Think of people as audiences not consumers to make better content says Vice commercial head
Brands looking at making content need to stop thinking of people as their consumers and start thinking of them as an audience, Vice Australia’s commercial director has said.
L:R Amanda Gome, Tom Robinson and Alex Light
Speaking at the BEFest conference in Sydney today Alex Light told the audience: “Coming from an ad agency background I know that brands need to throw away the traditional planning process.
“Don’t think of people as a consumer but as an audience – what are the things they are interested in – that’s a starting point that’s more powerful than ‘what do we want people to know about our products?’.”
Speaking on a panel about moving to content led thinking Light also noted they were concentrating the brand around its video content and hiring top end producers.
Asked about her video strategy for the Blue Notes publishing initiative Amanda Gome, head of digital and social media at ANZ Bank, admitted video content did not work for their audience.
“Our audience is business, they don’t want to watch video as they are in the office, on their mobile or whatever,” she said.
“Text with depth works and graphs, graphs are the new cats, people love graphs.
“We’re also having a look at Instagram at the moment and interesting business leaders using that. Bernard Salt from KPMG does a lot of chart based things on there that go well. We’ve got a lot of information like that and investigating how we turn that into a really good Instagram strategy.”
She also said they had encountered an unexpected phenomenon with staff demanding more content to share.
“We have a lot of passionate employees in the business who really want to get behind it and share, and technology – technology is helping you do that,” she said.
“The hunger from the staff asking for more content which they can share to help drive conversations is an amazing trend.”
Alex Hayes
