Tag: content marketing

Reviews on User Generated Video

Posted on by Drew Neisser

John Courtney

I met John Courtney at the MediaPost Social Media Insider Summit this past August.  As the person with the longest title I know, “Certified Agile Project Manager & Marketing Professional” at Sears Holdings E-commerce Content Strategy,  I couldn’t help but wonder what the heck he did.  Turns out, he’s a busy guy especially in the area of content marketing and more specifically product videos.  Sears now has over 33,000 user generated product reviews on its website which are helping to drive online sales.  That’s a lot of videos by any measure.

If a brand tried to create all of these videos themselves, the cost would inevitably be in the millions.  To help facilitate the creation and moderation of these user generated videos, Sears partners with ExpoTV.  And while John was cagey about the future not wanting to reveal confidential information, reading between the lines it seems like Sears will be upping its investment in these videos perhaps even matching the millions of products it sells online.  Regardless of the exact number, I found our whole conversatin quite enlightening and suspect you will too.

Drew: You mentioned that you have over 33,000 user generated product video reviews up on Sears.com.  That is a ton of videos.  What is the strategy behind creating all these videos and how long did it take to figure out it was working for Sears.com? 
Yes, currently there are over 33,000 consumer-generated product reviews directly matched to approximately 12,500 relevant items on product pages.  It’s been said that one in every four consumers posts something about you and your product or to you.  This segment is growing rapidly and brands call this growing sector the “Brand Connected Consumer.”  These people choose to be actively engaged in the conversation about product sharing and as they keep going, consumer-generated video numbers will increase geometrically.

The strategy behind creating all of these videos is really to test whether or not there is any lift benefit for key product page performance indicators such as revenue per visitor and average order value.  This content also naturally lends itself to YouTube to drive more traffic back to product pages.  It’s still probably a little too early to tell but so far product pages with consumer-generated product review videos appear to outperform those without.

Drew: Do these videos cost a lot of money to produce?  If not, why not?  (Feel free to talk about the vendor that helps you get these videos)
There’s definitely an investment to get consumer-generated media like this, but it’s completely different than producing professional video and other types of crowdsourced content. There is a really large investment in developing the community, getting brand connected consumers excited about this new form of supporting other consumers and communicating with brands, making the process easy for them and then just all of the infrastructure to support product matching and content distribution.  That being said, once consumer-generated media is scaled it becomes much more cost efficient.  You can get hundreds of consumer-generated videos for around same cost of a handful of professionally-produced videos. Both media types have unique benefit however and can be synergistic when combined.  Professionally-produced video conveys perceived benefits while consumer-generated validates those product claims giving the consumer more information to make a confident purchasing decision.  The sales effectiveness should offset costs to produce videos. Fortunately, Expo’s service also takes a lot of the investment burden off starting from scratch.

Drew: Have you been able to see a direct lift in sales (or at least site traffic to Sears.com) as a result of video views?
So far, the program indicates lift in conversion, engagement, intent and loyalty across numerous tests over the past year. At this point in program, the content is having the impact naturally expected by combining the power of video and the authenticity of real users.

Drew: What role do videos play in your overall marketing mix?  Or asked differently, what role do they play in the customer journey?  
Consumers are empowered.  By sharing their thoughts and opinions through video, they have gone beyond joining the conversation.  They’ve created it. In the past, merchants told the public what they would be buying.  Then again, in the past revolutions weren’t forged on Twitter.  Now they are.  Think about being in the middle of a flash mob of any sort?  It’s a pretty powerful phenomenon, just as an illustration.  Yes.  The public, as in the consumer, has created the conversation and brands all need to listen because they have the power and they’re not giving it back, and the more you listen and heed the comments to strengthen your brand, the more valuable the conversation will become.

Drew: Are you increasing your investment in videos?  If so, why?  (If possible please provide how many videos you plan to produce in the next 12 months as part of this answer relative to how many products you list online) 
Investment in video is definitely increasing. Consumers are getting used to having video and it is obvious it drives behavior. At the same time, the barriers to creating the content are falling and more creators are getting involved. Any major retailer has millions of SKUs but the bulk of revenue is highly concentrated. Videos tend to be concentrated on those key products so the impact is much greater than it would look by a raw coverage stat. Long story short, the program is moving from trial stage and into the scaling phase.

