Advertising

The branded content S-Q-U-E-E-Z-E

November 7, 2017 by Susan Getgood

“On average, unaided awareness was 69 percent and purchase intent was 51 percent after engaging with branded content,” reported the Polar Ipsos Branded Content Study in May 2017

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The struggle, it is real. Digital publishers finally have solid proof that branded content works, and boom, a whole raft of new competitors surface, all looking for that same advertiser dollar.

Digiday covers the problem quite nicely in this piece: As branded content pivots to video, publishers face new challenges. The article focuses on the competition offered by video production houses and entertainment studios, with a passing mention for influencers who approach a brand directly. Its central thesis is that the entertainment studios bring top-notch talent, expertise and a blank slate for the brand message, whereas the digital publisher pitch is about its audience and its editorial voice, which may no longer be enough in the new market realities.

I agree and suggest the following additional points that make it easier to go with the independent production versus the publisher.

Depending on the property, the editorial voice can make brand integration more or less challenging. If it is too hard, the advertiser looks elsewhere, and then can distribute its content through owned channels, content syndication, native advertising and programmatic.
The studios and video production houses are more distribution channel agnostic, whereas a publisher will always focus its distribution first on its owned properties. That can make it more costly to reach the total audience, unless the publisher is extraordinarily strong on the desired segment.
Nearly all video needs to be amplified on social to get the results we desire. The advertiser can buy her audiences from the social platform just as easily as the publisher can. The pitch for the editorial voice, and the implied endorsement of it, has to be stellar for brands to pay upcharges on something it can easily buy itself.

The competition isn’t just coming from entertainment studios and video shops. As Digiday noted, influencers are increasingly able to pitch directly to brands, at a level of production quality equal to the studio product. Brands themselves have more in-house capability, as do their media, strategy and PR agencies. Every publisher faces a certain amount of in-category competition and let’s not forget the social platforms. Facebook could do a little more vertical integration at any moment, and open its own branded content studio, which would be a formidable competitor. Note that I think this scenario is unlikely; Facebook has a vested interest in NOT being directly responsible for the content distributed on its service, thus not likely to broadly embrace strategies that put its Russian-hacking defense in jeopardy.

But still, even if Facebook stays out of it, digital publishers are squeezed by competitors on all sides. Here are some thoughts for surviving this branded content squeeze.

Build a branded content studio that has its own reputation for quality storytelling, that can compete for the brand dollar almost independent of your digital distribution. Great Big Story (Turner) and T Brand (New York Times) are two examples of this approach.It is also the most costly in the short-term. In these days of ever-decreasing media margins, if a publisher hasn’t already started down this road, this may not be a viable strategy.
Niche. OWN your audience. Make your voice matter. If your publication/channel is the go-to source for the audience, your editorial voice becomes relevant again. Even though the brand can buy your audience elsewhere, it cannot buy your editorial endorsement anywhere but from you.
Talent. Become the most efficient way to get the best talent. For some publishers. this means celebrities; for others, success is rooted in building the right community of influencers that you can tap into for branded content, both user generated and house branded.
Think beyond video to other channels. I will have more thoughts on this in a future post, but newsletters and podcasts will be important for advertisers in 2018. I also think the ability to tailor content to individual preferences (using all that data we have) will breathe new life into sponsored content. If we know that only the target audience, the presumed interested audience for a message, will see the sponsored post or branded video, we can offer more brand integration and tailor the messaging to drive conversion. Without wasted audience or irritating casual readers.

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I attended AdTech in New York last week, and met two super-interesting video companies.

Shootsta, based in Australia, offers brands a way to create higher quality social video. Basically, they send you the camera set-up, you film your content, and they do post-production. Targeted at the social media and corp comms folks tasked with feeding the social channels. Not intended to replace corporate video production.

Showbox, based in Israel, attacks the problem from a slightly different angle. It’s a cloud based platform that lets websites/communities/publishers offer professional quality video creation tools to users. I haven’t dug in yet, but it would seem to solve the quality problem of user generated branded content at a more efficient cost than what we used to do, which was have our video producers do the post-production.

