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Pac Mags CEO: ‘A crap story is a crap story, and it won’t be saved by the platform’

Pacific Magazine CEO Gereurd Roberts has told an audience of content marketers that, despite the proliferation of platforms available to content marketers in the digital age, “a crap story is a crap story, and it won’t be saved by the platform”.

Phil Tarrant, Gereurd Roberts and Alice Kimberley on stage at Mumbrella’s Publish conference

The comments were made during a discussion on measuring the success of your content during Mumbrella’s Publish conference, where the panel considered the difficulties of getting a brand to trust a publisher enough to tell their stories.

“One of the most important things, regardless of your market, is trust between the brand and the publisher,” Roberts added. “It’s a pretty big step for a major brand to trust another company to tell their story, and that’s something that you need to work hard to create.”

Roberts also touched on the redundancy of the term “multi platform”, saying that “brands want to reach those consumers no matter where they are”.

“We’re all multi platform, aren’t we?”, he asked. “It feels like a bit of a redundant conversation these days, we’ve got digital first brands going into television, we’ve got traditional print publishers starting to dominate their digital spaces – we’re all multi platform, brands are multi-platform.

“And more to the point, consumers are too. And we tend to think as businesses first rather than consumers or audiences, I’m still yet to run into a consumer who says ‘sorry, I’m only mobile, that’s the only way I consume.’ It’s just not the case.”

Also on the panel was Momentum Media CEO Phil Tarrant, who added: “It’s the responsibility of the person who’s spending the money, just as much as the responsibility of the person who’s receiving that money to ensure they know what they’re getting into.

“If they don’t know what their expectations are and you take that money from them, you’re not going to manage those expectations and there’s going to be a downward cycle.”

According to Alice Kimberley, head of strategy and insights and VICE, the delicate relationship between brand and publisher actually helps evolve the latter’s content.

She said: “Our ass is on the line regardless, and we want our content to do really well, but when you’ve got someone’s trust and their finances backing you, there’s no time to fuck up and fail.

“In a lot of ways, content marketing is forcing us a business to evolve, and really rapidly. We’re doing things which we never would have done but for the brand, in terms of format.”

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