Opinion

Why brands can do better journalism than publishers

With access to deeper customer insights brands are in a better position to tell compelling stories to customers than many publishers, argues Lauren Quaintance.
If you work in a marketing department just about anywhere you will have heard that brands are the new publishers. There’s no need to pay traditional media companies for eyeballs anymore, apparently. Brands can connect with potential customers by creating content themselves. Trouble is, very few marketers know much about how to create stuff that people actually want to read.

Quaintance

Quaintance

A recent survey suggests most marketers think this is the path to riches; 78 per cent of CMOs surveyed last year agreed that custom content is the future of marketing.

There’s no shame in marketers struggling to get to grips with content; marketing is just an entirely different discipline to publishing. (For the same reason PR firms shouldn’t tout themselves as content creators; a press release is not a story.)
Luckily, there are literally thousands of journalists in Australia who have recently been released from the ethical shackles of major media companies where the gulf between advertising and editorial necessarily runs deep.
If brands can harness the creative power of credible, authoritative storytellers – and invest in a solid content marketing strategy to guide their efforts – they might just deliver better journalism than publishers themselves.
How so? Well, brands on the whole have access to deeper insights about their audience – they know who those people are and what they want – and they have a clearer mission.
Publishing companies might claim to be focused on their audiences but more often than not front-line journalists and editors rely on what former News Limited CEO Kim Williams called the “tummy compass” or old-fashioned gut instinct.
So if marketers can focus on helping their customers – and resist the urge to sell too hard – then they can do great journalism.
Granted, brands are unlikely to deliver political commentary or social analysis that’s superior to Fairfax or the ABC (and they probably don’t want to) but there is an opportunity for companies to do what we call service journalism or “news-you-can-use”.
Useful stories about food, travel, home, design and real estate can establish the brand as an authority on a subject and, done well, they’re harder to ignore than a billboard or a pamphlet in the mail.
Today, if you’re a marketer your next customer is digitally-enfranchised. That means they are searching for answers on their computer or mobile and if you don’t provide an answer that is useful via credible content then you’ve missed an opportunity to build a valuable relationship with them.
But there are a few things that marketers can learn from publishers. The first and most important is trust. Brands should never try to hoodwink an audience with advertising that is disguised as content. Better yet, they should adopt the mantra “don’t deceive”.
The second is to learn (or work with people who understand) the fine art of generating ideas, writing briefs and commissioning stories. Publishers have editors on staff for a reason; 80-90 per cent of story ideas proposed on reputable publications never make it into print. Some ideas will be finessed and their angles sharpened; a great many others will simply be discarded.
And finally a great editor understands the need for a mix of stories – for stories that inspire and inform, for light and shade – as well as the need for packaging and attention-getting headlines.
There are brands that do a good job of this already. The Adrenalist, a web magazine that features stories about extreme sports, gear, gadgets and outdoor adventure “powered by Degree Men” (the equivalent of Rexona deodorant in the US) is as good as many men’s titles. Or the Four Season’s excellent magazine; it’s so good that guests pay to have it home delivered.
If brands get it right, if they can bring together the science of marketing and the art of journalism, then they might just succeed in being in the new publishers.
Lauren Quaintance is a former editor for Fairfax and is co-founder of Sydney-based content marketing agency Storify.
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