Old Spice: Bring back the man on the horse!

January 7, 2014 by Susan Getgood

Boys, use Old Spice, you’ll get laid, and your mom will turn into a crazy stalker who doesn’t brush her hair.

Old Spice has rung in the New Year with a new ad campaign for its teen-skewed products, and I hate it. And not just because I don’t think the joke is funny.

I understand the premise. The “joke” is based on the stereotype that no mother wants her son to grow up, therefore she is bereft when her teen son develops a social life. Like most stereotypes, it has its basis in reality. Not mine, mind you, but I can believe that some women do have separation issues.

But this campaign is creepy. Weird, stalker-y creepy. Oedipal and then some.

Will it get a lot of buzz? Sure. It is deliberately polarizing, which by the way, leads to no small amount of cognitive dissonance for those of us who don’t like the ads but feel compelled to write about them anyway.

But will it sell any product? An ad campaign that gets tons of attention (negative or positive) or wins awards for the creative agency, but doesn’t actually sell anything? Not a win.

If my Facebook feed is any indication, a few folks in my social graph like these ads. Men and women. It’s just a joke, they say. Look at the crazy ladies… Yeah? Call me humorless if you like, but would we still think this is funny if we switched up the gender? If this were a product for teen girls, and a father displaying such extreme behavior? Doubt it. We’d wonder if he was abusing her.

But it’s a moot point, because a campaign like that would never get off the drawing board. The advertising industry isn’t averse to using the overprotective dad, but it draws the line at making the stereotype so broad, so unattractive. Overprotective dad is the relatively normal guy who still sees his toddler girl behind the wheel even though she is all grown up.

Or chases after the fast food-eating kid who was “hanging out” with his daughter.

Mostly normal. Not a raging lunatic following the kid around like a creepy stalker.

Which is why even if this campaign did send teen boys into the store in droves in search of the magic spray that will get them a… GIRL, I would still call it a fail. Because it’s lazy and dangerous. It’s so easy to fall back on a prevailing stereotype of women in advertising — madonna, whore, harridan or shrew. Ha ha ha. Isn’t it funny?

Except it’s not funny. It’s dangerous.

Because when we support this “funny” stereotype — overprotective moms are shrewish monsters and overprotective dads are touchingly cute, we perpetuate more harmful ones. You know. Men are assertive. Women are aggressive. Men are persuasive. Women are pushy. And so on.

But in the end, I don’t think this campaign will drive sales the way it has drawn online buzz. The old adage, oft attributed to PT Barnum, that it doesn’t matter what they say about you as long as they spell your name right only goes so far. Sometimes the accumulated negative buzz really does damage your brand.

For my part, I say bring back the man on the horse!

For more on the “Mom Song” campaign, check out Hello Oedipus Old Spice Made Some Ads For You by Deb Rox.

Defining content marketing, native advertising and engagement

July 16, 2013 by Susan Getgood

Content marketing. Native advertising. Engagement.

These, my friends, are the buzzwords du jour. And there seem to be as many definitions OF them as there are letters IN them. Every publisher, every social network defines them in the context of their offer, their platform — what they are able to deliver to the advertiser.

Which is of relatively little use to the brand marketer trying to compare these disparate offerings and make decisions among them. In order to do that, you have to strip away the bells and whistles of the digital platforms and properties to get to a simple common definition of WHAT these things are. In other words, get to the apples to apples of things first, and then look at the embellishments offered by each platform/publisher.

To help us out, here are my simple definitions.

Content Marketing

Content marketing isn’t exactly new. In fact, it’s as old as the first testimonial, and I’m sure if we looked hard enough we could find that in the Bible. Not to start a religious war or anything but some might say that the Bible itself was an early form of content marketing. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. Turn of the (20th) century woman’s literature.

Content marketing is storytelling used to persuade. Prior to the modern age, it was more often and obviously used for ideas, but first person testimony has been used for products since the very first marketplaces.

The digital form offers some twists that we don’t find in Paine, Genesis or turn-of-the century pamphlets for this or that medicine.

