is built from social, because it’s about being culturally relevant, audience-first in thinking and knowing how to grab attention and then do something with it. Those skills allow us to stretch into non-social formats in a really strong way.
For example, the Point of View campaign I mentioned is now running across out of home in Ireland. It’s an example of an idea that starts in social and then stretches out beyond.
Social is going to continue to be the dominant media channel in our lives, but it looks very different now. We’re in this era of infinite content where brands can create a lot of content at low cost. The difference is how you get to great. That comes from taste, instinct, judgment, and strong strategy and creative.
So the value is shifting towards those things rather than volume. Every brand has access to volume now. The advantage comes from distinctiveness and meaning.