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Marketing ‘truth’ vs content reality – has creativity moved down the food-chain?

Recent research by The World Media Awards suggested that creativity has been usurped by storytelling and authenticity. Belinda Barker, Director of the World Media Group, asks whether creativity has truly fallen by the wayside.

Creativity once ruled supreme – the big-budget 30-second commercial was the immediately reached-for and arguably most effective weapon in a marketer’s arsenal. Ads of old often bordered on the fantastical, painting an idealised vision of a world that barely resembled our own. But recent years have seen a surge in content marketing, where brands align with editorial and deliver a more grounded form of marketing message.

Story first, authenticity second, creativity third

It’s a point backed by research. Our ‘Future of Global Content-led Marketing’ study carried out for the World Media Awards found that creativity came third to story (in first position) and authenticity (in second place) when respondents were asked to list the most important factors in a content-led campaign.

Meanwhile, the World Media Awards 2019 demonstrated that brands are working more closely with publishers on campaigns less shaped by the creative muse and more by grounded audience insight and editorial-style analysis, inviting people to engage with brands, rather than insisting.

Andy Reynolds, Strategy Partner at Wavemaker pointed out that the “creativity of old is more interruptive and immediate”.

“You’re not asking anyone’s permission to hit them with an advert, that disruptiveness helped that creativity,” he said. “You came out of nowhere and smacked people with your idea or message to gain an instant reaction to your brand or message or idea.”

He is adamant that there is still a place for such an approach. “That more primal creativity is still absolutely critical to brands and companies, when we lose the power to surprise, we lose a lot of our abilities to get people to think differently.”

But Matthew Falla, Head of Innovation at Economist Group-owned design and content agency Signal Noise, stressed that today “authenticity should be the baseline” in any communications.

“No one should be aiming for fake or un-genuine,” he said “But creativity should absolutely come first. What is the big idea? What do we believe will inspire? What are the stories that bring this to life?

“I think it’s important not to conflate creativity with dishonesty – like the way that people talk about ‘creative accounting’. I think that authenticity is a prerequisite for any creative endeavour that aims to connect meaningfully with its audience.”

So what exactly is creativity?

For Tanya Robinson, Global Brand Director, Ad Sales Partnership at National Geographic Partners, in today’s world, the term “marketing creative” has been associated with “everything from creative innovations to fictional elements”.

“But, in reality, the term creativity now is so much more complex and layered. Data analytics plays a key part and the customer is now more important than ever in helping with creative marketing for a brand or service.”

The depth offered up by ‘Big Data’ means that different types of brand must be shaped appropriately.

“I think it all depends on what the message is that is being pushed out, [and] on the product or brand that is being marketed,” Robinson said. “A car will have a different marketing message versus a service like a holiday to a tourist destination.

“Beyond that customers are more intelligent now than ever and with so many audience insights available, most marketing campaigns have a plethora of research backing them to ensure their message is on brand and developed for the relevant audience in mind.”

But Reynolds insisted that people are no more intelligent or sceptical than they were when the “original snake oil salespeople were out there”.

“We just have more tools to unpick at the claims and more ways to test our beliefs with other people in social media,” he added. “I think society is becoming more inward-facing and careful, people are becoming more concerned with their identities and how they’re outwardly expressed and what people might think about them for their decisions, beliefs, what they buy.”

There was an array of examples among the World Media Awards 2019 winners that demonstrated the appeal of more “authentic” campaigns for some brands.

Formula 1’s storytelling work favoured a narrative approach over big brand advertising and won in the Lifestyle, Luxury and Fashion category.

Award-winning storytelling

When Liberty Media acquired the motorsport brand in 2017, it was struggling. Nicolas Jayr, Brand Marketing Manager at F1, explained how it had changed from an event “people watched religiously on Sunday in the tens of millions, to a sport that was hidden on social media and digital”.

“Engineered insanity” became the campaign rallying cry, manifest across all major social platforms. F1 worked with 31 media partners in 20 countries and across seven languages. The work boosted social follows by 54% across Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, TV viewership was up 10% on 2017 to more than 48 million and F1 became the fastest growing sport on social media in 2018.

For Wavemaker’s Reynolds, who worked on the F1 project, if a brand is not reflecting its audience at a conscious or sub-conscious level, “you’re howling in the wind”.

“It’s where we started with F1,” he said. “What was the deep, emotional connection fans and non-fans felt about racing. When you understand what people admire and crave the gritty, raw, emotion behind a mechanical competitive sport, you can tell better stories, you can be more creative with the interruptive ideas. In a world of sanitisation, they wanted a little insanity.”

Meanwhile, Siemens won the won the Technology & Telecommunications category with its “Ingenuity for life” campaign in which it teamed up with The Economist and FC Bayern Munich for a data visualisation campaign (see below). It used thousands of data points captured at games (including crowd noise) to create a data-driven storytelling campaign.

Clearly, much content marketing places an emphasis on work that is both derived from and driven by data or insight, rather than imagination. But does that mean that creativity is falling from grace?

