Article by Amy He | Jan 27, 2020 | EMarketer
Marketers predicted that they will use more content-driven campaigns and audio and emerging formats in 2020, according to new research from World Media Group.
About 80% of marketing professionals worldwide surveyed in October 2019 said they expect content-led campaigns to grow over the next two years, with 19% saying they expect they would stabilize. Only 2% of respondents said there would be a decline.
Marketers Expect More Content-Driven Campaigns in 2020 – Edgy
Marketers Expect Content-Driven Campaigns to Increase in 2020 – E-marketer
Content Marketing Surge to Continue in 2020 – O’Dwyer’s
Content-Driven marketing expected to grow – MediaPost
L’activisme de marque, une tendance de fond – Viuz
Marketers Place More Importance On Cause Marketing – A.List
New survey suggests brand activism is on the rise – Ethical Marketing News
New World Media Group survey: Brand activism is on the rise – Plus Media Update
Survey: Brand activism on the rise – Advanced Television
Brands Told To Pick A Cause For Relevant Content Marketing – Media Post
Brand activism is on the rise in content campaigns – Warc
World Media Group survey identifies activism as key campaign benefit – Bizzcommunity
El activismo de marca cobra importancia en las estrategias de branded content – Marketingdirecto.com
New survey suggests brand activism is on the rise – BusinessGhana
Content marketing trends: ‘brand activism’ on the rise – Netimperative
Belinda – Why is benchmarking and celebrating great international advertising strategies essential for the success of the industry as a whole?
Christine – Identifying best practice and identifying what makes great great is crucial to foster quality within the entire advertising industry.
Belinda – What is your top tip for creating a winning entry?
Christine – The best advertising often is surprising in its simplicity.
Belinda – What particular challenges are there in the automotive sector?
Christine – Products become more and more interchangeable; audiences are continuously becoming smarter and less patient, i.e. also less brand loyal. Across all industries, consistently appealing to audiences therefore becomes a bigger task.
Belinda – And what would you consider to be an essential component of a successful campaign in that sector?
Christine – A successful campaign is one that generates impact in terms of company sales and consumers’ minds. To achieve that it is crucial to avoid wasting the audience’s time: relevance is key!
Belinda – What’s the biggest change you’ve seen in content marketing since the awards began five years ago?”
Christine – Content marketing developed from a niche proposition to an integral part of the marketing mix.
Belinda – What do you think will be the biggest trend in content marketing in 2020?
Christine – From my PoV, personalisation of content along with voice elements will continue to be key areas of innovation.
Belinda – Which new innovation do you think has the potential to have the greatest impact on the consumption of content marketing?
Christine – Both personalisation and voice / audio have strong potential to impact on the consumption of content as both respond to evolving consumer requirements.
Belinda – How is data changing the way you design your content strategy?
Christine – The stronger introduction of data into building strategic responses to consumer needs has been a major shift in the recent past. Apart from upfront insights, continuous data help to eliminate what does not work and focus on what delivers actual value. Data also enable for better individualisation of contents.
Belinda – How can brands use content marketing to align themselves with particular values or topical issues?
Christine – From my PoV, content marketing is the best way to associate a brand with a topic outside of, but right next to its original territory / brand proposition. It takes a strong alignment between brand values and the content topic coupled with the ability to work out a compelling story based on that. Consumers will realise if the story does not work or looks constructed; credibility and a very good fit therefore are not an option.
Belinda – Can you sum up the holy-grail of content-marketing in one sentence?
Christine – I’ll give it a try: “connecting a brand and a relevant topic to derive meaning (for the consumer) & value (for the brand and the content partner) by emphasising the joint purpose in credible, impactful ways.
Belinda – What is the secret to implementing a successful cross-border advertising campaign?
Christine – This is about being aware of cultural differences and looking for what individuals have in common internationally – or should be looking at having in common, i.e. a bigger cause.
Belinda – What’s the key difference between targeting a domestic audience and an international one?
Christine – A domestic audience can be addressed with very specific local flavours. It can even be a very local concern that becomes part of the story. For an international audience, I would opt to look out for bigger, more overarching values to talk about.
Belinda – How can you measure the success of your partnerships during an international campaign?
Christine – The same way measurement would take place on a local base: paid media performance, “buzz” and earned impact along with performance within the own ecosystem – simply aggregated bottom up. [This takes a harmonized ecosystem, so is actually not THAT easy, but worth establishing that]
Belinda – What is the best content marketing campaign you’ve ever seen? And why did it stand out?
Christine – My favourite content marketer still is Nike. They beautifully and consistently tell the story of human empowerment and achieving one’s goals – in all shades of emotions.
After winning the World Media Award for Content Leadership and Innovation 2019, Christine will be joining our esteemed Jury this year. To find out more about our awards and how to enter, visit our How to Enter page to see all of the information you will need to enter.
