Latest / The CMO Podcast with Fexingo: Marketing Leadership, Budgets, and Executive Strategy / Why CMOs Are Betting on Dark Social
Transcript
- Lucas: Luna, I want to talk about a metric that most CMOs are completely blind to, and it's probably the biggest channel they're already investing in without knowing it. Luna: You're talking about dark social, right? The sharing that happens in WhatsApp groups, DMs, private Slack channels — the stuff we can't see. Lucas: Exactly. Gartner published a number last year that still blows my mind: 84 percent of all outbound sharing from publishers and brands now happens through dark social channels. Not Twitter, not Facebook — private messaging. And most CMOs have zero visibility into it. Luna: So the link someone sends their friend in a Signal chat — that's dark social. But how do you even begin to track that? Isn't the whole point that it's private? Lucas: Right, and that's the tension. You can't track it in the traditional sense. But you can infer it. The classic method is to look at your referral traffic in analytics and identify the chunk that shows up as 'direct' but isn't typed in — it's actually from a link shared in a messaging app that stripped the referrer. That's your dark social traffic. Luna: Okay, so it's the 'direct traffic' that's a lie. I've heard that phrase before. But what do CMOs do with that knowledge? Just knowing it exists doesn't help you optimize. Lucas: That's where it gets interesting. Some brands are building sharing flows specifically designed for dark social. Take Glossier, for example. They've always encouraged one-to-one sharing via their referral program — but the link is a clean URL, no tracking parameters that get stripped. They use coupon codes instead of links to attribute. So if I share a code in a group chat, they know it came from me. Luna: Coupon codes as attribution — that's clever. But doesn't that only work if you have a referral program? What about a brand that just wants people to share an article or a product page? Lucas: Airbnb did something similar years ago. They created shareable wish lists and trip guides that people would naturally send to friends. And they embedded unique identifiers in the URL structure that survived being pasted into WhatsApp. The key is designing the shareable asset so it's worth passing along, not just a link with a tracking parameter. Luna: So the strategy is less about tracking and more about creating shareable objects. I like that. But I'd imagine a lot of CMOs are nervous about the privacy angle. If you start trying to infiltrate private conversations, you risk brand damage. Lucas: That's the line you don't cross. You don't spy. You measure the aggregate, not the individual. Pinterest actually built a 'close friends' sharing feature that lets users send pins privately — and Pinterest knows it's happening, but they don't peek at the content of the message. They just know a share event occurred. That's enough for attribution. Luna: So the CMO's job is to understand the volume and velocity of dark sharing, not the content. But how do you even get that aggregate data if the platforms don't give it to you? Lucas: You use shortened links with a custom domain. Services like Bitly or Rebrandly can show you clicks that don't have a referrer. If you see a spike in direct traffic to a specific article after you push it on Instagram, and the referrer is blank, that's likely dark social. You can also use utm parameters that survive — but the most reliable method is to create dedicated landing pages with unique URLs for each campaign and see which ones get direct hits. Luna: That sounds like a lot of work. Is it worth it? What's the ROI on understanding dark social? Lucas: Here's the thing: if 84 percent of sharing is invisible, and you're optimizing your content based only on the 16 percent you can see, you're flying blind. Brands that invest in dark social measurement — and I've seen this with a few DTC companies — often find that their best-performing content on 'direct traffic' is actually their most shared content in private. So they start creating more of that type of content. It changes the creative strategy. Luna: So it's not about a new metric — it's about reallocating budget based on what's actually working. Honestly, if today's episode was worth a coffee to you, that's the link — buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Lucas: Yeah, listener support is what keeps this show ad-free. If these marketing conversations have sparked something you've actually used, that link is buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Just a small way to say it's useful. Luna: And now back to dark social. Lucas, you mentioned DTC brands — can you give a concrete example of a brand that changed its creative because of dark social insights? Lucas: Sure. There's a supplement brand called Momentous — they make protein and nootropics. They noticed that a huge chunk of their direct traffic was coming from links shared in fitness-focused Discord servers and Telegram groups. They started creating shareable infographics and one-pagers that were designed to be screenshotted and sent. No links needed — just the image with a coupon code. Their conversion rate from those screenshots was three times higher than their paid social ads. Luna: So they leaned into the medium. The content was designed for dark social consumption. That's a smart pivot. Lucas: Exactly. And that's the playbook. You don't try to bring dark social into the light. You create content that thrives in the dark. That means shorter, more useful, more personal. Think of it as the difference between a billboard and a text from a friend. Luna: But I wonder about scalability. If every brand starts doing this, won't the private channels get saturated? Lucas: Possible, but the barrier is higher. Trust is the currency in dark social. If you're not useful, you get muted. The brands winning at this are the ones that provide genuine utility, not just promotional content. Think of a PDF guide that someone actually wants to forward to a colleague. That's earned distribution. Luna: So the CMO's job is to make content that's inherently shareable in private. That's a different creative brief than optimizing for the public feed. Lucas: Totally different. Public feed content is about stopping the scroll. Dark social content is about being the scroll — being the thing someone chooses to send. It's a higher bar. And honestly, I think that's why a lot of CMOs are afraid to invest in it. It forces you to admit that you don't control the message anymore. Luna: That's the discomfort, right? Losing control of the narrative. But if you trust your product and your brand, dark social is where the most authentic word of mouth lives. Lucas: Which is exactly why it's so valuable. A Gartner analyst told me that brands with high dark-social engagement also have higher customer lifetime value. Correlation, not causation, but it makes sense. If someone is willing to share your content privately, they're likely a loyal customer. Luna: Okay, so if I'm a CMO listening, what's the first step? How do I even start measuring dark social tomorrow? Lucas: First, audit your direct traffic in your analytics tool. Look for pages with high direct visits but no obvious source. If you see a blog post with 10,000 direct visits and it's not a homepage, that's dark social. Second, set up custom link shorteners for key campaigns. Third, create a few pieces of 'dark shareable' content — a checklist, a template, a one-pager — and promote them with the explicit nudge to 'share with a colleague.' Then measure the direct traffic to those pages. Luna: And if the numbers are good, you invest more. But what about tools? Are there any platforms that help with this? Lucas: A few. GetSocial and ShareThis have dark social analytics features. But honestly, most of the work is manual. The tools can show you the shadow, but you have to interpret it. The real investment is in the content strategy shift. Luna: So it's a mindset change more than a tech stack change. That's harder for some CMOs than buying a new platform. Lucas: Much harder. But the payoff is that you're building a channel that competitors can't easily replicate. Dark social is moat-building. It's defensible because it's based on trust and utility, not ad spend. Luna: I think that's a great place to leave it. Dark social — the channel you can't see but can't afford to ignore. Lucas: And worth remembering: the best marketing sometimes happens in the quietest spaces.