“Social is one of these things where, when it started, it was a bit of a land grab. It’s this new shiny thing, it’s content, it’s the internet on acid,” says Michael Corcoran, as he muses on the state of social media marketing in 2025. “Creative agencies wanted to own it, PR agencies wanted to own it, paid media wanted to own it, but when you challenge them on metrics of success and what it’s doing, nobody can fucking answer. It’s all vanity and fluff.”

Corcoran’s marketing career has evolved in tandem with social’s rapid growth trajectory over the last decade and a half. When he landed his first job in 2011 at a PR agency, brands were only just starting to experiment with their personas on platforms like Twitter, while Instagram was little more than a fledgling photo-sharing app and TikTok didn’t even exist yet. As one of the more digitally savvy members of his team, he quickly discovered that as a form of media, social is essentially “OOH and TV where you can scream back at the ads”.

His first role was followed by a couple of different stints at digital agencies, then by in-house roles at Paddy Power, Betfair and, most notably, as head of social at Ryanair, where he spearheaded the airline’s famously anarchic social presence. After quitting the business (in rather spectacular fashion) in 2023, Corcoran set up his own consultancy Frankly in part to address his frustrations around the marketing world’s approach to social. Specifically, its obsession with copycat virality over long-term strategy.

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