Drew: What metrics do you use to evaluate the effectiveness of your videos and how to you rank them in terms of importance?  Asked differently, is there typically a direct correlation between quantity of views and say click thrus to your website?  Or are there a few videos with only a modest number of views but that have very high conversion rates?  
The metrics most focused on are revenue per visitor and average order value for product pages with consumer-generated videos.  Other CTAs are evaluated but these are probably the two most important.

Drew: With so many user generated videos, are you concerned about the production values of these videos?  Does the customer care?  
This is definitely something that has come up.  As volume of videos has grown this has become less of a concern.  Watchers of the consumer-generated videos can rank videos so as more videos match a product the higher quality videos naturally become front and center with the poorer quality being pushed down.  It’s important to mention that all consumer-generated videos are screened by an ExpoTV editorial team to screen out content that is either lascivious or demonstrates improper use of a product that could cause potential harm.  Outside of ensuring these types of videos are removed it’s important all other consumer-generated product review videos, whether good or bad reviews, be available so it’s authentic to the consumer.

Drew: With videos, is it as simple as making and posting them to generate viewership?  Or do you need to “market the marketing” either via media (paid, earned and/or owned) to generate significant viewership?  And if so, can you talk about how you “market” your videos?
Posting videos on product pages generates its own interest and drives sales even when people don’t watch the videos given the visual impact from the still image.

Drew: What recommendations do you have for other marketers when approaching a content marketing program like the one you have in place?
It’s important that marketers have clear objectives and expectations entering a program like this. As discussed above, if the idea is to get professional production quality videos done cheaply they are going to be disappointed. You can’t force reviews to happen for a specific product. Some videos will be negative. Some videos will have poor production quality or feature a creator who probably won’t be featured on America’s Next Model anytime soon. The benefit is in the conversion lift, the authenticity of the content and the breadth of coverage afforded by consumer-generated content.

Going Viral

Posted on by Drew Neisser

paul_greenberg_largePaul Greenberg is CEO of CollegeHumor, a division of IAC that is growing faster than you can say Rodney Dangerfield. At this point, it is easy to believe that Greenberg’s mission for his organization, “To be the best and largest multimedia multi-platform comedy studio,” will be realized soon enough.  In the meantime, I thought you would appreciate more insights from Paul on making viral videos, budgeting, how marketers can work with CollegeHumor and lastly, how to lead a creative organization.

Drew: Is one type of video more likely to viral than another?
Often the ones that go really viral are new sketches. Because it is a new idea, it gets introduced, people latch onto it, they love it and they send it around.  And so for example, we did one that was called, Gay Men Will Marry Your Girlfriends. The thrust is, let gay men marry each other because if not, they’re going to marry your girlfriends and they are going to be much better husbands than you would ever be!

Another one that went really viral was called Look At This Instagram (see below).  And it wasn’t again in the Zeitgeist per se but it was a great take on how people use Instagram and it really kind of turned it on its head and parodied it beautifully and people just kind of I know I’ve seen those pictures a million times, I know what they are talking about, and so we really hit those.

Drew: Are series any different from a virality standpoint?
With series you are less apt to get into the Zeitgeist really quickly and so you build an audience over time.  So we’ll often see in a series episodes further down the chain do better than the original ones or we’ll see them catch up. People will discover Very Mary Kate on its 10th episode and go ‘oh wow, I didn’t know about this, and I am going to go back and re-watch all of them. We see binge-watching all the time, people just come in and they watch fifteen videos at a time, and a lot of times it is going back to start series when they’ve come in the middle.  Not that everything is serialized in terms of its plot, but it is just obviously thematically serialized and so we want to make sure that people love to go back and check it out.

Drew:  So how do you budget for production?
We work a monthly basis. So, I say to the team, ‘here is your pot for the month, some you are going to spend more on some and less on some and you know do what you got to do.’  And we work very closely as a team to make sure that if, for example, we are going to go for broke on a Batman video, we are going to do a couple of more Hardly Workings or batch-shoot those and try to do things cheaply. Overall, we’re very efficient in terms of costs.  We have figured out lots of ways to cut corners: we shoot in the office so we don’t have to pay location and we batch-shoot sometimes. It’s very efficient.

