Black Ops Advertising by Mara Einstein

Author:Mara Einstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781944869168
Publisher: OR Books
Published: 2016-08-21T16:00:00+00:00

THE BUSINESS OF CONTENT MARKETING

In the past, advertising was produced by agencies or in-house marketing and design groups. Typically, the account people would work with the marketing client to develop a creative strategy based on qualitative and quantitative research. Then art directors and copywriters would devise creative concepts that would go through several iterations before being presented to the client. After the client was happy with it, the concept would be tested in focus groups to ensure that it communicated the ideas appropriately for the target audience. Once the concept was tested and the script approved, the production process would begin, which would entail finding the right director, scouting locations, casting, and so on. The commercial would have to be edited and approved (again) and might even be shown to a focus group before going to air to make sure that it was perfect. This process took months and months of work.

Today, the process has been turned on its head. Marketers produce something in a few days or even a few hours, not a few months, and revise it on the fly depending on what data analytics say their consumers are attracted to. Real-time content with cultural relevance, as we have seen, is what drives the need to shorten the process. One marketer commented that now they do about 20 percent of the work up front, while 80 percent of the revising and testing happens online. Whereas in the past, we might have concept tested two different campaigns in a focus group, today that process happens online. Take two pieces of content, maybe with different pictures or a different headline, and post them on Pinterest. Based on which one gets more traction, the marketer revises and pushes the higher performing content through social media. It’s testing in a real-life laboratory, and we’re in the Petri dish.

The demands of SEO, needing to increase levels of engagement, and producing for owned media all drive the constant need for content. Producing one well-thought-out, meticulously constructed and researched ad just doesn’t cut it. In order to keep the pipeline filled, marketers rely on a compendium of freelancers and others to help get their message out. While most companies still work with an agency of record (AOR), they are less dependent on them as the single producer of their content.

More often marketers now work with content marketing firms, like Newscred, Contently, Maker’s Studio, or Scripted. These companies can have thousands—in the case of Contently, tens of thousands—of freelance writers, producers, designers, videographers, and photographers available to match up with corporate clients for content creation, both written and video. Newscred maintains relationships with a smaller number of creators because instead of creating new content, they repurpose existing content through licensing agreements with more than five thousand publishers. Say you are Pepsi and you want to make sure that the company is providing interesting content on an ongoing basis. Being a subscriber to the Newscred service, you could pick any article that the company has licensed. The demo I saw was an article about sports from a major news outlet.

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