First you have to give (the consumer) something – then later ask (click here, sign up, buy this, like us, etc). People want relationships with brands, but they expect the experience will be meaningful and engaging before they act.
I was on a date the other night. It was intense. It was intense for all the wrong reasons. Only one of which I’ll go into now. Within the first 20 minutes with the guy, after having sat down in a small, not very special coffee shop we got to the conversation of our jobs. He worked for a mobile shopping app, I said I was a Content Strategist. The conversation quickly turned towards him telling me that I worked in a stupid ‘waste of time’ profession and that advertisers were arrogant to assume that they could interrupt a person’s daily journey between point A and point B (whatever it was). For a moment I was inclined to agree with him – but my position on the matter evolved more from a viewpoint that it’s not advertisers that are the issue, it’s lazy advertisers who are battling to eventually churn out bad content, that doesn’t do anything for the brand and certainly doesn’t increase their commercial worth.
I argued that the problem is not that we are doing a useless, thankless job – it’s that not enough of us are doing it well enough. I explained – when he forced me to tell him that I skipped YouTube ads – that if anyone works hard enough to put out content that grabs my attention long enough for me to know it’s associated with a brand, then I’m likely to speak about that brand, or at least its activity with a friend. Word of mouth I said, is a powerful thing and whilst I might not have interrupted my target demographic’s journey –I could be sure that a conversation chain would eventually ensure that one person began thinking about the brand in a better light.
A chocca-block playground
The increased chatter across the digital spheres means that brands are having to work harder to grab the limited attention of consumers as they browse through over 27,000,000 pieces of shared content every day (2012 study by AOL and Nielsen) . Content is definitely king as we have come to believe as gospel but with more and more of it each day it is becoming increasingly hard to butt through that chatter with content that is actually worth its weight.
People spend more than half their time online with content as the AOL and Nielson study suggests and brands are battling for attention in a sea of content streams from the more traditional online publications and news portals to social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook and not forgetting email on top of those.
Up, up and away
Whether it is a video ad before an entertaining video on YouTube, sponsorship of your favourite online programme, or a product video on an e-commerce site that’s been tailored based on your purchasing habits and Google search; brand content has become a mainstay in the minds of brands and their on-going strategy. Unfortunately, sometimes the strategy gets somewhat left behind in favour of content alone.
If the Condescending Corporate Brand Page is anything to go by on Facebook – we can see that whilst social media provides a rich territory for brands to occupy – it appears that there are plenty who have the content but not the strategic backbone in place to make that content make sense.
Social media platforms such as Snapchat and Vine have developed the way that brands are interacting with their consumers and in turn the rise in technology and the fact that we are constantly being accosted with content has changed the way we sift through as well. One of the trends that has recently come to light is that ‘consumers do not absorb the content passively. Consumers have become active participants of the communication process – they want original and dynamic content’. This means that the route of traditional advertising is changing even more to becoming a much more consumer led exercise than it ever was before. Instead of a brand telling the consumer what they want and when they want it, consumers are getting wise to the fact that now more than ever they have a choice, not only to tune out of boring content but to also change the way the interact with interesting content.
Fail to plan, plan to fail
One of the lessons in branded content in 2013 was nuggets of reactivity can set you apart from the crowd. It’s just been the SuperBowl so it seems fitting to go back to the same time last year when the blackout gave Oreo the opportunity to get clever with this tweet. Then this year BudLight not only teased fans and non fans alike with our favourite Terminator – Arnie but they also created a warming chain of events that we enjoyed watching, some of us probably even sipped on a beer and those special few might even have been caught with a frosty BudLight in hand wishing they could have had the same opportunity.
The fact is content is about challenging behaviours and perceptions – not necessarily in a political way like Oreo or United Colours of Benetton. Simply drawing someone in who would ordinarily skip the ad and turning them into someone who watched 30 seconds and spoke about it in passing; that’s the magic, the gold dust that we’re all fighting for in whatever medium. It’s not a fight every brand has the capability of winning and perhaps the power for great content does not lie in a Facebook update.
But we shouldn’t be disheartened. We should just ensure that every content has a reason, a purpose, a journey and in doing so it will find its role. That role may differ depending on who’s engaging with it; but good content is still king and for a content strategist like me, that’s a good place to be.