In marketing, social media is not the savior.

With the NFL season beginning this past weekend, new expensive ad campaigns from GE, McDonalds, Lincoln, Nationwide and countless other companies will trickle out through a variety of platforms, many already priming for the holidays. Social media marketing — buying promoted tweets and Facebook posts to reach users — is an increasingly larger part of the modern campaign.

Social media seems like the perfect ad campaign. Marketers can now measure exactly how many people open a link, pass by a tweet or make a purchase through a Facebook ad. The concept of a company being a friend is clearly very appealing to salesmen.

But consumers know better. They know that an entity that exists only to move the money in their pocket to a corporate bank account is no friend. The social media marketing model will fail for that reason.

The reality is that, according to a Sept. 3 article from Forbes, only 15 percent of chief marketing officers can prove that social media investments generate any kind of return.

Look at what is regarded as one of the most successful social campaigns of all time: Old Spice and Wieden+Kennedy’s, “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like.” After audiences fell in love with former NFL player Isaiah Mustafa’s portrayal of the Old Spice guy, Mustafa himself made over 160 30-second response videos, written on-the-spot to individual fans and sent them out through Twitter and Facebook.

According to a report by Vivaldi Partners, a consulting group, Old Spice suddenly had 740,000 Facebook fans and 80,000 Twitter followers in a matter of a month. The response videos were eight of the 11 most popular videos on YouTube in the month of their release, and the original commercial is the most-viewed branded content on YouTube of all time. AdWeek reported the most important metric: sales increased 107 percent over six months. So it had to be true; social media was the future of marketing.

But the real story is not as glamorous as the sales reps for Twitter and Facebook would likely believe. The 107 percent number was ballooned by other traditional marketing efforts, such as: a massive television and print campaign, coverage from media outlets, Mustafa’s appearances all over television talk shows, such as Oprah, Ellen and ESPN, and most importantly, a buy-one-get-one-free coupon initiative put out by Proctor & Gamble, which produces Old Spice.

This is not to mention Tony Stewart’s Old Spice racecar zooming past millions of eyeballs and the company’s pre-existing position as the No. 1 body wash brand. So Wieden+Kennedy conducted a masterful use of the internet and social media, but those two entities played only a small part in this massive campaign even though they got all the love afterwards. Even Proctor & Gamble spokesman Mike Norton said to AdAge, “It’s impossible to know” what spurred the 107 percent sales growth.

Still, investment in social media marketing is expected to surge 128 percent in the next five years, according to the Forbes article. Much of this is due to the lobbying efforts of Twitter and Facebook. Social media salesmen contact desperate ad agencies and persuade account managers to persuade clients to invest in promoted tweets and Facebook ads. Ad agencies get their cut, and the rest of the advertiser’s investment goes straight to the social platform.

Facebook and Twitter will keep perpetuating the myth that social media can solve all your business problems, and early signals indicate that marketers will keep buying into it. Social media can only succeed when complemented by a fully integrated, traditional campaign. There’s little evidence that tweets and posts will pay for themselves.

Phil Kramer is a sophomore finance and television, radio and film major. His column appears weekly. You can reach him at [email protected].

Published on September 8, 2014 at 12:45 am