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
I haven’t seen Django Unchained yet (though I want to, and I loved Inglorious Basterds), but I found this insight into Tarantino’s process very interesting. From a New York Times interview with the director:
I have a writer’s journey going on and a filmmaker’s journey going on, and obviously they’re symbiotic, but they also are separate. When I write my scripts it’s not really about the movie per se, it is about the page. It’s supposed to be literature. I write stuff that’s never going to make it in the movie and stuff that I know wouldn’t even be right for the movie, but I’ll put it in the screenplay. We’ll decide later do we shoot it, do we not shoot it, whatever, but it’s important for the written work.
I think about this at Percolate sometimes and always err on the side of over-documentation. I like the idea of building a narrative around something that extends far beyond what’s necessary, as the additional context creates an important background for decisions. In Tarantino’s case, I have to imagine part of the reason he gets such good performances out of the actors in his films is that they’re given such a rich text to work with.
January 4, 2013 // This post is about: Filmmaking, MOVIES, Quentin Tarantino, WRITING
I really enjoyed this FT review of a few books on the origin of words and misspellings. Especially interesting was this note on how dictionaries came to represent current language:
Why did the editors of Webster’s Third drop this lexicographic A-bomb (another addition to the dictionary)? Because views on dictionaries, indeed on language itself, had changed. Instead of laying down rules on how people should write and speak, dictionaries became records of how people did write and speak. And that meant all the people, not just those who spoke the educated language of New England. The new trends in lexicography went along with the growth of scientific method and Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution: lexicographers observed what was happening to the language, rather than handing down precepts.
December 23, 2012 // This post is about: dictionary, evolution, language, words, WRITING
Felix Salmon gives his take on what really made Nate Silver such a phenomenom: First, he can explain complicated math simply and second, he gave people fodder for conversation. Felix explains:
The thing that Silver and the Obama campaign have in common, then, is that they used their databases to tell stories. Or, more to the point, their databases and models were used so that Americans could tell stories to each other. Silver’s site became a virtual watercooler, especially towards the end of the campaign — a place where people would gather to talk about what was possible and what was likely. Nate’s voice helped to guide the discussions, but the real reason that he got such astonishing traffic was not that people wanted to read what he was writing, so much as that people were using his model as a framework within which to hold their own idiosyncratic discussions.
Now I’m not sure that this is really unique. People consume, at least in part, to talk about what they read. This is especially true in the realm of politics as evidenced by the nonstop conversation over the last three months. But I still think Felix is very right and it’s interesting to think about the role of statistics here. Are statistics actually better conversational fodder than punditry because they still allow the reader to make observations and decisions? Not sure, but I like the thought.
November 8, 2012 // This post is about: election, Nate Silver, politics, Statistics, WRITING
So apparently Jonah Lehrer plagiarize himself (or something like that). I’ve read a bit about it (not enough to have an opinion), but of course Felix Salmon has and takes the opportunity to dive into a comment from Josh Levin at Slate that Lehrer’s Frontal Cortex blog (one of my favorites) is to blame. The argument, essentially, is that if you’re “an idea man” like Lehrer a blog places too much stress on content creation.
Felix, as is frequently the case, disagrees: “Lehrer shouldn’t shut down Frontal Cortex; he should simply change it to become a real blog. And if he does that, he’s likely to find that blogs in fact are wonderful tools for generating ideas, rather than being places where your precious store of ideas gets used up in record-quick time.” What’s more, he dives in on a few suggestions for what to do with the blog and in turn makes some really interesting comments about blogging generally. I especially like his first point:
Firstly, think of it as reading, rather than writing. Lehrer is a wide-ranging polymath: he is sent, and stumbles across, all manner of interesting things every day. Right now, I suspect, he files those things away somewhere and wonders whether one day he might be able to use them for another Big Idea piece. Make the blog the place where you file them away. Those posts can be much shorter than the things Lehrer’s writing right now: basically, just an excited “hey look at this”, with maybe a short description of why it’s interesting. It’s OK if the meat of what you’re blogging is elsewhere, rather than on your own blog. In fact, that’s kind of the whole point.
I always thought of this blog as a thing I use to think out loud. It doesn’t overwhelm me because it helps me think through ideas (and in turn create new ones).
June 20, 2012 // This post is about: blogging, Felix Salmon, ideas, Jonah Lehrer, Josh Levin, WRITING
