How Community Advertising Helps Small Businesses

Small businesses are the financial and cultural bedrock of our physical communities. The people who own and manage them live in our neighborhoods. Their morning routines wake up a city. They support local artists and invest in community causes. They know their customers by name. The pandemic made it more obvious than ever that small businesses care deeply about the communities that keep them afloat. Small business owners stepped up to sew face masks, produce hand sanitizer, and give out free toilet paper when their communities desperately needed those things in order to stay safe. Local restaurants donated meals to their communities’ essential workers and unhoused populations. Small business owners, not large corporations, were the ones handing out free snacks and water bottles to BLM protestors. They were the ones who showed up in the morning to help their fellow small business owners repair shop windows after a night of civil unrest.

Small businesses invest time and money into their physical communities because they understand that community matters. In other words, while their participation in communities might gain them a loyal customer base and allow them to profit, making a profit is not the sole reason for their participation. Acting as a tether between capitalism and community, small businesses both benefit from and contribute to communities — making them the example of how capitalism can sometimes be palatable and charitable, as opposed to merely exploitative.

Well, at Mesh we believe that our online communities are just as important as our physical ones, and they should be treated that way. That’s why we use the community advertising model, which takes the special relationship between small businesses and physical communities and mimics it in the digital ecosystem. This model allows brands to own their relationships with online communities and participate in them with intentionality, just as they would in the real world. This starkly contrasts the dynamic of the surveillance advertising model, which places brands at the whim of the giant social media platforms and leaves them clueless as to where, and to whom, their ads are showing up.

Here are three reasons why the community ad model is awesome for small businesses:

1.     Community advertising means that whoever sees your ad sees it as an endorsement by a trusted creator.

Under the community ad model, creators must — at a minimum — sign off on the brands that advertise to their communities. More often than not, however, creators actually hand-select the brands they want to form partnerships with because they share their core values. That means that every time your ad shows up in a community, the members know that their respected community leader believes in what you’re selling. That’s a way more compelling reason for them to support your business than a creepy targeted ad could provide.

2.     Community advertising protects your brand safety.

No brand wants to be associated with communities where negativity and bullying are tolerated, much less with full-fledged hate groups. Under the community ad model, you are never in the dark as to what kind of content your ads are showing up next to. Brands and creators are accountable to one another: The creator trusts you to run your business in a principled way, and you trust that the creator is running and moderating their community in a way that won’t jeopardize your brand safety.

3.     Community advertising makes you a valued community member instead of an unwelcome trespasser.

Under the surveillance ad model, ads are often disruptive to communities. They usually have nothing to do with the community’s purpose, making them interlopers that distract from the content members actually want to see. Under the community ad model, by contrast, community members know that you’ve been invited into the fold by someone they trust. They know that you are on their team. You’re either a business that they already know and love, or you’re about to be!