Drew:  Are your videos the primary driver of traffic and new users? 
To an extent, although sometimes the non-video content gets shared just as much as the video stuff.  For example, the article Eight New Punctuation Marks That You Need got over a million views because it just got shared everywhere. And now there is interest in a series of it. So it really depends, [non-video] content can really drive a lot of view as well.

Drew:  Do the video creative team also create the other stuff? 
No. We have a separate production team including separate writers who have to be very topically driven.

Drew; Okay, do we get to the point where there is a cable station called CollegeHumor?
No, I don’t think so.  I mean I feel like being the multiplatform studio that we are, we are as close to a new age cable channel as you can get.

Drew:  So tell me about Coffee Town, your upcoming movie—did you write this in-house?
We actually did finance it but we didn’t write the script. Our agent UTA found Brad Copeland who was the writer for Arrested Development.  Brad wrote his own movie script and was looking for somebody to help to allow him to produce it and direct it.  So we were the studio. Brad wrote it, directed it and we produced it.  We went out to LA and hired a film crew, a real legitimate movie crew, etc.  (see trailer here)

Drew: I would suspect you are hoping to rally your army of CollegeHumor fans to see the movie, right? 
Yeah, oh yeah.  We’ll definitely use the army without question. A big part of this is the fact that we can mobilize 20 million people immediately to say or to at least raise awareness if not to get them off their butts into the theatres. And if we put it on iTunes, we can say, hey click here and you’ll be able to watch CollegeHumor’s movie.

Drew:  What exactly is native advertising and what are you doing in this area?
Native advertising is when the advertising blends more with existing content and it becomes less distinguishable as an ad.  We’ve been doing that for five years whether we called it branded entertainment or branded content or branded advertising or native advertising, About a year ago, we reorganized an entire group around native advertising.  We hired two comedy writers just to write branded content and native advertising pieces and we also reorganized a production team so now we have a native advertising production team that just creates videos for advertisers. Out of those 50 videos we create in a month, maybe less than half are advertising video.  But it still feels like CollegeHumor content and people — advertisers [like KFC, AXE & Listerine] come to us because they are interested in our sensibility.

Drew Neisser:  What’s the best way for marketers to work with CollegeHumor? 
Great question. We need to understand what you are trying to do.  Are you trying to increase sales?  Are you trying to just increase your brand perception?  Are you trying to increase relevancy?  Are you trying to activate an audience to go do something? Is about getting more Facebook likes? What do you want as a brand?  And then we can help you come up with content that fits that goal.

Drew: How involved are you in the content decision making process?
Not that involved, at this point, certainly not day to day. We have a phenomenal team of very creative people who are very good at what they do.  I get involved at a high level making sure that we have a strategy and we are trying to follow it and everybody knows what that strategy.  I’ll get very involved if something is questionable from a legal perspective or a taste perspective. But on balance, and that’s how I try to manage my team – hire the best people you can, hopefully people who are smarter than you, and who are experts at what they do and you get obstacles out of their way and you let them do what they do.  And so I don’t see any need to micromanage the content team. Besides, I’m not that funny.

Drew: Have you gotten funnier since you joined?
Much. Much funnier–I’m hilarious.  Actually it is intimidating in a way because these guys are really funny. And they are so quick. We have our weekly staff meetings and even a lot of the executives are standups [comics], and they are just hilarious. I mean it is like somebody took all of the best class clowns and put them all together in one room, it’s hysterical.  It is a really fun place to work.

Drew Neisser:  Do you ever say to yourself, ‘I can believe I have this job?’
Yeah.  Yeah, it’s awesome. I love creating content and creating products that affect people’s lives in a positive way.  That’s one of the things that’s always driven me from a business perspective.

Drew: How about a few secrets to your success?
One is, never stop working ever; just be as aggressive as possible and want to win and do your work your absolute hardest because there is always somebody who is going to work harder than you are and ideas are wonderful but they are a dime-a-dozen.  Everything comes down to execution and doing it right and doing it well.