On the contrary, argued Charles Yardley, Senior Vice-President of Europe at Forbes. “Creativity will always be core to the marketing and advertising sector,” he said. “While tech and innovation have disrupted many of the traditional methods, channels and measurement tools used by marketers, a unique and creative idea that resonates with target audiences will remain one of the most powerful tools we have.

“Data and insights can help marketers to become more intelligent and emotive storytellers, by helping them to test, analyse and refine the ideas that are driven by human imagination and gut instinct, and we are committed to working with our brand partners to deliver the insights they need to achieve this.”

Data as a force for creativity

But is there a danger that in a world so enamoured with data and its applications, that we lose the magic of marketing, that it becomes dry and soulless?

Falla thinks so. “I’m not entirely convinced by a data-driven approach to advertising that continuously A/B tests creative until it is mathematically optimised but culturally inert,” he said.

“Our approach to using data is slightly different – typically we use data from the real-world to identify or inform the story that we want to tell.”

Steven Nottingham, Senior Vice-President of Strategic Brand Solutions at Dow Jones, said that brands need to be storytellers, using data to drive their narratives. But that this should not prelude creativity.

“In my opinion it actually fosters even greater opportunities for creativity,” he said. “This is the same for data and insights. If brands allow it to make the storytelling rote and mundane then it isn’t using them right. These things are the new foundation for brand communications strategies and, when used right, they provide powerful springboards for creativity.”

According to F1’s Jayr, creativity is not going anywhere. “But I do think that while you’re not seeing the death of creativity, creativity for creativity’s sake is not needed,” he said.

“It’s becoming more grounded in reality. We don’t need to spend hours and hours thinking up metaphors. I do think the talent of a strong copywriter and art director will always be needed and will continue to be fundamental to our industry.

“But we need more help in understanding who we are giving the message to. The notion of one-size-fits-all and the 30-second TV ad is really over and we now need to be in a world where we adapt the message to whoever we’re talking to.”

How to balance creativity and authenticity

Andy Reynolds, Strategy Partner at media agency Wavemaker, shares some tips:

  • “Get into the emotional beliefs of your audience. Understand them like an editor, journalist or commissioning editor would.
  • “Truly understand what new perspectives and beliefs you can trigger based on the realities of how and what they think now. The more you know now about your audience, the greater the leaps in creativity you can make and the more interesting to them your stories will be.
  • “That’s where authenticity and creativity meet, reflecting the audience’s beliefs today and telling them a new creative story. This unlocks a new perspective without them rationally realising it.”

Belinda Barker
Director of The World Media Group

Tailor-made: How to cut through with custom content

Tailor-made: How to cut through with custom content

Belinda Barker
Source: Event Reports,
Downloaded from WARC

More brands now want agencies and media partners to develop increasingly sophisticated branded content solutions to reach certain target audiences.

Historically, content marketing has been produced by a brand and its ad agency, before being deployed across a plethora of media titles, but new research suggests tailor-made content for specific media owners is growing in demand. Marketers can cut through with brand content in many ways, such as being meaningful – readers want to know you’re investing to help answer the big questions on their desks today, not a pitch. Marketers may also consider bringing in multiple voices – compiling several valuable viewpoints and lessons from across the industry ecosystem and the publisher themselves, not just commentary from your brand, demonstrates a real commitment to finding the right answers, and a humility too.

A growing number of brands today are looking for agencies and media partners to develop increasingly sophisticated branded content solutions to reach specific target audiences.

At least, that’s a collective interpretation of many of the findings unearthed in the World Media Group’s Future of Global Content-led Marketing study. With an overwhelming 78% of brand and publisher respondents (and 85% of agencies) expecting content-driven marketing to grow over the next two years, and 45% saying more than half of the campaigns they are currently working on are now content driven, the discipline can clearly expect healthy growth.

Historically, content marketing has been produced by a brand and its ad agency, before being deployed across a plethora of media titles. But the new WMG research suggests tailor-made content for specific media owners is growing demand. Some 66% of respondents believe audience and media alignment is “the most important factor” once a story has been created, and “story, authenticity and creative” top the list of most important elements for success.

The findings support the trend in brands working more closely with media owners and agencies from the outset to shape their communications strategy and executions. This has fuelled the rise in the creation of in-house multimedia specialists within commercial teams of many of the world’s biggest media owners.
These “studios” or “labs” teams have the ability to produce highly targeted creative executions – or, as Deutsche Bank’s Managing Director, Global Head of Marketing, Christoph Woermann said, “build a magnet in the marketplace, not a megaphone.”

Woermann’s words are cited by Tony Jarvis, Managing Director, Client Relations at EI Advisory, a B2B agency that worked with Deutsche Bank on its award-winning treasurer-targeted work, in conjunction with The Economist. “Christoph’s point is that they don’t have the budgets of Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan and need to produce work that turns heads and is meaningful,” Jarvis said.

