King Content’s lost crown is no reflection on the content marketing industry
The King Content story is getting a lot of attention. In the midst of the corporate drama of Isentia's axing of the brand, content marketing and the agencies that specialise in it are at the risk of getting a bad rap, warns Mahlab founder Bobbi Mahlab.
On Wednesday, Mumbrella’s Tim Burrowes posted to LinkedIn about Isentia axing the King Content brand and writing down the sale price of $37.8m.
He said: “While it doesn’t prove that content marketing is worthless, it does rather suggest that Isentia bought a future number that wasn’t achievable once brands started doing their own content marketing in-house.”
Content marketing agencies like ours are flourishing. We are working with brands with in-house teams and with brands that outsource and those that do both.
The way we see it, brands doing their own content marketing in-house is a positive. It means there are internal champions who understand what content marketing is and the business goals it can deliver.
Our role as an agency is to complement in-house teams, to help them understand their customer and to help them with strategy, amplification, overflow content creation and developing the big creative idea.
The media landscape is changing so quickly and comprehensively that in-house teams can be hard-pressed to keep abreast of the latest trends and opportunities.
This applies to both smaller brands lacking sufficient resources and larger brands that must produce diverse, targeted, high-quality content at a fast turnaround. In both scenarios, there is only so much that an organisation’s bandwidth can be stretched.
In contrast, this is the atmosphere agencies are permanently immersed in.
The strength of good agencies lies in their ability to consistently deliver quality content and in their ability to specialise; successful content is about a hell of a lot more than creation.
For content that rises above the churn of forgettable copy, you need expertise in strategy, distribution, optimisation, design, amplification and commercialisation.
If you can find a writer or marketer who can, say, translate your business objectives into a content strategy, write the content that brings that strategy to life, design and build an EDM to get that content out, optimise your social media postings on emerging platforms, target the right audiences to make the most of your amplification budget and devise tactics to commercialise your content offerings, hire that person immediately.
Otherwise, an agency is going to be more effective for the content marketer who wants every part of their strategy to sing the same song.
A recent ADMA/CMI report found that 47% of marketers intend to increase their spend on content marketing this year. These are marketers that recognise that content marketing is about being customer-centric. Help your customer and you help yourself.
As I see it, the Isentia/King Content story demands questions about due diligence and service delivery. It would be a shame if the fortunes of one player marred the reputation of content marketing as a discipline or the role agencies can play in helping marketers help their customers and achieve their business goals.
Bobbi Mahlab is the managing director of Mahlab, a multi-award winning content marketing agency. You can watch her “24 hours with” segment here.
“No-longer-trendy marketing thing is still amazing!” says owner of no-longer-trendy marketing thing business.
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I don’t think content marketing is no longer trendy. I think the issue with King Content is far more to do with what was promised vs what was delivered.
Content marketing is only one part of a broader marketing strategy – close to customer experience. It won’t deliver overnight returns and it certainly won’t if you’re just producing tonnes of generic stuff for the cheapest possible freelance rate.
I wonder how much of what was promised to Isentia was based on the ability of Craig Hodges to dazzle in pitches with brand logos, rather than on delivering quality content with realistic objectives?
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Hi Bobbi,
I couldn’t agree more. The issue with King Content was not content marketing but how they ran their content marketing business. Like you, we’re seeing flourishing opportunity for content marketing in Australia and internationally.
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I think you are on the money Bobbi, whereas Isentia was not.
KC was a business built to sell-at the top of the market.
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Is this content marketing?
Or
An opinion peice?
I can’t tell
But if it is the former I’m not buying it. Content Marketing is centuries old .
It’s story telling. Mahlab was a custom publisher once. A story teller. Still is. Did a good job once. Still does. OK you’ve learnt how to amplify stuff. Cool. My kids can too. But they aren’t great story tellers. King Content? Their work was pretty shonky day 1. Their customer focus was pretty good though.
Bobbi is right- it was a one firm problem, not a content agency issue
King was a sham from the get go.
The MO was “over-promise, underdeliver and screw the crew”.
Former staff know it, peers to the founders knew it from the outset because they boasted about it, and anyone in a bar at 2am when they were after a prospect knew it.
How a nice smart listed Co
CEO let them in is bewildering.
Hope there’s a clawback.
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The headline of this article says it all.
Now, I have no intimate knowledge of King Content’s financials. But, what I do know is this. If you unpack all the financial news in the post that was linked – there is nothing there that reflects on the current state of content marketing. And, there is especially nothing there that speaks to the state of content marketing in Australia. In fact, two of KC’s offices – Sydney and Melbourne – would seem (at least by my last check) to be operating well. Singapore and the UK are still servicing clients well. They are only closing down a small office in HK and the one in NYC. And, spoiler alert, if you hadn’t noticed things are a little weird here in my country as of late.
Which brings up spoiler alert number two – scaling a global agency presence is really hard, and frought with mistakes to be made. Just try it. I can tell you it’s not an easy task. So did KC grow too fast? Almost certainly. Did they overestimate their ability to penetrate the US Market? Maybe. Did they have too many headcount that overlapped with what iSentia wanted to do? It would seem so.
Every acquired company goes through this (and I believe it was always in the cards for the KC brand to be subsumed into the iSentia brand). Yup, they had a bad year and decided to take their lumps in one fell swoop instead of spreading out the pain.
The events here have absolutely nothing to do with the health of the content marketing space, and everything to do with a company trying to get its global ship right-sized. As was mentioned here, there are a number of other agencies and companies in Oz that are doing AMAZING things with content (I know because I’ve worked with them). I wish everyone – including the KC (iSentia) crew – best of luck and godspeed.
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Craig used content marketing (in more ways than one) to earn $40m. It can work…
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Hype 1
ROI 0
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