Drew: Do you have any advice for new or aspiring CEOs?
The advice somebody once gave me for managing is, only do what only you can do and spend your time doing that.  To that end, I wrote an article on this recently that identified five things that CEOs should spend their time doing:

    1. Set the strategy for what the company needs to be and what we are trying to accomplish and what’s our mission and where are we going.  And that’s not done in a vacuum per se, that’s done with the team but ultimately the leader has to be the one who puts his or her stamp on it and say this is the direction we are going to go.
    2. Then it’s making sure that the strategy is communicated very well and that everybody knows what’s going on and that there’s absolutely no misunderstanding. And making sure that everybody is coordinated so that ad sales and editorial and marketing and PR all know what each of the other ones is doing, to help support that overall strategy.
    3. Then its hiring and firing.  Personnel.  Putting the right people in place, and making sure that they are — smarter than you, they’re experts in their field and they are great.
    4. Then it is getting obstacles out of their way and letting them do their jobs and not micromanaging them but making sure that if there is something wrong, that you are there to help them.
    5. The fifth thing is making sure there’s enough capital to run the business and making sure there is a business plan that can be executed.

Drew: You’ve been on both sides of the creative development process including being a voice over talent and a radio announcer. Do you think that has helped you as a leader of a creative-driven company?
Yes. If there is somebody who is never been a creative before and never been on the talent side, you’re going to make decisions purely based on the bottom-line and probably potentially the wrong ones.

Note: this is the 2nd part of my interview with Paul. Click here to see the first part. 

Funny Business: Humor Within Content Marketing

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: So, a rabbi, priest and the content marketer walk into a bar.  The bartender asks, “well gents, what’ll it be?” The rabbi glances around the crowded room lamenting, “I see you are serving some of my tribe here, would you mind sending them to temple on Friday night?”  The priest, echoing the thoughts of the rabbi, says “yes and if you would send my flock over on Sunday that would be most kind.”  The content marketer, ignoring his companions’ discretion, jumps onto the bar and shouts at the top of lungs, “Drinks on me everyone, our ‘Sobriety Rules’ video just went viral!”

Paul Greenberg stillNow that we’ve established there are no jobs for me in comedy, let me introduce you to a veritable lion of laughter, Paul Greenberg, the CEO of CollegeHumor Media (owned by IAC). Paul and I had a lengthy chat a couple of months back about the inner workings at CollegeHumor, part of which is transcribed below.  I think you will agree after reading this that Paul has one of the best jobs around, working with funny people to make other people laugh AND making money doing it.  Look closer and you’ll also see how I was able to glean a few of the 18 Things College Humor Can Teach You About Content Marketing for an upcoming FastCompany.com post.

Drew: When did you join CollegeHumor and how its been going since then?
Sure, I joined two and a half years ago.  I was brought in to help grow the company and we have grown 40 percent year over year in traffic over the past two years.  We’ve also grown our revenue and we’ve grown 40% in traffic, we are now the eighth largest YouTube channel with over 4.5 million subscribers; we have 15 million monthly unique visitors which again is up, way up over from where we were a couple of years ago; we do a 100 million video streams per month.

Drew: So you’re a lot more than a website?
Yes, look at us as a multiplatform, multimedia studio.  We’re not a website.  We create enormous amount of content and we publish it on our O&O website, we publish it on YouTube, we publish it to game consoles, we publish it to connected TVs and now we are starting to create traditional long-form television shows and are very close to several deals with major cable networks to do that.  We are also going into lots of other areas of business like publishing three books, numerous DVDs and have shot a full-length movie called Coffee Town that will be released in July (see trailer here).

Drew: Tell me about the video production process.
We do about 50 videos per month and it’s all created in-house.  We have a production team here in New York a team in LA. It is all original content; we have our own writers, we have our own directors, we have our own producers and editors and it’s all created under the banner of CollegeHumor.

Drew: Do have some kind of schedule for your series like Jake and Amir?
Yes. Jake and Amir comes out every Tuesday like clockwork and Hardly Working comes out every Friday.  Some of the other series we do more in seasons.  Very Mary Kate, for example, will have a run of 15 straight weeks with an episode and then it’ll take a break.  It really depends on the production schedule and the actors, the writers, and how we can work around their schedules. But we try to be consistent and let people know when things are coming out — that’s the best way to build an audience.