Publisher-specific content campaigns are not limited to financial, or niche brands, according to Rupert Turnbull, brand ambassador for Fortune, who has worked on campaigns for the business title (as well as its former stablemate Time) including for the Indian Ministry of Commerce and Ministry of Tourism.
“I wouldn’t say there are certain brand types more suited, it’s more about the brand understanding the voice of the media brand,” he said.

That said, there was clear evidence of financial services investing in content marketing among the winners at this year’s World Media Awards. There were plenty of examples of brands, agencies and publishers working in collaboration to produce bespoke, engaging work in an individual title’s tone of voice. Among them was Credit Suisse’s partnership with Bloomberg Media designed to position the financial services company at the centre of a conversation around entrepreneurism and leadership. “The Power of Entrepreneurial Thinking” triumphed in one of the most contested categories, Brand and Media Owner Partnership.

The content strategy was informed by a global study into entrepreneurial thinking among Ultra and High-NetWorth individuals, conducted by Ipsos MORI. It underpinned a comprehensive, nine-month content programme across a multimedia portfolio, and planned around key global events, like the World Economic Forum in Davos. The video series generated more than 850,000 views and achieved significant perception shifts around “Credit Suisse’s understanding of the entrepreneurial mindset,” among its target audiences.

“Our research deeply informed our content and approach to interviewing entrepreneurs at different stages of their careers, from ambitious startups through to a £90 million buyout success story,” said Arif Durrani, executive editor for EMEA at Bloomberg Media Studios. “We tapped into a wealth of in-house specialists, from sales advisors and data scientists to strategists, journalists and creatives.

“Much of the work we do for clients involves brand building and market positioning and we’ve seen first-hand how silos between media, advertising and PR agencies are breaking down. The Credit Suisse series involved close ties with Havas International, for example, while our BMW Group Centenary campaign saw us work closely with German PR agency Ketchum.”

Meanwhile, Deutsche Bank’s “Global Treasury Leaders Programme” campaign won the Financial Services category for its innovative take on reaching corporate group treasurers and heads of treasury by inviting them to network and share ideas.  A series of top-level forums were run in New York City, London and Hong Kong, while an in-depth survey conducted by The Economist’s Intelligence Unit quizzed 300 treasurers on the latest innovations and issues. The campaign reached 1,250 corporate treasury professionals and engaged 415 via its global treasury leaders network across a variety of sectors.

The right message in the right place
There are many advantages to publisher-led content, and one of them can be cost, according to Turnbull. “Procurement people understand that they can target people at scale and cut costs dramatically, with the metrics showing that they’re getting a response.”

“We tend to meander in the marketing industry between fashionable things – it’s suddenly all about certain channels, videos and now content,” said Deutsche Bank’s Woermann. “But I think there’s a misconception here. It’s always been about content. For us, it’s not just about content marketing itself, it’s about the context within which that content is delivered. The headline of this is to let the customer determine the journey.”

Turnbull admitted that a publisher-specific campaign presents challenges. “It’s much harder work to pick a particular channel and get under the skin of that channel and understand the consumer mindset in their language, it’s a much heavier lift for marketers,” he said. “But results will follow.”

Tone of voice
There are some key considerations to running a content marketing campaign. For instance, Woermann counts himself as allergic to self-proclamatory terms such as “thought leadership”, because, he says, it is presumptuous. “The client decides if you’re a trusted advisor or thought leader,” he said. Brands should present wellresearched information and create reciprocity. “At some point have the urge and desire to reciprocate. That in my view is a principle that marketeers and agencies need to understand.”

Interestingly, Deutsche Bank does not aggressively pursue direct response sales through its content marketing. “It kills goodwill,” Woermann said. Instead of sales, Deutsche Bank’s KPIs are usually more focused on engagement levels.  Even so, Woermann admitted that he would be “super-surprised” if as a consequence of a campaign “we did not get a single piece of business”. But, he stressed, he would not go so far as to say that “content is the new gold”.

“If you’ve opted for a content strategy, be willing to let your customer determine your journey. Be willing to spend a lot of time listening, be willing to spend a lot of time researching and driving the conversation,” he added.

More collaboration
The future of content marketing looks set to encourage more collaboration between agencies and media owners alike. For Turnbull, being open to new partnerships can be conducive to success.
“There’s a question over whether the commoditisation of media has made it difficult for individual publishers to compete,” he said. “Media brands used to only compete with each other, but we’re seeing more examples of multimedia content partnerships. The World Media Group is a great example of where brands are putting aside that petty competitiveness and working as a collective.

“That’s really where we see opportunities for media brands, especially ones with passionate and engaged audiences. You’ve got Fortune, National Geographic, The Economist, Bloomberg, Time – brands whose users specifically come to them for their point-of-view, opinion and voice that they completely trust.”

Six tips for how to cut through with brand content
EI Advisory’s Tony Jarvis and Rachel Reasbeck, Senior Client Relations Leader, outline some of their top considerations when optimising a content strategy with a specific publisher.

