• by Nathan Lump , March 16, 2011

You'd be forgiven if you left this year's SXSW with as much anxiety about the future as excitement about the "Next Big Thing." Seriously, for every panel brimming with anticipation for the rise of something (and you wouldn't have to attend a single one on gamification, transmedia, memes, and influencers to know those are trending topics) there was another that featured some real hand-wringing about the state of marketing or social media or journalism.

As a content strategist responsible for coming up with ways that our clients can use editorial content across channels to drive audience engagement, I was particularly intrigued by several panels on the rise of branded content, evidence that content is likewise a shiny new toy for marketers. Interestingly, in most cases, the discussions framed such content in an antagonistic role to journalism.

At "Brave New World: Debating Brands as Publishers," moderator Tom Ashbrook of NPR demonstrated the genuine fear that resides in the journalism community surrounding brands commissioning and publishing editorial content. Citing examples like Net-A-Porter.com, which produces editorial and sells stuff in the same digital space, Ashbrook registered both suspicion that business goals could taint the content creation process and concern that consumers won't be sophisticated enough to judge it with the proper amount of skepticism. But I would question both points. On the one hand, at a time when consumers are demonstrating quite sophisticated attitudes towards how they filter through vast amounts of digital content - making judicious use of their social graphs via Facebook and Flipboard, or aggregators like the Huffington Post or Atlantic Wire, as well as their favorite mainstream sites - it seems paternalistic to me to suggest they are in need of journalists to protect them from being taken in by corporate messages.

Consumers know bunk when they see it, I believe. Likewise, I would argue that publishers themselves have always had their own business objectives, which in some instances renders their journalism far from "pure." Those myriad Top 100 lists, for instance, are an example of editorial content that is designed to drive sales, of both advertising and issues, not fulfill gripping journalistic needs. But that doesn't mean they're de facto bad or sneaky or even un-journalistic. Journalist Laura Kolodny of Techcrunch, in the same panel, acknowledged that branded content needn't necessarily be bad. She did, however, communicate many of the same fears. Describing a P&G site that echoes the editorial framework of the magazine Real Simple and incorporates P&G products, she felt this whole endeavor could be somehow misleading to consumers and derided it as another example of low-quality "infopollution."

This theme was continued in a later panel, "Brand Journalism: The Rise of Non-fiction Advertising." Here, several of my JWT colleagues discussed work we've done in this space - applying journalistic techniques to storytelling about brands for clients as diverse as Ford and Microsoft. It became clear to me that while marketers have increasingly embraced a publishing mindset in content creation, and are recognizing the power of making content that is more than a press release wrapped in a prettier bow, the issue is really with the word journalism.

Moderator Bob Garfield, who pens a column for Advertising Age and hosts a show on NPR, spoke more than once about how "real" journalism differs from this branded content, and The New York Times' David Carr tweeted that brand journalism was simply another name for digital custom publishing. I'm not sure I entirely disagree with either Garfield or Carr. There is a difference between doing this work, and, say, investigative political reporting for The Washington Post. But I do take issue with the implied denigration of branded content. It seems to me that journalists feel threatened by branded content not so much because of the threat it is seen to pose to media companies and therefore their livelihood, but rather because it somehow degrades them and their work by association. Yet brand journalism or branded content or whatever you want to call it is increasingly being done by actual journalists, people who were trained in best practices and journalistic techniques and worked for reputable publications. For example, I used to be an editor at The New York Times. That means this content can and is being produced in very similar ways. It's just being paid for in a different way - directly by the brand as opposed to indirectly via advertising dollars. And while it's true that currently there aren't a lot of examples of great branded content, that is changing. I believe we'll start seeing more and more very high quality content being sponsored and produced by brands. And it's clear that makes a lot of people nervous. What's great about an event like SXSW is how certain big issues like this bubble to the surface here, alongside smaller topics that just make you think about something new. One of the most interesting panels I attended this year was about how Iceland is using crowdsourcing tools to fuel economic and political change. One lesson: the economic meltdown in 2008 didn't knock the country to its knees but forced it to be more innovative. There are lots of reasons why branded content is a growing phenomenon, but I don't think it's happenstance that the movement coincides with the decline in traditional publishing models. Rather than being a threat, I'd say it is creating new opportunities for innovation - for brands, for publishers, and for journalists. I just wish more people would see it that way. Nathan Lump is director of content strategy for JWT New York.