Drew:  I happened to watch an episode of Very Mary Kate (Drinking Party) and I have to ask, has there been any pushback from the real Mary Kate?
You know I can’t speak for her, from what I understand, completely anecdotally she is a fan and she thinks it’s very funny.

Drew:  How do the parody movie trailers fit in?
There are two kinds of videos we do; one are series, which we just talked about and one are just one-off sketches.  And a movie trailer for us is like a sketch.  It is just like a Saturday Night Live skit that we do and if it hits, we’ll do more and if it doesn’t hit, we won’t do more.  So for example, the Dora trailer was an enormous hit — not only was it a hit in the sense of people who said we want to see more of this kind of thing but we also wished this were a real movie. So we made a 12-minute movie which is out in three installments and that was responding to the community.

Drew:  How do know when to stop doing sequels to a sketch?
We now have three of the Startup Guys but that was enough. We didn’t want to beat the joke to death, So it really depends on the kind of life that a sketch will get, we have a series we call The Six which is The Six girlfriends you’ll meet when you are back home, The Six dads that you could have — we started off with The Six dads and that did really well so we thought, all right there’s something here and now we have a bunch of Sixes.

Drew:  When you say “really well,” what does that mean in terms of traffic?
Once it starts to get to the half a million level, we start to really pay attention.  And we don’t just look at views, we look at Facebook likes, we look at shares on Twitter and shares on Tumbler, we are a very social media oriented company.  We have a lot of data and we spend a lot of time analyzing data, loking at the ratio between likes and views, if this getting shared a lot but not watched a lot?  Do we need to give it a little push somewhere? Is it getting watched a lot on our site but not shared very much?  Is there something that doesn’t make it go viral? And we are very good at making content that goes viral and gets shared and so we are always sort of tracking those metrics about social media.

Drew:  So you’ll know pretty early whether it is going to be successful, and if you think you see those early signs do you then do more to fuel the fire?
Yes, absolutely.  We look at it and we say all right, we got to keep this on our homepage, or we need to make sure we post it again to Facebook or something like that.  Creatively we have something called The SIV, which is our secret formula for viral videos and so it needs to make sure that certain videos have certain aspects about them and we keep that very tightly protected, as you might imagine, but it is the sort of the secret sauce of how we create viral videos and we have a team that has honed that art.  You know, not everything hits, obviously but I’d say our track record on balance is pretty good and we are very happy with how it is doing and the team is great at it.

Drew:  Is there a dedicated team to social media?
We have one person who is a social media manager; all she does is spend her time on social networks.  She’s completely in the loop in terms of what’s happening and what is coming up in terms of our schedule, so she’s always out there pushing it to our PR partners. We have another person in our marketing group who pushes stuff to other partners, so we have a well-oiled machine that is constantly making sure that we’re getting our tentacles out everywhere.

Drew: How does Hardly Working fit in?
Hardly Working is a sort of playground for us.  That’s where we put the weird ideas into motion, the ones that we want to experiment with, so we are less concerned about how that does. It is totally bizarre and fun and interesting and it gives us a safe place where we are not expecting huge amount of traffic. We do get some that blow up like Startup Guys [which started as a Hardly Working sketch.]  Not everything starts there, but it is one place that things get started.

Drew:  So it really is all about sort of rapid experimentation?
Exactly. You can’t be afraid to fail, you have to be willing to put yourself out there every day with something new, and they’re not all going to be gems but you get enough hits so that people start to realize wow, these guys have something interesting going on and I’ll go along with them when something is not as great, but I know when I come back there’s going to something for me.

Drew:  If we look at, I’m just focusing on the video, we talked about 50 a month, how many of those have to be hits for that month to be a good month?
Two or three big hits, I would say.  Which is not as easy as it sounds!

Drew:  We’ve been noticing this with business related videos that length matters a lot.  What’s ideal for you?
Absolutely, we try to keep it under 2 or 2½  minutes. Anything longer and people really just glaze.

Drew:  Are you guys into Vine?  Must be tough to do any fun in six seconds?
We’ve done a lot of Vines actually and they are fun experiments. We did a very funny thing for the Oscars–we recreated every Best Picture nominated movie as a Vine.