1. Build trust

Co-branded content with an established media brand is more likely to be trusted than your own content, by prospects and also by your existing clients. Showing both groups that you are investing in quality content pays dividends. It will also provide ammunition which your client teams will be keener and prouder to use in their dialogue with the market.

2. Be meaningful

Readers want to know you’re investing to help answer the big questions on their desks today, not a pitch. You need to find a way to listen to the market, process what you’re hearing, and play back initiatives which move the industry forward. Media editors have this sense in their blood if you can tap into it.

3. Bring in multiple voices

Pulling in several valuable viewpoints and lessons from across the industry ecosystem and the publisher themselves, not just commentary from your brand, demonstrates a real commitment to finding the right answers, and a humility too.

4. Publishers know their audiences

Lean on your media partner to help optimise the content campaign for their specific audience. What works well with their particular audience in terms of calls to action, gated versus non-gated content, text versus graphics, short form versus long form etc?

5. Ask yourself: “So what?”

Why is this particular programme different, meaningful and a better use of time for people to read than any other content out there? If you and your media partner can truly answer that – you will turn heads.

6. Think longevity

One hit wonders are quickly forgotten. Build a programme which fosters real dialogue an ongoing community, like a club with a mission.

About the author
Belinda Barker Director, World Media Group
The World Media Group is a strategic alliance of the world’s leading publications which incorporates The Atlantic, Bloomberg Media Group, Business Insider, The Economist, Forbes, Fortune, National Geographic, Reuters, The New York Times, Time, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and associate members: Moat, Smartology and The Smithsonian. Its aim is to promote award-winning journalism and the role of international media.

https://www.warc.com/content/article/event-reports/tailormade_how_to_cut_through_with_custom_content/127385

Branded Content: Creating Successful Campaigns with Ads that don’t look like Ads

Branded content: Creating successful campaigns with ads that don’t look like ads

Belinda Barker
Source: WARC Exclusive, June 2019
Downloaded from WARC

Examining winning entries into the 2019 World Media Awards for the dos and don’ts of developing a successful content campaign.

  • According World Media Group’s ‘Future of Global Content-led Marketing’ research, for 45% of marketers, more than half of campaigns are now content driven.
  • Audi’s World Media Award-winning e-tron campaign delivered complex technological information in a clear and concise way through podcast media.
  • The growth in editorial-style branded content raises questions around the delineation between editorial and commercial, which publishers must be sensitive to.
  • Branded content ought to appear in the right context, and should serves a clear purpose, whether that is to inform or entertain.The late, great David Ogilvy once said: “The less an advertisement looks like an advertisement, and the more it looks like an editorial, the more readers stop, look and read.”While it is two decades since his death, his words are more resonant today than ever before. It’s a point driven home by James Davies, Account Manager at Thomson Reuters responsible for selling global content marketing. “Give them something that informs them and engages them, something that they truly want,” Davies said.Jeremy Elias, Executive Creative Director of The Atlantic and head of content arm Atlantic Re:think, points out that while advertisers have been investing more into the medium in recent years, the concept of viable, pithy and powerful branded content is nothing new.He cites the creation of Michelin Guides back in the 1900s, books containing an array of information for motorists, including maps, tyre repair instructions and hotel and restaurant listings and reviews. To this day, it’s a brand that is still synonymous with good eating, arguably to the point of a disassociation with tyres.

    For the most part, the roots of branded content are embedded in the advertorial – often clunky attempts to slot in editorial-style content in the pages of a publication. Annie Granatstein, Head of WP BrandStudio at The Washington Post, notes that the term advertorial began to morph into content around five-to-ten years ago.

    “The key ingredient of the evolution is putting the audience (rather than the brand’s offerings) first, which advertisers increasingly realise they have to do to engage people,” she said.

    Content renaissance

    The eruption of digital channels, a growing sophistication among brands and publishers exploiting them, and the realisation that a crude attempt at dressing up an ad as an article just doesn’t cut it, has led to something of a renaissance.

    “I think people are beginning to understand what the value exchange needs to be between brands and consumers,” Elias said. “In the advertorial age, the value exchange was that you got to hear this news about a product – a cleaning product talking about its detergent making your clothes extra white. Today that is no longer a meaningful exchange.

    “What’s a greater exchange is a brand using their perspective on the world, giving consumer access to talent, using their money and resources to bring something of value.” According to World Media Group’s own ‘Future of Global Content-led Marketing’ research, brands are finding increasing value in content marketing. The study found that for 45% of marketers, more than half of campaigns are now content-driven, while 77.8% said that content led campaigns are set to grow.

    For Joel Koch, Managing Partner at PHD Germany, there has been a “paradigm shift”. “Marketers used to advertise from a product perspective but that can easily lead to branded messages that no one is really interested in and that don’t resonate with customers,” he said.

    “But a new perspective is winning over: We can see how customer-centricity drives the impact of campaigns. And to do so, advertisers need stories and genuine content as that is what customers want instead of superficial brand messages that often enough don’t really matter to them.”