Many World Media Group members were at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week to discuss the global, regional and industry issues affecting business leaders today. Here are some of the key takeaways, as observed by Katya Ionova, Creative Director, UK & EMEA, Business Insider and Damian Douglas, Managing Director, EMEA, Time.
Youth Power
Although the average demographic of attendees at Davos is aged 52-54 for men and aged 49 for women, the question of how we can support the younger generation was a critical theme that ran across many areas of discussion. Concerns ranging from the kind of planet we’re passing on, to the lack of funding for the global mental health epidemic that’s affecting the younger generation were high on the agenda. Greta Thunberg wasn’t the only young voice to be heard this year – 10 teenage activists from all over the world were invited along to encourage collaboration between generations.
Sustainability
Environmental risks, renewed commitments to sustainability, carbon-neutrality pledges, the circular economy and financing a sustainable future were all big themes and more CEOs were seen wearing the SDG pin. The message was clear: we have less than a decade to act, so maintaining the status quo or ‘business as usual’ is no longer acceptable.
Stakeholder Capitalism
The growth of stakeholder capitalism was a frequent discussion point. Companies can no longer serve only their shareholders but must consider all stakeholders, using business as a platform for change to address the environmental and societal issues that matter most to today’s employees and consumers.
Transformation
The Fourth Industrial Revolution and technology such as AI, driverless cars and the IoT formed the basis of many discussions around digital, organisational and societal transformation. The transformation of people was another important theme, from supporting mental health issues to unlocking the potential of human capital.
Brands as Content Creators
A packed fringe agenda featured events from brands such as Accenture, who produced a daily live show. Bank of America, EY and Refinitiv used their social and digital channels to deliver lively content throughout the week. Many World Media Group members led with a content agenda, such as The Wall Street Journal, which hosted The Journal House again, curating discussions on topics aligned to the seven themes of the main agenda. Media newcomers included Condé Nast’s Vogue, which hosted a networking nightcap in Davos House.
Purpose-Driven Marketing
Will we see Davos’ ‘Youth Activism’ theme translate into purpose-driven marketing campaigns? If previous years are anything to go by, they will trickle down from CEO to the rest of the boardroom and start to manifest in 9-12 months. Two years ago, the themes at Davos were around Women, Gender, Diversity and Equality; it’s no coincidence, then, that we saw an increase in DNI campaigns at Cannes last year. We predict that we’ll start seeing Gen Z-centric creative at Cannes in 2021.
Finally, we couldn’t sign off without mentioning the best-branded swag at the event! Every year, Zurich Insurance provides blue woolly hats and they were everywhere – even featured on posters for the Zurich-sponsored airport WiFi. Zurich gave out 13,000 hats this year and pledged to plant 13,000 trees. It goes to show that merchandise can still be an effective marketing tool if it’s a) useful, b) on-brand, and c) entirely fitting for the environment it’s being shared in.
Belinda – What’s the biggest change you’ve seen in content marketing since the awards began five years ago?”
Josh – First, it’s worth defining Content Marketing as I think it gets misinterpreted far too often. Real Content Marketing can be defined as “creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience.” Ultimately this is akin to an always on publishing model and as such is not something that can be ‘turned on and off like a campaign.’ What that means is that brands doing this properly have had to create very unique infrastructures. So I think the biggest change we’ve seen is those brands that that are embracing proper Content Marketing are really structuring properly to deliver.
Belinda – What do you think will be the biggest trend in content marketing in 2020?
Josh – Reality is that real Content Marketing isn’t annual ‘trend based.’ Yes, there are winds of change, but these are the same winds of change that impact the entire publishing market. I’m hoping the biggest trend in Content Marketing is that marketers understand the times when it’s a truly useful tool in their arsenal and times when it’s not the answer.
With that in mind, and it’s a broader trend, it’s worth looking at how the many of the originators of Content Marketing – the Direct to Consumer brands like Harrys and Casper – now understand that to kick start a new phase of growth they need to compliment Content Marketing with Broadcast.
Belinda – Which new innovation do you think has the potential to have the greatest impact on the consumption of content marketing?
Josh – Given a huge amount of Content Marketing is language based I think the recent advances in NLP (natural language processing) has the potential to really help refine content strategy. From understanding topics that will be interesting to optimising language to make content more sticky.
Belinda – How is data changing the way you design your content strategy?
It’s an obvious thing to say, but data is at the core of any Content Strategy but that many brands miss the requisite data to be able to implement a content marketing approach properly. Yes data is integral when identifying what content you should make but the piece that is often missed is using data for success attribution (because if you can’t do that then you can’t make the case for investment!). As mentioned earlier, it’s no surprise that the brands excelling in this space are Direct to Consumer brands – because they will actually be able to tell you the ROI of Content Marketing and conversely, it’s why so many larger brands fall down in this space – because within their complex communications systems they are unable to unpick the effectiveness of Content Marketing in isolation.