Drew:  Do you ever say to yourself, “I can believe I have this job, this is so great?”
Yeah, it’s awesome.  I love creating content and creating products that affect people’s lives in a positive way.  That’s one of the things that’s always driven me from a business perspective.

Footnote: Paul also appears in some Hardly Working videos as himself. Here’s one of them.

 

Content Marketing Peak at Fusion-io

Posted on by Drew Neisser

logoThe program you are about to read about is the kind that has kept me excited about being in the marketing biz for (gasp) over three decades.  It is enlightening. It is entertaining. It is cool. It supports a cause.  And most of all, it is good for the business.  In this case, the business is Fusion-IO, whose marketing is driven by former Renegade Trip Hunter who talks about the program below.  And in the interest of full disclosure, Renegade was lucky enough to play a part in the development of this program, architecting and designing the website.

Drew: For those unfamiliar with Fusion-io, can you provide a quick overview of the company?
Trip: Fusion’s ioMemory software and hardware leverage flash memory to accelerate databases virtualization, cloud computing, big data and the applications that help drive business from the smallest online retailers to the world’s largest data centers.

Drew: The Everest Memory challenge is an interesting twist on ‘content marketing’. Can you tell me a bit about the program?
Trip:It is a great story that has some strong common denominators between Fusion-io and Nelson.  We both represent the world’s best memory, albeit in very different forms. Nelson’s memory is mind-boggling. He can memorize a deck of cards in under a minute, and holds the USA record for memorizing 303 random digits in 5 minutes. On top of that, he is climbing Everest to raise money for Climb for Memory,  a charity he founded to help find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, which afflicted his grandmother.

It is just an incredibly interesting story, and one we thought our community, customers and partners would find as compelling as we do. Along the way, Nelson will be testing his memory to see what happens to it  under the stress of climbing the world’s tallest mountain. We’ll be inviting others to participate by posting memory quizzes as Nelson ascends the mountain.

Drew: I saw the CMO of SAP speak recently and he felt B2B brands need to start acting more like B2C brands.  Certainly the Everest Memory Challenge seems more like a B2C effort. What do you hope this program will do for Fusion-io?
Trip: The Everest Memory Challenge represents qualities that Fusion-io values and embraces. Like Nelson, the Fusion-io team and our customers are  people who are adventurous, and take calculated risks to overcome obstacles. We see a bit of ourselves in him, so it is a story we want to share, and whether you work in B2B or B2C, it is one you can relate to.

The Everest Memory Challenge is in some way, about getting to know us a bit better, beyond bits and bytes, by sharing something that we think is worthwhile, compelling and has an emotional connection. It’s a bit like a first date with someone you work with: When you realize you have mutual interests outside of the office, you become more interested in each other.

Drew: Of course, I think this whole thing is really cool.  Have you gotten any feedback from folks that weren’t involved in the development of the site?
Trip: Yes, and it ranges from “I love it” to “I don’t get it.”  I think this effort adds a new dimension to our marketing, in addition to traditional content driven marketing, but naturally there are some skeptics. That being said, there are very strong connections between Nelson and Fusion that make this more strategic than many sponsorship opportunities. This is more than sticking our name on a golf bag or a hat. Attaching ourselves to something that is inspirational and representative of who we are as a company says much more about what drives us and our business.

Drew: How long have you been working with Nelson, and why him?
Trip: We started working with Nelson about two years ago, shortly after he won the USA Memory Championships for the first time. We are both champions of being the world’s best at memory, so it felt like an easy fit. Nelson’s story is also new to people; “He’s a memory what?” People are intrigued and it breaks through the noise because they haven’t heard this story already.

We have worked with Nelson to create a video series on how to learn his memory techniques, such as memorizing names, which most of us can stand to become better at, to having him at events, where he can memorize 75-100 names of our guests just by meeting them as they arrive. It makes for a pretty memorable moment when he walks around a room recalling everyone’s name. It is a moment that our customers and partners don’t soon forget.

Drew: Seems like this is a really tight partnership. Do you have any words of wisdom on how to make the most of partnership programs like this?
Trip: Look for partnerships where there is real synergy with your core values and brand promise.

