Why Brands need to become Publishers (Idio at Huddle 2011)
Thursday 3rd November 2011 marked the launch of Mindshare UK’s first HUDDLE unconference. idio were invited to run two sessions on ‘Why Brands need to become Publishers’ – detailing the shifts in the media landscape and the benefits of content marketing, ultimately with the intention of encouraging brands to develop their own media properties with original editorial and curated content.
Why Brands need to become Publishers
The session started with a quick overview of the change in the marketing ecosystem and why brands could – and should – set up their own online publishing models. In brief:
- Media is disaggregating – Historically, brands could rely on guaranteed exposure and consumer attention by being present on several limited media outlets. Now with the advent of ‘new media’, there are young personalities and communities developing their own media models that are disrupting the traditional outlets. As such, there is a completely legitimate opening for brands to follow suit. (To read more on our view on The Future of Publishing go here)
- Content is increasingly ‘spreadable’ – Never before has content been so fluid or shareable. Content can come to us through search engines, recommendation or percolate through our social networks. Rather than having to be repurposed or painstakingly edited – branded content can very easily have a multi-channel presence on Pay-Per-Click, social media sites, mobile, email etc
- From Campaigns to Continuous Relationship – Campaigns may raise awareness for a short period and but these peaks of ‘chatter’ drop off as soon as the campaign finishes, ultimately destined to not pick up again until the next campaign is launched. If brands were to regularly publishrelevant, useful and informative or entertaining content in a niche that they could legitimately speak into e.g. Slimfast provides content around healthy living, fitness and weight loss, then they can develop a long-term relationships with their target audience predicated upon trust and utility.
- From Push to Pull – We are no longer in the historic marketing paradigm of ‘interruption marketing’ – where brand sensitisation is enforced by ‘pushing’ repetitive messages – the public has become increasingly adept at tuning-out the noise. However, consumers are more than willing to ‘pulled’ towards a brand if they perceive the brand to be providing something of value or interest which fulfills an informational need or an entertainment need.
“Where brands once had to go through media, and pay, or rent customer attention, they now can deliver information directly to consumers, and are themselves, media organisations” – Andrew Davies, idio
How brands can become publishers
After going through the fundamentals of the new marketing landscape, the next step was to get the audience thinking about how to apply what they had learnt about content marketing to some popular brands…
The groups were asked two questions:
Where does the brand currently advertise?
The idea here was to look at the traditional print properties brands could be found advertising through, and encouraging them to create their own media properties around these areas.
If your brand was at a party what would they be like?
This was to ascertain the ‘brand persona’, i.e. what is a brand like when it is talking with the customer and not at the customer.
The video below looks at some of the content propositions created over the two sessions for BT (a parenting focused, informational hub – content for keeping children safe online and cataloguing local activities for children), Canon (a travel magazine in the same vein as National Geographic) and L’Oreal (the girl-next-door door providing beauty and fashion tips, as well as commentary on mainstream water-cooler shows):
- For anyone interested in an in-depth look at Content Marketing, you can read more here.
- If you are interested in the benefit of content curation, you can read more here and here.
If you would like idio to do an entertaining and educational content marketing academy over a lunchtime for your agency team, please contact Jonny Rose on jonathan.rose@idioplatform.com
Reading your expose about why brands need to become publishers is music to my ears for the fact that when I joined VAC AERO content publishing was the underpinning of my online marketing strategy. Five years later I am reaping the benefits a hundred fold. The funny thing is that common sense dictated how important it is that by dispensing free and valuable knowledge-based content they will come…and in hordes. Nothing genial about that, it’s just human curiosity. The internet is all about knowledge and information, brands that adapt this mantra into their marketing mix will be communicating above the fray of conventional media since they will be in control of the pitch and scope of their B-to-B communications. This is another reflection on “The medium is the message” in this case the online medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived. This new paradigm is a boon to global B-to-B SMEs such as VAC AERO.