    Award-winning content marketing

    Accordingly, the World Media Awards 2019 featured a number of winners that excelled in attempting to bridge the gap between compelling, nuanced and balanced content and marketing communications. Among the winners was Audi’s and PHD’s e-tron campaign, which scooped the Automotive Grand Prix. It delivered complex technological information in a clear and concise way. At its heart was a podcast, promoted by advertising activity, featuring experts and promoted via podcast streaming services. It attained the number one spot in Apple’s Tech Podcasts.

    “The e-tron podcast marked a milestone in German automotive advertising,” explained Koch, whose agency was behind the work. “It was one of the first marketing instruments that did not include the famous four rings, the claim ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’ or any other brand insignia. It was driven by the genuine desire to create content on e-mobility that is compelling to technology enthusiasts.”

    Elsewhere, Incredible India (Ministry of Tourism) teamed up with CNBC and won the Travel & Tourism Grand Prix. Its campaign aimed to promote India to affluent travellers, using storytelling, sending photojournalists to source stories from across the country, producing cinematic films about Kerala, and running ad testing to formulate headlines for specific audience types. The video gained more than three million views within three weeks of launch.

    Meanwhile, Financial Services category runner-up Barclays Corporate Banking produced a podcast to connect with a time-poor C-suite audience, which gained four million impressions. The campaign was overseen by Davies at Reuters, who said that the client was happy to give the publisher a high degree of autonomy. “They gave us the creative freedom to create six themes around which to build the campaign,” he commented.

    “It used to be that it was very clear that a brand was leading a piece and paying for it, but now brands realise that in order to inform, engage and entertain the reader they have to allow the expert publisher to lead and advise on what the narrative should be,” he says. “If the brand is involved too much, then the audience sees through it.”

    Integrity vs message

    But won’t content always be associated with what is ultimately a sales pitch, however thinly veiled? Elias believes not. Atlantic Re:fresh recently worked on a campaign for Land Rover’s Range Rover that saw film score composer Hans Zimmer employed to create a piece of bespoke music.
    “One of the many good things that The Atlantic brings to the table, especially working with high-level talent, is that it’s a bit different from when an ad agency might approach talent,” Elias said. “By our nature we’re a journalistic institution. The story has to have a certain level of integrity and quality to it.”

Koch agrees. “More and more brands are realising that contemporary advertising needs content that has a value in and of itself,” he said. “If content cannot stand for itself, then why should consumers bother to spend their time on it?”

Credible partnership

The World Media Group’s research found that 71.5% of media agencies, media owners and advertisers reckoned that clients are looking for a credible editorial environment when selecting a media partner, with 65% opting for quality of audience engagement and 63.3% for audience profile.

Ergo: engaging audiences in a credible environment is a no-brainer. Yet outmoded attitudes can still prevail. “Some brands certainly take content as just another form of messaging,” Koch said. “But those are the brands that won’t succeed with their content.”

Editorial integrity

The issue of credibility and authenticity is not just a consideration for advertisers, but for publishers too. The growth in editorial-style branded content inevitably raises questions around the delineation between editorial and commercial.

“There needs to be division between the two,” Elias insisted. “You can look at The Atlantic as an example, there’s a true separation between the editorial and business side. We’ll talk to people on both sides and understand what editorial wants to write about. Ultimately we want advertisers to underwrite that, but we’ll never get close to blurring the lines of what editorial is writing about.”

For Granatstein, content needs to be clearly labelled. “The Washington Post takes labelling very seriously and provided clear labelling before FCC [the Federal Communications Commission in the US] guidelines were issued a few years ago,” she said.
“Media companies can create engaging, native content and safeguard their newsroom’s impartiality if they ensure that it’s different journalistic talent creating the branded content versus the newsroom content, which is the case at The Washington Post.”

Koch is equally adamant that true editorial “needs impartiality and balance”. But he added: “Since the days of medieval patronage, the arts and content have never been entirely impartial or balanced. I strongly believe that brands need to allow content to flow in order to be most compelling. If they do so, it doesn’t matter if content is sponsored or not.”

The future of branded content

For Reuters’ Davies, the outlook for branded content is rosy. “It’ll become an even richer experience and the boundaries will become blurred even more,” he said. “To the point that – apart from the fact it is clearly signposted – the audience won’t realise that it’s from a brand.”

But for The Atlantic’s Elias, the future holds a “reckoning of sorts”.
“There’s a lot of branded content being produced, a lot of it great, some of it bad and not valuable to the brand funding it,” he commented. “As more and more [publishers] compete to get the dollar, advertisers will get more critical around the sort of work being produced and there will be more rigour around brands trying to prove ROI and understanding the value it brings to the bottom line.”

Elias also highlight the types of organisation creating branded content. While five years ago it was publishers “who set up teams had a monopoly on the space”, the status quo is shifting. “Now that creative agencies are no longer relying retainers of two-to-five years, they are starting to get into branded content space on a project basis,” he said. Expect a future where content is increasingly the domain of agencies, production companies, studios and the consultancies such as Accenture, PwC and Deloitte.
But while a growing encroachment from editorial-led organisations is a given, publishers have a clear advantage. And that boils down to long-term collaboration. Granatstein says WP BrandStudio is experiencing a “deepening of relationships with advertisers, as they renew with us again”.

