The advent of content marketing, and its mass adoption as part of the brand marketing strategy, is possibly the most significant non-technological change to publishing we could imagine.
There is an increasing amount of peer pressure on marketers to generate content through which to engage their target audiences and critical stakeholders. So ‘brand as publisher’ is now a fact – a reality – and publishers need to not only accept the fact that the competition just got stiffer, but figure out a way to keep ahead of the curve.
A big part of that comes from understanding exactly what content marketing entails, who’s talking about it, and who’s doing it well. Last Thursday’s event held at The Savoy Hotel by Raconteur Media and NewsCred (a publishing house and a content syndicator, respectively), was created to give senior marketers advice on how to involve journalism in their content creation strategy – that is, how to create content that piques the curiosity and engagement of their target audience. As publishers, we know that ‘better content’ means content that is credible, authentic, inspired, brave, thought-provoking and geared towards the benefits to the readers, not the messenger. The event was focused on marketing experts who understand publishing, communicating those attributes to other marketers seeking to learn.
The evening’s speakers included IBM’s Partner for Social Business Andrew Grill, The London Evening Standard’s Media Editor Gideon Spanier, CIM CEO Anne Godfrey, Santander Corporate Banking’s Head of the Breakthrough Programme John Williams, and Gemalto’s Head of Content, Tim Cawsey. Together, they were certainly a qualified group of people to put forward advice and comment on how brands should publish high-quality content. John Williams even declared to the audience that when he joined Santander, the first thing he said was, “we are a publishing company now!” They all understood that to create good content, brands have to take a publisher’s approach. The solution put forward by the speakers, and also by the host organisations, was about consistency, quality, and independence – that’s how newspapers and magazines once created a loyal audience and became successful.
Without willing to be incendiary, these types of thought-leadership forums are precipitating more of a push on big ideas coming from big brands with big dollars. The division between paid-for and editorial has always been sacrosanct, but now that brands themselves are publishing, this line is less and less relevant – the emphasis is narrowing in scope to how good the content is. The speakers all took for granted that brands are spending a significant portion of budget on content marketing, and the event very effectively highlighted the opportunities for those brands who can look at how publishers operate and glean (steal) smart ideas and methods.
But what wasn’t really discussed, and what, with publisher’s eyes, was an elephant in the room, was – do these brands know they are competing for attention span, ‘mental market share’, with us publishers? And do they know that it’s that very information, and that alone, that should be driving their content strategies?
While brands are therefore not thinking about us publishers as competition, but rather as opportunity, we’re also not thinking about them as competition, but rather as opportunity. And the opportunities are clear: brand marketers have discovered that looking at the publishing model or engaging journalists as the crux of their content creation strategy is the only formula for success in today’s marketplace. Jyske Bank in Denmark for example has recently launched its own award-winning TV-station, breaking news stories and covering the financial markets just like Bloomberg and CNBC. And publishers have discovered that working with brands to help them create content is an opportunity for the business, as Vice Media, the Economist Intelligence Unit, The Onion, Guardian Labs, and even Raconteur itself are doing.
But what about the other side of the opportunity? What if brands get so good at publishing, they begin to pose real competition to our content?
But it’s when it comes to the competition that everybody is missing a trick. Publishers must be aware that as content marketing becomes a more refined skill, and more expertise and best practice become available, the biggest, most sophisticated brands who are the real leaders in their fields could get so good at publishing that publishers might be faced with a challenge for which we are ill prepared.
So how should we feel about this encroachment on our space and our expertise? If brands can publish, what about publishers?
Our continued role must be to set the standard of great content. If smart brands start to match our standards, we must push harder. Content produced by publishers needs to be more analytical, more diverse, more deductive, more energetic, more imaginative – and we need to go back to telling stories. With the drive for continual content turnaround that running a digital content hub presents, it’s been easy to be complacent – to repeat stories in print that have already broken twelve hours previously on the social media feeds of the news houses – but that complacency will cost us in the long run. What publishers need to do in response to increasing competition from brands with ever-improving content marketing strategies is to set the standard for any and all content producers, and to take a good, hard look at how to raise the bar.