Belinda – How can brands use content marketing to align themselves with particular values or topical issues?
The core of a good Content Strategy is becoming synonymous with a specific topic. But we shouldn’t let ‘topic’ and ‘topical’ become confused – because a good content strategy needs to be rooted in a topic the brand has the authority to make always on content about and nuanced by topical sentiment. A bad Content approach would be trying to jump on a short term topical bandwagon.
Belinda – Can you sum up the holy-grail of content-marketing in one sentence?
I’ll do it in one word. Attribution.
Belinda – What is the secret to implementing a successful cross-border advertising campaign?
Belinda – What’s the key difference between targeting a domestic audience and an international one?
The question to ask are the same whether domestic or multi-market: where is the growth going to come from? What motivates that audience? How can we apply that to our brand? Are there meaningful differences between different groups within the audience? How does that affect the way we treat them?
Belinda – How can you measure the success of your partnerships during an international campaign?
Whilst media measurement is local to market, success should be determined by long- and short-term business metrics.
So brand tracking against metrics that drive long-term business success, along with sales / share are key metrics.
Belinda – What is the best content marketing campaign you’ve ever seen? And why did it stand out?
The reality is that Content Marketing can never be looked at from a ‘campaign’ based lens. That’s framing it as something inherently short term – which Content Marketing in its true form isn’t.
And the reality is that as agencies we often have a blind spot when it comes to truly effective content marketing because so much of the best stuff is done by smaller D2C companies really making it pay off for them. For example there is a Direct to Consumer Beer Brand called Beer 52. They have developed a magazine called Ferment Magazine. This isn’t a campaign but a fantastic example of genuine Content Marketing.
Belinda – Why is benchmarking and celebrating great international advertising strategies essential for the success of the industry as a whole?
The world is getting smaller, clients are seeking greater consistency across territories and the opportunities to deliver brilliant international campaigns are growing every year. It is important for our industry and our craft to be able to publicly identify the best work and to be able to illustrate its impact so we all have a north star to aim for.
Belinda – What is your top tip for creating a winning entry?
Joshua Krichefski is part of our World Media Awards Jury 2020, as our co chair judge. Read more about how to enter, but remember not to forget the top tips here from Joshua! We look forward to reading your entry.
Belinda – Why is benchmarking and celebrating great international advertising strategies essential for the success of the industry as a whole?
Sital – This helps us spot and recognize talent while commending great work done and milestones reached across geographies within an ever dynamic and challenging industry that we are part of as we look to connect and build relationships with our evolving consumers.
Belinda – What is your top tip for creating a winning entry?
Sital – Writing & Storytelling. How you craft the entry and tell your story is critical to grab the attention of the jurors and what helps your entry to stand out in a crowd. When detailing out what a specific campaign achieved, be sure to focus on how this drove business outcomes rather than just delivering campaign outputs.
Belinda – What is the secret to implementing a successful cross-border advertising campaign?
Sital – While defining the ‘What’ – It’s important for such a campaign idea to rise above the specific cultural & geographical nuances which tend to vary and instead focus on the universal human truths and relate these to the proposition being advertised. When it comes to the ‘how’ of communicating, it comes down to finding the relevant common denominators – not the lowest but the highest common emotional denominators, which can help connect with audiences across borders. With these elements in place, simple storytelling seems to have almost always worked.
Belinda – What’s the key difference between targeting a domestic audience and an international one?
Sital – In my view there is not much difference. One can say we tend to know more about domestic audiences and hence it is easier to manage them. However in today’s day & age of 24×7 global connectivity where audiences are not just consumers but also creators, editors & influencers – its important for those targeting either domestic or international audiences to keep ears to the ground and eyes on the ball – be ready to respond, optimise and on ‘always on’ mode.
Belinda – How can you measure the success of your partnerships during an international campaign?
Sital – Foremost, its absolutely critical to have a shared understanding of success criteria and KPIs with each individual partner prior to the launch of the campaign. Depending on objectives and stages of a campaign, these might differ and hence its important to have prior agreement on these. A brand building campaign would have clearly different success metrics compared to one that is planned to drive performance marketing. Once we have aligned objectives, it becomes easier to put measurements in place with the right timeframes to measure success. Increasingly of course in recent times we have been swaying significantly towards harder & business driving metrics to define and measure success of partnerships.
Sital is a member of the World Media Awards Jury 2020. He is joining the other esteemed members of Jury and will be discussing all of your entries for the awards this year. We are open for entries, to see how you can enter and share all your great work. Go to our How to Enter page.