On Friday a rather long piece I wrote on content marketing went up over at Re/code. The point of the piece was to try to answer the three main questions we hear around the space: What is content marketing, why is it a big deal for brands, and how big could it really be? I did my best to answer all three questions and while I won’t reproduce the whole thing here, I did want to give a little flavor for a few of the points I made that I think you’ll find most interesting.
On the future of following brands:
The last note on the “why” question is around followers. For a while now, questions have been asked about why consumers follow brands, and what this means. Whereas at one time follower count was a meaningful metric for brands, it’s not any more. The major social platforms have a clear message to marketers: We have the scale and ad products to allow you to reach any consumer segment for a reasonable cost. The marketer’s job, then, returns to creating content that captures their attention and achieves the brand’s objectives, whatever those objectives may be.
On why mobile is so meaningful for the future of digital advertising and content:
What happens in mobile is that all the things that made up digital marketing over the last 15 years start to go away. That means no more flash, cookies, banners or Facebook sidebar ads. The mobile opportunity is about “native advertising,” which, in English, is just about the content and the ad being the same thing. To think about the market opportunity, then, you need to look at the market opportunity for the biggest social platforms (a.k.a. mobile media companies) in the world: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. (I’m leaving Google off for the sake of simplicity, but I think they belong in this group, as well.)
And, finally, my three big/almost-definitely-inarguable conclusions driving the growth of content marketing:
1. Massive amounts of consumer attention are moving to mobile social platforms.
2. Those platforms are made up of streams of content, and will offer brands increasingly impressive parameters for targeting unique groups of consumers.
3. For brands to be successful in reaching consumers, they will need to create engaging and on-brand content.
It seems relatively simple, then, that content — and therefore content marketing — sits at the center of the next phase of marketing technology, and offers a massive opportunity.
The whole thing is at Re/code.
January 27, 2014 // This post is about: content marketing, percolate, WRITING
This morning I woke up to this Tweet from my friend Nick:
It’s great to have friends who discover interesting stuff and send it my way, so I quickly clicked over at read Jeff’s piece on sponsored content and media as a service. I’m going to leave the latter unturned as I find myself spending much less time thinking about the broader state of the media since starting Percolate two-and-a-half years ago. But the former, sponsored content, is clearly a place I play and was curious to see what Jarvis thought.
Quickly I realized he thought something very different than me (which, of course, is why I’m writing a blog post). Mostly I started getting agitated right around here: “Confusing the audience is clearly the goal of native-sponsored-brand-content-voice-advertising. And the result has to be a dilution of the value of news brands.” While that may be true in advertorial/sponsored content/native advertising space, it misses the vast majority of content being produced by brands on a day-to-day basis. That content is being created for social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the such by brands who have acquired massive audiences, frequently much larger than the media companies Jarvis is referring to. Again, I think this exists outside native advertising, but if Jarvis is going to conflate content marketing and native advertising, than it seems important to point out. To give this a sense of scale the average brand had 178 corporate social media accounts in January, 2012. Social is where they’re producing content. Period.
Second issue came in a paragraph about the scalability of content for brands:
Now here’s the funny part: Brands are chasing the wrong goal. Marketers shouldn’t want to make content. Don’t they know that content is a lousy business? As adman Rishad Tobaccowala said to me in an email, content is not scalable for advertisers, either. He says the future of marketing isn’t advertising but utilities and services. I say the same for news: It is a service.
Two things here: First, I agree that the current ways brands create content aren’t scalable. That’s because they’re using methods designed for creating television commercials to create 140 character Tweets. However, to conclude that content is the lousy business is missing the point a bit. Content is a lousy business when you’re selling ads around that content. The reason for this is reasonably simple: You’re not in the business of creating content, you’re in the business of getting people back to your website (or to buy your magazine or newspaper). The whole letting your content float around the web is great, but at the end of the day no eyeballs mean no ad dollars. But brands don’t sell ads, they sell soap, or cars, or soda. Their business is somewhere completely different and, at the end of the day, they don’t care where you see their content as long as you see it. What this allows them to do is outsource their entire backend and audience acquisition to the big social platforms and just focus on the day-to-day content creation.
Finally, while it’s nice to think that more brands will deliver utilities and services on top of the utilities and services they already sell, delivering those services will require the very audience they’re building on Facebook, Twitter, and the like to begin with.
July 29, 2013 // This post is about: brand journalism, content marketing, jeff jarvis, media, native advertising, percoalte