“This means that we gain a more nuanced understanding of their mission, initiatives and positioning. At the same time we are increasing our ability to understand our audience,” she said, adding that the use of data to inform the creative process is key.

For Elias, a heritage built on trust lies at the heart of continuing, fruitful publisher-client relations. “I think that more and more advertisers realise the value of partners with established credibility, especially as trust becomes more important. In terms of The Atlantic’s position, we can bring a level of credibility that traditional ad agencies can’t.”

Content marketing dos and don’ts

Produce something tangible
Branded content should result in tangible content that serves some purpose, whether that’s to inform or entertain. “It’s not just plastering media across 250 ad units,” says Elias. “You walk away having learned something and have not just been sold to.” Content is king, context is queen If a piece of content marketing is not in the right context then it can be detrimental to the campaign. “Clients should look at what they are trying to achieve with content, rather than just making videos that go viral,” Davies says. Koch concurs. “It’s all about finding a natural fit between a brand’s true identity and a field of content to explore,” he says. “Best-in-class advertisers will create a natural symbiosis of advertising and content resulting in genuinely intriguing pieces for well-chosen target groups.”

Relinquish control
Brands are understandably obsessive over the minutiae of their messaging, but if they are to use branded content successfully then they must relinquish a degree of control. “The risks are the marketer and brand having too much control or say in how the flow of content goes,” Davies says. “They should trust the expert and publishers to provide insight and angle given that they know what works for their audience. “By all means they should feed in, but too much and they’ll lose their audience because it will sound too much like a puff piece.”

And lastly, don’t overcomplicate
According to Davies, simplicity is key. “If you can’t sum up an idea in a tweet then you’ve already lost the battle. Know what you’re doing and be clear on that.”

About the author
Belinda Barker Director, World Media Group
The World Media Group is a strategic alliance of the world’s leading publications which incorporates The Atlantic, Bloomberg Media Group, The Economist, Forbes, Fortune, National Geographic, Reuters, The New York Times, Time, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and associate members: Moat, Smartology and The Smithsonian. Its aim is to promote award-winning journalism and the role of international media.

https://www.warc.com/content/article/warc-exclusive/branded_content_creating_successful_campaigns_with_ads_that_dont_look_like_ads/126934

The Impact of Voice & Sound: The Audio Web is still in the 90s

The Impact of Voice & Sound : the audio web is still in the 90s

 

The audio internet, whether that’s voice-activated devices powered by machine learning AI or journalistic podcasts, is at an equivalent stage of development as the World Wide Web in the mid-90s.  This was the point that resonated most sonorously with panellists at a World Media Group Briefing this week entitled The Impact of Voice & Sound.

 

It was an assertion starkly illustrated by Brenda Salinas, who works on news partnerships at Google.  Salinas showed the audience an image of The Washington Post‘s homepage in 1996 — primitive and clumsy by today’s design standards.  “I think in terms of the audio internet, this is where we are,” she said. “It’s a very nascent technology but it has a lot of potential.”

 

Salinas’s point was echoed by Nate Lanxon, technology editor at Bloomberg, who talked about how in the mid-90s, meta-tagging helped make online content searchable, but in a very rudimentary way. “That’s where we’re at with podcasts today,” he said.

 

Elevating journalism

But while there was a consensus that audio technology is fledgling, there was also enthusiasm about the opportunities it already provided.  Sebastian Tomich, global head of advertising at The New York Times, explained how award-winning journalism had been augmented by an embrace of audio. The newspaper’s The Daily podcast is often the number two ranking podcast in the world.

 

The publisher has also been experimenting with more unusual ways that audio can complement print journalism. This saw it create an “audiozine”, a sonic magazine that introduced listeners to sounds they would never experience in real life, sending listeners on an audio voyage featuring, among other things, laughing rats.

 

Audio proliferation

Event chair Clancy Childs, chief product and technology officer at Dow Jones Professional Information, explained that the “amount of audio-friendly content is multiplying minute by minute” and asked: what are the implications for publishers and brands?

 

For Jeremy Pounder, futures director at Mindshare, the launch of Amazon Echo in the UK, “represented a quite fundamental break in how people interact with tech”.  “We felt that voice and talking to something with a seemingly human voice speaking back, it was a new type of interaction that we’ve not seen in society before,” he added.

 

Experiments conducted alongside research firm Neuro-Insight saw Mindshare discover that sound outperforms text in terms of “cognitive load” on someone’s brain. “When voice works well, it’s a very streamlined way to achieve a task. With text, there’s more going on, with the brain having to work out what’s the important information it’s looking for.”

