In brands’ eternal quest to break through unending online clutter, the marketers at the helm must come up with something different to push platforms further, into new and surprising spaces. This is the view of Aivory Gaw, Associate Planning Director at AKQA, speaking at the IAB’s Social Media’s Future Evolution conference (London, August 2017). And yet, she said, breaking platforms is nothing new. Social media has always been evolving: as communities as much as platforms, they enable and are themselves enabled by their users.
In the late 2000s, social was still in its infancy – Social 1.0, as Gaw put...