In digital, content marketing is far more overtly used for products. Sponsored content on blogs, consumer resource sites sponsored by brands, brand sponsored Pinterest boards and Facebook Pages. Even content driven advertising. Format doesn’t matter – editorial, testimonial, advertorial, advertising –as much as the simple notion that there is intrinsic value in the content. In other words, I don’t have to buy the product to get some value.

The value in the content independent of its role as a branded or brand sponsored message is what drives sharing. In the digital sphere, we can track and measure that sharing, and use that information to tweak our tale, adjust our strategy. A real-time option definitely not available to Mr. Paine. It took him years and an occasional stint in Parisian prisons to get his feedback.

Native Advertising

It’s no secret that I find this term unnecessary. It’s a buzzword in search of a unique meaning.

In some circles, it means an advertising message (of any length) delivered in the “native” format of the platform. This can be anything from a Facebook post or a tweet, to a brand logo perched on a blog post a la BuzzFeed. Even a brand-written advertorial “guest posted” in a blogger’s editorial space. The term can also be expanded to include all forms of sponsored content, even that which is not 100% controlled by the brand.

My question has always been – why do we even need the term? We have perfectly good terms — advertising, editorial, advertorial, content and sponsored content. Advertising is a message developed and controlled by a brand. Editorial is a message developed and controlled by the author or publisher. Advertorial is a blend of the two, and strictly speaking only should be applied to editorial-like content developed and controlled by the advertiser, although you will find it applied to independently written sponsored posts.

Collectively, digitally, all of these things can be considered content. Yes, even advertising. And when a brand sponsors and informs it, we call it sponsored content. So why exactly do we need the term native advertising?

I suppose underlying the rise of and desire for the term is the idea that native somehow makes it better. The thought process must be something like this: “Native. That’s like organic, right? So it MUST be better.”

Poppycock.

There’s nothing wrong with advertising. It serves its purpose in the marketing mix, as do all the other tools in the toolbox.

Engagement.

Simple right? Engagement is the measure of consumer interaction with the brand message. It’s an action – reading a blog post, retweeting or sharing a Facebook post, pinning an image.

Engagement is not exposure.

Exposure to a message is important, additive and critical. Without exposure, there is no possibility of engagement, and we know that repeated exposures increase likelihood of eventual purchase. Understanding the potential exposures to our message is the crucial base for a concrete action based model for engagement.

With advertising, we buy impressions but evaluate the success of our programs on click-through. In social, we acquire exposures (paid or earned, it really doesn’t matter) and evaluate the success based on actual consumer engagement with the message – by reading content, clicking through to a site, entering a sweepstakes, pinning an image, retweeting and so on.

This is all moving toward models that are predictive of sales, or at minimum can be used to forecast with some degree of accuracy. We aren’t there yet, and even when we are, it will never be perfect. Things that involve people never are totally predictable, but the more we understand what works to move the needle — what is effective — the more efficient we can be with our marketing spend.

One tactic that will help in this mission is to design engagements — actions — that move the consumer along the sales funnel. For example, instead of simply collecting an opt-in email address for more information on your micro-site, develop an interactive widget that helps the consumer understand which of your products might fit her best, or provides use scenarios that she can try on for size. Whenever possible, engage your customer actively, not passively.

And that’s it for today’s vocabulary lesson. What popular industry terms and jargon do you think could stand a little deconstruction? Leave your suggestions in the comments.

The Marketing Economy: Why advertising still matters in a social media, word-of-mouth world

April 15, 2013 by Susan Getgood

Disclosure: I am Vice President, Influencer Marketing at BlogHer. Advertising and social media marketing programs are a significant source of revenue for my company and for the bloggers in our advertising network.

Anyone who knows me, even a little, knows how passionate I am about word-of-mouth marketing and the amazing potential of the voice of the customer (blogger or simply happy camper) to move the needle for brands. It’s part of my professional DNA, and was even before the advent of social media. Back then we called them testimonials and put them in case studies and adverts, but the principle was the same. People like to hear from real people.