 

Ethical barriers

But there are ethical concerns too. “One of the biggest is that voice might reinforce gender stereotypes,” he said.  Such as that older men tend to prefer the AI voice of young women, reflecting an increasingly outmoded, patriarchal attitude. “Do brands want to tap into that or take a more progressive stance and challenge some of those stereotypes?”

 

Sonic branding

The session also looked into how music could play a part in a customer’s experience of a brand.   Hamish Goulding, head of global brand strategy and creative at HSBC, explained how the bank’s journey into creating a sonic brand saw it recruit the talents of musician Jean-Michel Jarre.

 

Jarre produced seven tracks, from a string-led orchestral movement and synth-driven alternative, to a mnemonic jingle. The creation of a sound palette has been applied at HSBC’s physical events, in branches to identify when a cashier is ready, in ads, in content and even as a more palatable form of lift music.

 

“Don’t try to be international, try to be universal,” was Jarre’s advice to HSBC.

 

Growing pains

Yet audio technology is still lacking universal appeal, with some panellists expressing doubts, mostly hinged on its infancy.

 

Bloomberg’s Lanxon questioned the genuine usefulness of voice-activated tech as it stands, arguing it is “reminiscent of telephone message trees, because you still have to wait for polite responses before you can comment”.

 

HSBC’s Goulding had more sobering concerns over security and the intrusiveness of voice-activated devices, calling for greater rigour in voice identification, “so you know which customer is which”.

 

But Mindshare’s Pounder outlined a major challenge for publishers and worries around the sheer might of the tech giants —”the trade-off, the distribution of content to the biggest audience possible and the loss of control”.  “I guess the issue for many publishers is that it’s difficult to get people to come to you directly unless you’re a brand of a certain scale,” he said.

Photo: L-R Clancy Childs, Hamish Goulding, Jeremy Pounder, Nate Lanxon, Brenda Salinas, Sebastian Tomich

The Adaptation and Reinvention of Journalism

Alex Delamain, President of the World Media Group (WMG) and SVP, Head of Client Sales and Services at The Economist, reports back on the key themes from the WMG ‘Journalism 2020 Breakfast Briefing’ featuring a panel of senior media experts and journalists discussing the future of media and journalism in a world of ‘Fake News’.

‘Fake News’. We all hate the term but the issue is going nowhere as darker forces continue to get paid for creating it for commercial or subversive means. Yet, panellist Tom Standage, Deputy Editor & Head of Digital Strategy at The Economist pointed out that ‘Fake News’ is by no means a new phenomenon.
‘Fake News’ is not a modern day problem.

He believes it goes back to the early days of the printing press when, if you had nothing to print, you would dust off an old pamphlet about a witch trial or terrible disaster, change the names and locations and print it. It was essentially rubbish, but people loved to read these stories and it kept your press busy.
The big change came when the first daily newssheets were set up in the 18th century. The owners realised they had to convince people that they were reliable and trustworthy if they were to get them to buy their paper every day. These fledgling media brands worked hard to build their reputations and credibility. It was the beginning of trusted journalism as we know it today.

The return to ‘Fake News’ has been driven by the internet’s disaggregation of newspapers. Today, the provenance of a story can be impossible to find. You click on a link on social media and get taken to somewhere that looks like a news site to see a story and are unlikely to ever go back there again – so we’re back to the days of the pamphleteers who pumped out content to make money and didn’t care about getting you to return.

Quality journalism is essential for society
Clearly it’s worrying, but the panel agreed that it has led to the big media brands focusing more than ever on quality journalism. Hayley Romer, Chief Revenue Officer and Publisher at The Atlantic, believes that this is not just for commercial reasons but because the sustainability of trusted journalism is paramount to society. For instance, without it people would not have exposure to topics like climate change and so there would be no behaviour change.

Bénédicte Autret, Head of Strategic Relations at Google concurs, explaining that this was why Google is providing publishers with tools. Obviously, as a search engine they rely on good quality information, but also they believe they are part of the same ecosystem and as such have a duty of care to quality journalism.

The importance of education around the value of journalism
Autret also believes that it’s important to show consumers that good journalism comes at a cost. Phillipa Leighton-Jones, Editorial Director Innovation at The Wall Street Journal, commented that the big media brands need to do more than ever to educate the public about what the media does and how to know who to trust. For instance, with an increasing number of state-owned media channels coming into play, such as the Chinese Global Television Network, Russia Today and Al Jazeera, it’s important that consumers understand the context and implications of where their news comes from.

It’s not only important to educate consumers about the media, though, according to Medhi Benchelah, Senior Project Officer, Division of Freedom & Media at UNESCO. He explained how, as part of the UN’s Plan of Action on the Safety of Journalists, it is important to train national security forces about how and why they should respect and understand journalists. Yet, for those that worked for previously totalitarian regimes this requires a huge cultural shift as journalists were viewed as the enemy before.
Corporate brands apply journalistic rigour but, for quality media brands, church and state remain sacrosanct.

