In an interview I read last week, Babs Rangaiah, Unilever’s vice president of global media innovation and ventures, conveniently summarized all the current challenges of delivering brand
content to consumers effectively. He listed ad blocking, the problematic programmatic evolution, and the need to clean up ad fraud and execute direct relationships with leading digital platforms
and start-ups.
For argument’s sake, let’s say we could wave a magic wand and make all those issues go away. Then all of a sudden we would be forced to think more about the
creation of actual content. And what marketers tend to forget today is that crap delivery of great content is as bad as great delivery of crap content.
I am (in industry terms) as old as dirt,
having started my professional life in the full-service advertising agency era. And back then, as is apparently the case today, the relationship between creatives and marketers was challenged, at
best. In a recent study of 789 marketers and creatives by Visually, a content creation agency, creative teams complained about the lack of clear briefings and useful client feedback when ideas are
presented. At the same time, clients complained about creatives not listening to the brief and always responding late. Plus, can we make the logo bigger, please? According to Visually’s study,
nothing has changed from what I remember, as today’s challenges are still those of unmet and misaligned expectations.
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Permit me to add another challenge to those problems. In many a
marketing department meeting, I hear frustration that their agency is incapable of creating the volume, quality and appropriately priced content needed to “feed the beast” of their content
factory (such as daily social media updates, “live” responses to consumer feedback, creation of at least one new video every week -- as well as the “big buckets” of the ad
campaign, i.e., the creative executions for traditional media).
I believe marketers are both unrealistic and naïve on this issue. It is one thing to say that your department is going to
create a content-factory approach and will have a strategy to connect with your target audience “in real time across all relevant touch points.” But actually doing this requires a huge
change in almost everything the marketing department of yesterday was set up to do.
You will need different people with different skill sets, you will need to integrate marketing with customer
service and/or corporate communications, you will need a whole new ecosystem of agencies that can deliver constant content at scale within your means, and probably a whole new way of measuring all
your marketing efforts. If you are in a business where online is also a critical sales channel (exclusively, or as one of many channels) you will need to integrate with sales and trade marketing as
well.
Personally, I think the whole “native advertising” hype will soon diminish to its proper role within the marketing mix: important for some campaigns, but not a silver bullet
to overcome all of our tech-delivery problems. What is probably far more important and effective is placing a bigger focus on creative development: that is, what you can create within your means
(financially as well as in terms of resources), and how well you do this.
Doing creative content better (not just more) might be a bigger piece of today’s brand communications puzzle
than you think.