Just over a decade ago (iPod Nano 2 in Apple years) I remember standing in the swanky office of an agency executive, explaining what branded content was. I had just wrapped a multi-day content shoot with their advertising client and guards were up. Words like Video and Internet seemed to smooth out what was otherwise a prickly conversation.
Years later (circa iPhone 4, and the tutorial on how to hold it), I found myself in another agency executive’s swanky office, pitching them on building an in-house content practice. “How is that different? Advertising is content, too” I was lectured. I mumbled something about social currency the advertising-television complex being broken but wasn’t convincing them.
I could argue that change was coming. I just couldn't prove it was coming that fiscal year. It’s Five-and-a-half iPhones since that day, and everything is on its head.
Digital display is broken: Adtech’s once-soaring EV multiples are pancake flat, and signals suggest the promised land is elsewhere.
Cord cutters were once a thing, much like artisanal toast. Now they are as common as, well, toast. Audiences lap up entertainment that is ever-more efficient and cost-effective. In this environment, ads are like smokers in bars: you don’t notice they’re missing until one lights up.
Who remembers Google’s right-hand rail? Quietly in the night, they took out their signature ad unit and left it by the curb, like an old sofa. The changes Google made to its SERP align perfectly with the relentless pursuit of a user experience that is singularly theirs: helping people find the information they’re looking for without having to sort through the information they’re not.
For interruptive advertising to work it must carry a value exchange: a few seconds of attention in return for quality entertainment, like, I don’t know, the Superbowl.
But in this age of Ad Avoidance, content has become ‘stuff’: “Give me content! More content!” There’s no value exchange in sloppy, meaningless seconds of video.
A content-first approach only works when it delivers a narrative that reinvigorates the bond between brand and customer. Excellence must be at the core for it to work. It’s a barter: entertain for attention; inform for consideration; curate for loyalty. There needs to be a barter.
Let’s start a Campaign for Properly Good Content. My first nomination would be C2 Montreal.
C2 (Commerce+Creativity) is an annual Innovation conference that takes place in the gorgeous Franco-American city of Montreal. It’s my favourite conference because C2 understands that its audience is human: we want to be stimulated and inspired and thrilled and entertained and educated, simultaneously.
It’s a great example of Properly Good Content.
#properlygoodcontent