It was heartening to hear from Kunal Dutta, Chief Editor of Digital Channels at Shell talking about the factual rigour being applied to corporate content too. His team members all have journalistic backgrounds which means they take a journalistic approach to information inside the business. They apply strict checks and balances to all their stories and truth always outweighs marketing messages.
However, the panel agreed that there were still strict guidelines delineating ‘church and state’ (i.e. commercial teams versus news rooms). That said, innovation is leading to more ‘bridge roles’ between the two. Creation of products requires input from both sides of the wall, but new products and closer ties with corporate news rooms will never be at the expense of their brand integrity.

Innovation must align with core brand values
Interestingly, Alex Wood, Europe Editor at Forbes believes students and cub journalists are much more commercially aware right from the start, which he thinks will be a catalyst for innovation. Dutta said that journalists should not just be thinking about how to develop a great story or podcast but look at what innovations they can use to tell a richer story – suggesting that what delivers the news could become just as important as the news itself.

AI (artificial intelligence) was seen as the most exciting innovation at the moment, providing huge opportunities for new products through its ability to delve deeply into information and also its ability to score quality journalism and monitor ‘Fake News’. However, as Standage pointed out, innovation has to be measured with a yardstick that is bigger than revenue alone. It must be in line with core brand values and do what your audience wants you to do.

https://mediatel.co.uk/newsline/2019/02/28/the-adaptation-and-reinvention-of-journalism/

Alex Delamain is President of the World Media Group (WMG) and SVP, Head of Client Sales and Services at The Economist

Photo: From L-R Hayley Romer, Alex Wood, Bénédicte Autret, Kunal Dutta, Phillipa Leighton-Jones, Tom Standage
Photo Credit: Jane Clipston

International advertising is dead, long live international advertising

Once upon a time, international advertising could fairly be accused of being unexciting, needing to appeal to a broad target market and so lacking the great ideas that local campaigns were able to implement given a better understanding of the humour or nuance of local audiences.  Some of us are old enough to remember those awful TV ads where you could instantly tell it was an international campaign by the bad dubbing and bland creative, and few truly global campaigns would be lauded at Cannes.  Digital, of course, has changed this – making it ever easier to think global but tweak for local, and enabling international advertisers to target audiences more precisely on an international scale.  The World Media Awards have been set up to recognise the growing creativity and innovation in international advertising, particularly those campaigns which engage with audiences with a content-led idea.  Given that our independent jury represents a broad range of expertise in international communications strategy, we’ve been asking them about the new “global / local” approaches and how you make them work.

 

What do we mean by “personalisation” in international advertising?

Our jurors are excited by the  notion of personalisation – of taking an idea and adapting it across different markets so that it is still recognisable as the same campaign despite the regional variations. Brodie Reid, Global Brand and Content Manager at Tourism New Zealand, says that their international campaigns “take a global view of the macro trends happening in the industry and then apply a local lens to tap into what’s relevant and specific for that market”. Annie Granatstein, Head of WP BrandStudio at Washington Post, supported this idea, explaining that a successful and profitable marketing campaign may involve the creation of multiple versions of the content, “not just translations, but accounting for differences in cultures and interest.”

 

Is there such a thing as an “international” audience?

Richard Stokes, Global Head of Content at Wavemaker questions the notion of an “international“ audience, before suggesting that “we should apply all that we know of an audience group and ensure we personalise content to the greatest extent possible”. Iain Jacob, Director, Advisor and Investor,concurred, explaining that “nobody is ‘international’ or ‘domestic’ in today’s world. This is about targeting a mindset – and it is context that delivers mindset.”

 

Is it all about the data?

Raquel Bubar, Director of T BrandStudio at The New York Times said that “the more we can tap into performance metrics, the more we can predict which types of content will work well with different audiences in different regions around the world.” However, whilst data is increasingly essential to the success of a campaign, including the local expertise is still a crucial component. Caroline Foster-Kenny, CEO of the EMEA region at IPG Mediabrands, stated that “trusting in the knowledge of local teams is key to the development of any successful campaign running across multiple territories” whilst Thibaut Portal, Global Media Hub Leader at Pernod Ricard, explained that “head office enables you to consolidate and bring coherency across many activated markets [whilst] local is fine-tuning and adapting strategies.”

 

Great international advertising needs a great idea

Gordana Buccisano, Head of Business Strategy and Commercial Planning at Publicis, said “at the core of a campaign, you need to have a killer insight that forms the basis for the killer idea on which the campaign is built upon. If both are in sync (insight and idea), then the job of balancing global with local becomes much easier to implement.”

 

An international content-driven marketing strategy must find the right balance between using metrics and local insight to personalise the campaign without losing sight of the human truth that the strategy taps into. It’s a fine line to walk, and the successful culmination of this tight-rope act is a feat worth of celebration.   We have a library of some of the most successful international content-led campaigns at [link to hall fo fame]

 

Enter now!

We would love to see how you are tackling these challenges – enter the World Media Awards atwww.world-media-group.com/awards by 7 February 2019.  There’s not cost to enter – we’re simply looking for the best campaigns that have strategically targeted at least 3 countries.