Drew: One of the risks of a program like this is that it is a ‘one-off’ which is only great while it last. How does the Everest Memory Challenge fit into your overall marketing strategy?
Trip: We are developing a number of initiatives that focus on how Fusion provides technology and tools that help our customers push boundaries, do the unthinkable, and change the world around them. A position we call “Same Planet. Different World.”  Nelson embodies the human side of this position. He represents individuals that overcome challenges and help change the world around them. That becomes the litmus test for what we get involved with then. Our overall marketing strategy focuses on the people who, because of their drive and vison-change and positively impact the world in which we live.

CMO Insights: The Content Imperative

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Steve Rubel Steve Rubel is Chief Content Strategist for Edelman, the world’s largest public relations firm, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that he is evangelizing about the importance of content marketing. Given that I happen to agree with Steve and having seen him speak at the Brite ’13 Conference, I was delighted to be able to dig into the topic a bit deeper with him after the fact. As you will see, there’s a lot more to content marketing than publishing a few articles.  In fact, it requires a comprehensive approach including a clear strategy, a diverse blend of media (paid, earned and owned) and writers that know how to start conversations.  But don’t take my word for it, read on…

Neisser: So, what exactly is The Content Imperative?
Rubel: It’s the belief that creating content is no longer optional. Rather, it’s imperative given the significant economic changes that are taking place in both media and, resultantly, marketing. With more ads bought/sold through trading desks, advertising is now far more efficient and effective. This is great for the marketers, but it’s a nightmare for the publishers since it erodes their margins.

Faced with a lack of viable options for generating new/replacement revenues – e.g. subscriptions, significant increases in video views (which have a higher CPM) – media companies are increasingly becoming open to taking sponsored content. Sponsored content is poised to become a significant, possibly even a major new advertising format. And it’s for this reason why it’s now an imperative.

Neisser: When it comes to content marketing, what does success look like in terms of business metrics that a CEO or CFO would appreciate?
Rubel: The metrics of success really depend on the approach. Are you building an asset and trying to attract an audience to you or are you trying to engage the public on other lands? In the case of the former, it’s traffic that leads to sales. In the case of the latter, it’s impressions that create brand awareness and/or potentially lead to traffic and sales.

Neisser: Presumably content marketing provides some kind of competitive advantage.  Can you provide a real world example or two of marketers that have gained competitive advantage via their content marketing efforts?
Rubel: Red Bull is just as known for the content it creates as it is for it’s brand attributes. The same is true for GE (an Edelman client). Both have a content vs a message mindset. One is a consumer brand effort, the other is corporate reputation.

Neisser:  So, does this mean every marketer needs to become a publisher?  And if every marketer in every category is pushing out their own content, at what point does the consumer say, enough already AND/OR at what point does content publishing no longer provide competitive advantage?
Rubel: Not necessarily. There could be a first mover advantage here in some categories. And, yes, it is possible that consumers won’t be receptive. That said, throughout history quality content has prevailed over junk no matter where it comes from. What’s different now is that the playing field has leveled. Brands have a viable way to get their message out and a cadre of media owners ready to help them do so.

Neisser: Creating great content is an art form that not every company can master.  And of course, content is what media companies do really well.  So, how can chocolate (marketing) & peanut butter (media) get together nowadays?
Rubel: Due to the economic underpinnings mentioned above, media companies are increasingly recognizing that content marketing is a viable revenue stream when done right. Many media owners have set up distinct content studios that exclusively serve marketers. They help customers understand their audiences, create content and build deeper relationships. However, they are limited to doing so within their walls.This is why we believe there will be opportunities for agencies like Edelman to integrate different partnerships in context of a broader program.

Neisser: Given an over-abundance of content (aka the WWW) and a dearth of free time (so we all say), should marketers be more focused on quality than quantity, striving to become a recognized curator rather than a prolific purveyor?  
Rubel: Absolutely. Slow is the new fast. Quality is the new quantity. (Although these are old ideas) However, scale is still critical. As is consistency.

Neisser: Content publishing has the potential to be a one way street almost like traditional advertising. Where does social / conversation fit into the content marketing picture? 
Rubel: The media owners seem open to experimenting on their social platforms. The faster we together make this about content as a means to building relationships, the better.

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