Don’t expect a digital blood-bath: content marketing is unlikely to replace advertising
Expecting an advertising 'blood bath' is as unrealistic as expecting a media without advertising, says Jon Stubley. But one thing is for sure marketers need to get better at marketing their marketing.
The always entertaining Shane Smith, co-founder and CEO of Vice Media has been making industry headlines again in the last few weeks, warning the market to ‘expect a blood bath’ in digital media in the coming year.
Smith has been vocal in his opinion that the future of media is destined to be increasingly free of traditional advertising – and much more about branded content.
“Young people have grown up with ad-free content,” the Vice Media co-founder and CEO said in a recent conversation with Unilever marketing and communications chief Keith Weed, “and so visionary brands are saying, ‘I get that, and we’re going to interweave and be part of the process.’”
Brands that don’t excel at branded content “are going to be left in the dust.”
Yeah. No.
Yeah in that content marketing is of course a bigger part of the mix for many companies. It has already made it to the peak of inflated expectations in Gartner’s eponymous Hype Cycle and on the slide into the trough of disillusionment.
Companies like the aforementioned Vice along with its sometime nemesis Gawker are certainly raking in the dollars from branded and sponsored content streams -and the Red Bulls of the world are a case study in content-first brands.
But are we going to see a world without traditional ads in the post ‘blood-bath’ world? I’d say no. And this is why.
Not all brands are created equal
Red Bull has been so successful at creating sports content that it’s been described as a media company that happens to make an energy drink, boosted further by its recent content deal with Reuters. But for every Red Bull, there is a brand that is less aesthetically aligned with a potential content stream.
If you make toilet paper, you are unlikely ever to be described as a ‘media company’ that happens to make toilet paper (and I’m studiously avoiding making a cheap gag about execrable cable content at this juncture).
Can’t scale the content marketing peak
You need to throw a lot of resources at content marketing if you are going to do it effectively. If you have deep pockets then there are some fantastic examples out there. The New York Times-Netflix collaboration around the topic of women inmates, which subtly promoted a new season of Orange Is the New Black is a notable example.
For those with smaller pockets, however, it is hard to scale to get broader reach. Yes, you can own your own channels (e.g. an Instagram account, a Youtube channel, a dedicated website), but the fact remains that if you build it (content), they (consumers) won’t necessarily come.
Outbrain, Facebook promoted posts and a glut of specialist content distribution companies can do some of the heavy-lifting, but you have to have a half decent content play in the first place for a real audience.
Producing great content is bloody hard
That. Producing properly engaging content is hard. Really bloody hard – and you don’t have to trawl the web too far before you find great examples of poor content.
Finding the right talent to write and/or produce it can be both a challenge and an expense. And it can also be a strange dynamic when working journalists are commissioned, as discussed at a recent panel in Singapore by Mashable’s Asia editor, who noted that it made writers feel schizophrenic.
We know that it is a challenge for marketing teams in Australia with the Content Management Institute’s 2016 research finding that 69% of Australian marketers believe producing engaging content is their biggest challenge.
Further, whilst 55% say their organisations are clear on what an effective or successful content marketing program looks like, just 28% of the Australian overall sample says their organisation’s is effective.
The bottom line is that in the brave new world of branded content, marketers have to be skilled at, essentially, marketing their marketing – and we don’t seem to be there yet.
All that said, I’m not disputing the fact that digital media models are, at best in flux and at worst, in crisis.
Put simply, what has worked for brands in the past five years isn’t going to work five years hence – or even next year.
It needs to be, and is in the process of being, re-imagined. I expect to see huge advances in mobile video, people-based marketing, in-image advertising and real time creativity. Change is most definitely coming but the idea of an ad-free future is, to my mind, greatly exaggerated.
Jon Stubley is vice president of sales, ANZ, at GumGum
I agree, it is inevitable that young people will push back on content channels pushing paid advertorial…. you are right, they have spent their whole lives accessing ad free content!
BUT I do believe when the context is right they embrace branded content as authoritive – at The Footnotes we are a content hub for young women 16 – 25 and we push university, career and industry content that aims to help influence decisions. In our case, because the audience comes to the site with the intention of learning / making an action, they welcome brand input… if it is a brand they trust of course. I think the issue is that brands need to stop making content for the sake of merely ‘having content’ and make meaning connections with the audience – because when done right, this engagement is far more valuable than traditional advertising.
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Jon, your article makes perfect sense. Great content has always been hard, and it has always involved both production and media costs.
But where I disagree is the idea that you need to throw a lot of money at content marketing to do it effectively. Loo paper marketers provide some good examples of how low-interest categories can use content marketing:
https://contently.com/strategist/2013/08/02/content-marketings-royal-flush-meet-post-publish-sponsoring/
http://www.charmin.com/en-us/c.....ef-project
http://www.charmin.com/en-us/c.....sitorsquat
The question content marketers, and all digital marketers need to face, is whether we’re spending too much time doing niche marketing. Charmin’s decades-long Mr. Whipple campaign might have been loathsome (see Luke Sullivan’s book “Hey Whipple, Squeeze This”), but it built a mass-market brand.
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Branded content eh? Well, a few businesses in the marketplace have tried doing this and failed. These businesses failed because they didn’t nail it or they simply had futile Marketing decision makers in place. Don’t let your business be led astray. Always ask the obvious question: does the branding feel authentic?
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Red Bull has also over the years spent hundreds of gazillions of dollars on advertising.
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I’ve been hearing how the internet will destroy traditional channels for over 20 years. Great article and the Henny-Pennys of this world will face the butcher’s block eventually. Content marketing has been brilliant in sparking new creativity, writing and job creation. But it is not going see the end of traditional channels. If anything it could breath new life into them.
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I have to laugh when I see that 69% of Australian marketers see producing great content is their biggest challenge.
Maybe if they focused on producing a great product or great experience and left the great content up to their agencies then everyone would be a winner.
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There is still a misconception in many areas of our industry that native advertising and branded content is content marketing. It simply is not. It is content IN marketing, not content marketing. Think of it like a content-led campaign.
Content marketing is not going to replace *all* advertising, but content marketing can definitely benefit from advertising (such as traditional display, SEM, branded content, native advertising). As a traffic driver to your CM pieces, advertising is an excellent piece of the puzzle. In fact, CM efforts, which are a long-term play, can fail because of a lack of campaign around them. Advertising helps build the audience around CM activities.
Will content marketing replace some advertising? Absolutely. And it already has. The changing nature of consumers and their expectations means that traditional types of advertising often don’t get the cut-through they used to get. At this point in time, audience consumption of good quality content, especially on owned channels, is positively driving both brand and transactional outcomes.
There’s enough space for content marketing and advertising to exist together. By understanding and not misrepresenting the limitations of each, there are winners everywhere – advertisers, content marketers and most importantly, the audience/consumers.
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