My passion for tapping into real voices, real stories is one of the reasons I joined BlogHer nearly three years ago. As part of this team, I am able to help connect brands and bloggers in mutually beneficial ways more than I ever could as a solo independent consultant.

No one is more passionate than I am about the real stories about life and about brands revealed by social content every day.

But I still believe in advertising. Just as passionately.

Saying that the digital banner is “dead” or no longer relevant in today’s marketplace is premature. The banner is only dead if we let it be so, and if we do, shame on “us.” The marketing economy needs advertising just as much as it needs public relations and word-of-mouth marketing and sponsored content and direct response and every other element of the marketing mix. For a number of reasons.

First, consumers need and want to hear directly from companies about their products. Advertising is the most efficient way to reach a lot of people at a relatively low cost; the company can deliver a consistent controlled message to exactly the audience it wants to reach. Keep in mind — it is not that consumers don’t like ads; it’s that we don’t like BAD ads.

It’s incumbent upon the industry to develop creative, compelling digital ads that help brands move the needle. Should ads use more social content? Sometimes, and the IAB has addressed this with new units like the Portait (one of the Rising Stars). But abandoning the digital banner in favor of “native advertising” (whatever that is, and more on that in a moment) is a fatal error that will destroy the balance of the marketing economy. We need both.

Here’s the thing. Whatever you call it — “native advertising” or sponsored content (my preference) — it relies on the existence of publishing vehicles, whether mainstream media sites like Mashable and Forbes, or independent publishers like the bloggers in the BlogHer Publishing Network. And without advertising revenue, these publishers will be in a world of hurt. Why? Sponsored content revenue is active revenue; the publisher has to create this content, and that costs. Time at best, and in the case of larger publishers, money too. Advertising revenue is passive, and scales easily.

Bottom line, without advertising revenue, the blogs we depend on for word-of-mouth marketing might not exist. It’s no different than the long ago print days, when I managed marketing for tech firms; our policy was that if we believed a publication was appropriate for our press releases, we would at least consider it for our advertising dollars. Sometimes we just couldn’t afford the rates but we understood that the publications we relied on, relied upon advertising to pay their bills.

It is no different for bloggers.

Before I move on to my final point about why advertising matters in the social marketing economy, I want to address the term “native advertising.” I wholeheartedly agree with Lori Luechtefeld, the author of recent iMedia Connection article, Why “native advertising” must die. She points out that we already have terms for the acceptable activities usually bundled under the term native advertising — to whit, sponsored content and advertorial –so why do we need a new term? The third concept, the misdirection, or deliberate masking of the advertising nature of the content, is a betrayal of consumer trust. She writes:

“But that third manifestation of native advertising? The Misdirection? If marketers and publishers have coined the phrase “native advertising” with the hope of legitimizing practices like that, then we’re all in deep shit. That’s a battle that reputable publications have been fighting since the dawn of journalism, and for good reason. If you blur the line — especially intentionally — between editorial and advertising, you will lose reader trust. And then you’ll lose readers. And then it’s pretty much over.”

Not to mention, this sort of misdirection would be a flagrant violation of the FTC Guidelines for Endorsements and Testimonials.

Finally, in the social marketing economy, we need to stop worrying about whether content is paid owned or earned. What matters is whether it is shareable. Likewise, we need to get rid of “viral” as the Holy Grail of social marketing. In the real world, viruses are BAD, and by and large, when it comes to corporate content, bad news spreads far faster than the good. What we need to focus on is creating compelling content that speaks to our consumers, not at them. That they will want to share. That’s what creates the “network effect” we are looking for when we say we want our content to go viral.

What we really want is for our customers to share our story with their friends, whether they first saw it in an ad, or on our website or Facebook page, or in sponsored content on a blog or the social graph.

Or all three.

Because isn’t that what REALLY moves the needle, when our customers are engaging with us across multiple platforms, in multiple ways. It’s not about a single click-through. It’s the cumulative effect of all the ways the consumer can engage with us in the balanced marketing economy.

Ads are part of that, and we need their storytelling just as much as we need blogs and editorial, Facebook and Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram, and whatever comes next.