The Content Is King – Long Live the King

Recent buzz about the importance of content in e-marketing is nothing if not ironic. As the d-realm struggles to inject relevance into marketing communications, suddenly content is king. Again.

What’s old is new. In 1962, Marshall McLuhan opined, “the medium is the message.” The next paragraph in Understanding Media decodes what McLuhan means: “The content of any medium is always another medium.” 

What intrigues me is that at some level in some way marketing thinking is coming around to a spin McLuhan’s axiom with a twist of Gertrude Stein: the medium is the message is the content. 

This is close but not quite there. The real nugget needs a final strike to mine the crystal: The medium is the message is the content is the brand. Not only I have noticed this. Famed New York adman, Martin Puris has, too.

Martin “The Ultimate Driving Machine” Puris’ recent posts decry today’s brand content desert. His point boils down to: real content is a brand’s lifeblood, without which ad investment is unconscionably squandered.

Even Silicon Valley notices. Cara Sloman, EVP at Nadel Phalen PR, reposts a colleague’s riff on the Demand Gen Report’s Review # 42 (Sept. 2020). The dude (the author’s a guy) 100% focuses on content.

Inflecting off Gartner’s 2020-21 CMO Survey, my own “Is Marketing Creativity Dead?” piece observes the dearth of truly creative ideas that are the invaluable and absent content of great marketing – and brands.

So, it’s almost laughable that DGR Review 42 opens with the conclusion that “Marketing is impossible without great content.” The missed point: Brands are impossible without great content. Marketing is about brands.

DGR notes that over 60% of all marcom spend is on digital messaging. Gartner reports that over 40% of d-marketing spend is on platforms – not on content.  The big lie here is the platform, not the content, is king. This has to change.

Puris steams about the corollary in advertising: the epitome of the multi-$1M Super Bowl spot is the nearly-always specious ad. I saw them all live this year. Read about and re-watched them. I recall none.

Ok, ok. I’m not being honest. I do recall one Super Bowl ad: Ridley Scott’s “1984” spot for Chiat-Day’s Apple client. It ran once. On the Super Bowl. In 1984. It’s nearly 40 years that we’ve been talking about this ad.

The brand idea was huge. The upstart, vibrantly human Apple taking on the droning, monolithic IBM in the battle for personal computing. Which would you want? IBM isn’t even in the biz it defined anymore. Apple’s a trillion-dollar brand.

Gartner celebrates the finding that 1/3 of tech CMO’s see the light and are pursuing brand strategy. In truth, it’s scant investment in the kind of brand marketing creativity that is capable of leaping the demand chasm.

DGR and Gartner only reinforce my skepticism: 60% of marcom spending is digital. 40% of that is platform costs. This omits post-installation costs: operational overhead + d-marketers’ anemic exploitation of the e-platforms they pay for.

But wait a minute, you might object. Demand gen is about user leads for sales development and conversion. Wrong. Demand gen is about attracting customers. Emotionally-driven humans not analytical automatons. 

Brands are magnets. They powerfully attract the iron in the hemoglobin of the blood flowing through the human heart. The strength of brands’ attraction-stickiness reflects their gravity: the equity-value (idea-bonding) that draws in the customer. 

Demand is the behavioral-economic expression of both a prospect’s and a customer’s brand response. Cisco’s networking loyalists are a case in point. In focus group after focus group, nothing can erode or, incredibly, amplify their commitment to that brand. 

The most successful B2B brands intentionally crossover into that hybrid space of the Top 40 hit from a vertical genre. An example from the Puris portfolio is UPS – the Taylor Swift to FedEx’s Miley Cyrus.

UPS’s “We run the tightest ship in the shipping business” directly addressed but blew right past procurement to reach the recipient, the customer, the human being. Decades later, UPS ended 2020 still eclipsing FedEx.

This is what Puris is talking about vis-à-vis content. The huge freaking ideas that drive demand and reify loyalty. But getting to this requires a kind and level of investment – and expertise – that no longer holds widespread sway.

Everyone’s alarms should be blaring that the Big 5 consultancies are jockeying into this space. These entities have neither the expertise nor the ethos to build brands. For g’s and c's sake, they can’t even manage their own.

Proof? The Arthur Anderson brand was legendary. Legendary. For eons. Arthur Anderson committed brand thermo-nuclear-icide, changed its name, spun off its non-accounting business, and repainted itself with sterilizing rebrands.

Sloman’s colleague observes: “You can have the most attractive…the most famous…[properties] ever, but that’s all meaningless if your prospects can’t see your content”. To which I will add: if they can't see the ideas in your content.

Note that this agency guy talks about the desired, future customer. There is no widget-head’s or bean-counter’s reductive, objectified, user-exploitative mentality here. Make-sell-to-users is the endemic mindset that pervades industry.

But the make-sell that typifies ‘the user’ mentality doesn't have to be this way. Companies and their brands don't have to settle. There is no reason make-sell cannot also be brand-making. 

I moved into advertising because its compression of meaning always fascinated me – since I was a kid. I got pretty good at it. As an agency and client ad guy “I” earned 5 gold EFFIES and a digital gold LION. There's a point to this hype.

 Colleagues called me “the doctor.” Running with that trope, think of me as a brand surgeon operating on the vital organs of national and global franchises. Sculpting idea-content that produces extraordinary returns.

 How exceptional? How about: 3 share points in 6 months; or 60,000,000 cards in 3 years; or the strategic underpinnings of a decades-long campaign that redefined one of the world’s most recognizable brands? 

Not enough? How about: doubling a major CPG brand’s national market share in 4 years; or repositioning a top internet portal, growing its salable pages 2X in 6 months – the kind of performance that buoys entry into a multi-$1B buyout? 

A single ad that ran for 5 weeks ignited that growth. A $1M campaign (6 national insertions + outdoor in two markets) motored a brand awakening into accelerated adoption of a personalized portal conceived to unleash latent demand.

Was it the ad or the idea or the product? The answer is yes. The reconceived product was an idea. Developing the highly specific and differentiating concept was an idea. The testing prototype was an idea. The ad was an idea. It was all one big idea.

Let me rephrase this: the idea is the brand. The Phalen repost opens with: “Content is the centerpiece of modern digital marketing.” Puris’ point is that substantial content is the brand’s lifeblood. The brand’s genius is its content.

I’ll recast this once more expanding Stein's absurdist is-is format: the idea is the idea is the idea is the brand. A franchise only gets out what it puts into all of its marketing. No differential ideas? No content. No meat. No big return.

Which brings it back to DGR # 42. If the brand is its content, starving the brand to underwrite digital marcom platforms simply robs the franchise of the resources and substance to produce breakthrough ideas and results. 

Brands without vision equate to marketing without guts. Marketing devoid of creativity is merely incremental. Marcom without brand substance will never achieve the results it could and should. The content is the idea is the brand is king.

James Desrosier consults under the Nuvocation banner.