MANAGING CONTENT IN AN AGE OF ASYNCHRONICITY

It wasn’t that long ago that the eyes of a whole country would glue themselves to television sets to watch the same programme. TV advertising was immensely powerful because these same poor suckers would simultaneously consume the same commercials.

It's not just the C-19 lockdown that's made this notion appear comically outdated. It's a trend. We started ‘time slipping’ entertainment 20 years ago. We moved from watching live broadcasts to video recordings. From radio to podcasting. From DVDs and VCRs to streaming. We have chosen to consume entertainment and information, at a time of our choosing.

As content escapes from the constraints of transmission times, advertising is dying. Irritating interruptions drive audiences crazy in almost every mature market, only today, they’re easier to avoid. At the same time, media continues to explode. Think of the number of channels and streamers you can access. Media is evolving too. Is Clubhouse a social medium or a channel for specialist radio phone-in shows? 

With the plethora of entertainment now on offer, the new challenge is deciding what to consume. Maybe, like me, you’ve trawled through so many Netflix movie trailers trying to choose, that you’ve given up and gone to bed.

Yet great content inevitably prevails. The socially-powered world has created groups, threads and apps specifically to share ratings and discussion around fresh programs that should appeal to us. And the streaming services are using recommendation engines to help surface content that we might enjoy.

With time shifted entertainment must come the ability to time shift and better target brand content too. 

The old marketing bargain of an interruption in lieu of a chunk of free entertainment is no longer sustainable. If ads irritate, we disengage. Without engagement, any brand story or product benefit is lost. Rather than target consumers through big media (including Facebook) and interrupt us through advertising, brands need to create great content that serves a useful purpose - to entertain, inform or educate us. 

When consumers actually want to buy a product, they might research the sector, so an authoritative, supportive brand will naturally appeal. Organic search isn’t easy and the big players are making it harder but it’s vital that useful, educative and entertaining content is organically available on every conceivable platform and intelligently tagged for every search engine. You can’t avoid paid search either.

So what content works? What type of content should brands be investing in? Social media has urged marketers to create content by the mile - irrespective of how good it is, how relevant it is, how useful it is to the recipient. Just throw more content into the performance marketing hopper and test if it works. 

I believe that this strategy is that the end of the road. And I’m not alone.

Airbnb founder and CEO Brian Chesky shared his experiences in a recent earnings call. When the coronavirus hit in 2020, Airbnb canned almost all its performance marketing. After a brief dip, Airbnb’s website traffic returned to 95% of its 2019 levels, despite the cut. This showed the power of Airbnb’s brand and convinced Chesky to change his marketing strategy. “We don't intend to ever again spend the amount of money as a percentage of revenue on marketing in the future as we did in 2019,” he is quoted as saying. “Brand advertising and PR will be prioritized in future”, adding that “half a million articles were written about the company in 2020”.

Many brands have focussed on creating masses of social posts. With the rise of the power of social platforms has come the desire to ‘be there’. But if you look more closely at the number of contributors, the number of posts and the number of comments, you will see that a brand’s prospect of engagement on those platforms is actually diminishing.

All the research I have studied, in a business to business context, shows social media marketing to be ineffective and time consuming. It’s not really surprising. Most B2B decisions are serious decisions that require research, study and consideration. These are unlikely to be influenced by an Instagram post no matter how well targeted by Facebook’s cunning algorithms. These decisions are more likely to be influenced by deep supporting evidence, testimonials and impartial, unimpeachable data. 

So while social content will remain a crucial trigger, I maintain that the bulk of it will come from user generated content (UGC) and the most potent from influencers and celebrities. Consumer posts amplify a brand’s performance - good or bad. And UGC always comes across as truer and more authentic than traditional brand marketing. With the Social Graph1 giving way to the Interest Graph2, I have been contemplating a new one - the Trust Graph. Imagine mapping all the connections that people actually trust. Does Trust + Reach = Influence? I’m not certain but I think it does. 

But high quality, high impact, emotive brand communications has a key role and I believe it’s set to return. Content that’s more thoughtful, more intelligent, more soulful and, as a result, more engaging. The stuff that people talk about. The crucial element for today’s work is that it needs to be completely authentic and utterly consistent with the brand’s attributes (purpose and values) for it to work. Any hype or deception will be weeded out by the throngs of social media watchers who can pass judgement in a heartbeat.

While quality content usually requires more thought and bigger up-front production budgets, the efficiency of that investment is amplified by the ‘social-turbo’ effect. Fans link-sharing, re-posting and re-purposing worthy content will increase the chances of it being discovered. With a world drowning in content, discovery remains axiomatic to success.

Marketers know that messages need to be consumed more than once to be effective. Most reach maximum efficiency when viewed at least seven times. In a world where content is so ephemeral, there’s a good case for creating content that offers longer life and better cut-through. Invest in content that builds on a brand’s story, season after season - irrespective of how or when it’s discovered.

I see massive opportunities growing for brand engagement through product placement in entertainment content. With Fashion Weeks across the world largely ‘virtualised’, there has been a race to make emotive films of forthcoming collections. Frankly, they’re not great. In fashion, nobody speaks. And anyway, why bother? Why doesn’t Matches simply dress the next season of Euphoria? Every episode could be supported by click-to-buy technology. No pesky ads but social would explode with massive commercial outcomes.

To be most effective, content has to be interesting but it also needs to be relevant. So storing content on a marketing platform that automatically searches for relevant opportunities to use and re-use content investments makes supreme sense. 

At Adgistics we call this Dynamic Relevance? - an agile system that responds to what’s happening - in the world, in the news, in the trending topics of conversation. 

All the content in our clients’ digital repositories is automatically tagged and signposted so it can be matched to the platform’s daily feast of what’s actually going on. Relevant content is highlighted so it can be resurfaced, repurposed or simply re-utilized to maximize the value of the original creation.

The other massive benefit of this continuous examination of brand content and the associated consumption data, is to discover what content is working and why. Also to highlight what content you should be creating next to explain your brand’s ambitions or build its reputation.

For content to thrive, Dynamic Relevance is a breakthrough. It merges AI and Machine Learning with the power of creativity in a way never before possible. The case for responsive content is impossible to rebut. But now it’s here.

1 The Social Graph

Facebook’s feed is based on the masses of data it knows about you. Your family, your friends, where you live, what you do and what you’ve “liked”. These insights create your social graph - a sort of personalised recommendation engine. If you like something, or better still buy it, Facebook trawls for people, like you, who might like it too. 

2 The Interest Graph

?YouTube, TikTok and Ecommerce players, like Amazon track a user’s likes and dislikes to craft a personalised feed of posts, products or recommendations. These are Interest Graphs and they connect individuals with shared tastes, interests or the love of the same products. If your behaviour matches that of others, you could automatically receive helpful suggestions and recommendations based on like-minded individuals.