my turn

Commentary

Throw Out Your Map Of Siam, It's All Content

Perceptual habits? I have them. We all do. I mean habits of perceptual thinking. The kind of reflexive adherence to ideas that aren't compatible with reality, but which one adheres to like a sailor to a piece of wood because, well, it hurts to let go. 

I went through a juggling phase in my 20s. I thought I was pretty good, and could prove it by juggling five balls at once. One day I met another juggler. He only used three. But what he did with those three was so ethereal that I put the things down and really have never picked them up again. 

Here’s the best example of what I mean: Rogers and Hammerstein’s “The King and I.” The play examines how destroying a man’s world destroys the man. But it also teaches that if you can’t change, you must leave. “You have destroy King!” yells the Kralahome to Miss Anna. “You have destroy king!” But, sometimes the king has to be destroyed. No way around it. 

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In marketing, the same holds true. We’ve heard these exhortations: you can’t think of it like a funnel any more; digital marketing is marketing; advertising is dead; it’s alive but on tranquilizers. 

I got into this with Steve Kerho, chief strategy officer at MXM (Meredith Xcelerated Marketing). Kerho has had the tiller on sales and media for Nissan, Bank of America, Visa and Procter & Gamble among others, and was Adweek Media-All Star for doing things that I won't pretend to understand. Things got interesting when we got into a discussion about content, about how Kraft is a brand that really understands how to think about what it means to communicate with consumers in a way they value. 

Kerho pointed out what a lot of people already know: push is getting to be a smaller and smaller part of the strategy pie, and pull is getting bigger. And it's no mystery why. Consumers are in control, and they only let your voice into their ears when they think you have something to say worth listening to. 

This inconvenient truth changes the entire game. You have to "destroy king” if you are still oriented around an old-world view of the consumer journey where CRM is different than content, social, SEM, etc. 

Kerho pointed out the obvious: it's all content. And when he did, my first thought was a silent, "whoop de doo, like I didn’t know that. Of course it's content.” Not so easy, though. I looked at my own perception of things for a second, and realized that in my mind’s eye I actually perceive advertising as, well, advertising; push messaging. It's not, you know, content. Content is “news you can use.” It's native, branded entertainment, advertorial, it's something you want to engage with. Who wants to engage with ads? Ads are a kind of trickery, right? CRM? Isn't that, like, just talking to your customers about things they can get for being so loyal and good? Isn't social acting like you're your consumer’s best friend. 

There's a decent chance that if I were a marketer, my organization would have more silos than a corn farm in Iowa, assuming that’s where they grow corn. I’d have my search person, my CRM and email person, my social expert, Mr. or Ms. entertainment maven all offering me their proof points. Fight club. 

The value of this broader view of content is that it makes you perceive everything you do as an extension of a single idea: it’s content, and content is information to the consumer, information she needs and/or wants. Suddenly advertising takes on new meaning. “Any artifact on behalf of the brand is content. And the goal of content is to solve a problem the consumer has. It can be educational, information, entertaining, connections between people, tools.” 

Kerho says that, besides de-siloing one's thinking, the benefits of defining content as broadly as possible, is it allows you to look at the whole journey. “If you call it all content, you are liable to apply best practices; you understand how all these experiences add up.” He notes that 39% of budgets of a typical B2C campaign go to “content creation.” So marketers are already in an arms race to build out content ecosystems. 

And if you do it right, you get an extra plus: you can monetize it, because other advertisers love an audience that appreciates value.

1 comment about "Throw Out Your Map Of Siam, It's All Content".
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  1. Kevin Horne from Verizon, November 16, 2015 at 11:27 a.m.

    "Consumers...only let your voice into their ears when they think you have something to say worth listening to."

    We still have no proof of that, after all this time.

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