In 2020, I launched a new digital consultancy, NextNow Digital. All of my new ideas and insights can be found at the new site. The Digital Influence Mapping Project has been a labor of love since I started it in 2005. This blog may continue to live on in some form or another.
For now, visit NextNow Digital Insights & Ideas. You will find fresh POVs on digital marketing and transformation to help startups, small and mid-size businesses, as well as continued thoughts for enterprise marketers.
To connect with customers and communities, brands need to put more energy into brand storytelling. This is as much advice I am giving myself as anyone else wrestling with marketing at a large, enterprise brand.
It’s not enough to pump out a lot of content engineered to return well in Google search results. Traditional “buy” messages – often called “bottom-of-the-funnel” advertising – are likely not enough for most companies whose products compete against others that are not well differentiated in terms of benefits. Anthem-like brand films are good when you have something to wave a flag about, but even then, this is a lot of “inside-out” messaging.
Brand stories that demonstrate how people within a company work to solve customer challenges are different. And they cannot be constructed from whole cloth no matter how cynical a marketer you are. They are “discovered” within the people and operations of a company and then shaped to be as relevant as possible for an audience.
Two Stories
I want to share two stories from Travelers. We discovered each within the company. They reflect the commitment of people who care about our customers and our communities.
These brand stories are about people digging into hard problems – the opioid crisis and the growth of cyber risks and crime. Each is told by a real person.
If there is any pride in these storytellers, it is in the knowledge that they are trying to apply their specialisms – safety and health, risk management, recovery and more – to real problems people and business face. Few people wake up each day within large companies solely motivated by improving the share price. Financial health is a means to an end. The impact a thriving business can have on its communities is substantial.
Brand stories like these help customers and communities know a company and even understand what they sell - beyond the advertised products and services. This is customer-centered marketing in that they aim to frame what we do in relation to the benefit for our customers and their stakeholders.
Lessons Learned for Strong Brand Stories
Find real stories of people earnestly solving problems
Tell these stories succinctly in a way that respects the audience’s time and interests
Use a genuine voice or storyteller to reveal more and, gasp, allow for some intimacy
Lead people to more content that digs even deeper and does connect to what you sell
Share the content via the channels and moments that make sense to your customers and stakeholders
Make brand stories a key ingredient in a content marketing program designed around the complete buyer journey
Reading the marketing trades online, one would get the sense that every brand has gotten wise to the value of content marketing and is busy shifting budget dollars from ineffective display or interruptive advertising to juicy content. But attend a few marketing events where brands are presenting their progress or even their commitment to this area and you quickly see things are moving more slowly.
Working inside brands is a process. There are few lightning strikes of wisdom that shift behavior overnight. Rather a steady effort of communicating the benefits – and addressing the risks – of new marketing approaches may take hold over time. That means the sales pitch for content marketing is never done. Here is a compilation of what I find the most compelling reason to shift dollars and expertise to content marketing from some other marketing practices (those we do automatically, less because they prove themselves more effective).
Customers (B2B, B2C) research their purchase decisions online before, during and after the purchase and/or interaction with the brand.
Buyers go to Google before they know your product or service solves a problem they are researching. That’s the opportunity to get in front of them and earn their attention. A new report from Blue Nile adds some color to these behaviors:
“The ease of access to information in the Internet economy means buyers are fully prepared to leverage all channels available to them and more than 70% (76% B2B) use three channels or more when researching a purchase. 45% of buyers (46% B2B) want data and stats to help them make a buying decision, more than any other content type”
Great search results will always favor highly relevant content
While Google alters its algorithm seemingly all of the time, causing most brands to invest in persistent efforts to understand these laws and strengthen their results, the theme of good results remains consistent. Content others authentically share and link-to rise to the top. Fresh content and even longer content seem to do well. If all you provide is content that describes what you sell, you can dominate on brand searches. If you provide highly relevant content on broader topics that garner more interest – business problems and solutions, for example – then there is a greater opportunity for you to connect with buyers. Check out Neil Patel’s summary of some of the more recent history of organic search that affects brands.
Native advertising works and requires user-valued content & content marketing discipline
Banner advertising is a disappointment. Ad blockers are a threat. For brands who want to work with media properties or even ad networks to reach specific audiences, the remedy to this deterioration is partly found in native content. Partnering with a great content property like Businessweek or CNET, for example, means access to a great audience. But it requires brands to get behind creating strong user-valued content. That is a different skill set than designing a package of banners. Just take a look at these videos – including this one on creating a dog washing station - inside the Instructables Web site for Moen. My experience has been that great native content cannot be completely outsourced to a partner. It requires the brand to think and apply value like a content marketer.
Brands can realize efficiencies creating user-valued content for both their sales and marketing efforts
Content that helps buyers make great business and even purchase decisions has a place both in the hands of a salesforce and via direct online channels. The explainer videos on tough subjects like Nonprofit Directors & Officers Liability (if you serve on a board, you should care about this) are valuable, relationship-builders than can move a customer towards a purchase. When a salesperson (independent agent) shares that content, she strengthens her trusted advisor role. When the brand shares via digital channels, it aims to help buyers make more informed choices and earn perefence. Using content for both channels can be more efficient.
Buyers are increasingly demanding video and rich-media content (not ads) to help or delight them
People are consuming a lot more video online and via mobile. That’s an irrefutable trend. Interestingly, that same Blue Nile study revealed, “B2B buyers actually preferred video at a greater rate than B2C.” As soon as you acknowledge this trend and embrace the challenge of delivering valuable video, you require a new of content marketing skills. TV spots generally don’t do it. Even the wonderfully emotional John Lewis holiday spot is pure delight and entertainment. It’s more than a TV commercial. Brands who want to achieve a marketing result via video, need to think about how to make that content useful and/or desirable in some way.
What are your compelling reasons for investing in content marketing.
Watching the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon in London this past weekend, I was reminded about all of the live collaborative creative sessions that I have been a part of over the last several years. (BTW Infected Flight - a way to visualize and track disease spreading won.) From Facebook Publishing Garages to creative “hacks” at Ogilvy to more technical hackathons like the TechCrunch event. There are two types of compressed collaboration in these examples. One challenges a team against other teams to develop a promising solution. TechCrunch Disrupt London had 80+ teams staying up all night to pitch their solution.
The other model combines a disparate group of people to think through a problem and offer solutions. In Facebook’s Publishing Garage episodes, the media company (that’s what they are), brought business problem owners (brands) together with creative and technologists to define a content strategy and then create content emblematic of that strategy.
All of these examples are pulling people together in a compressed collaboration to sketch up a solution.
How about we do the same thing to bum rush the brief.That's a service brands and agencies could embrace.
Hack the Brief
We have a terrific Marketing Brief where I work. A bunch of seasoned marketers took the best of the best and distilled it down into a document that lays a terrific foundation for any creative work. My favorite parts are the fields that tell us what we want people to actually “do.” Second favorite section is where we inventory insights or, more often, potential insights.
The brief is not magic. But what goes into it can set us up to do some awesome work with a network of creative and often unlikely partners.
Let’s bring people together to hack together a terrific brief. Rather than just leap to tactical ‘what-ifs,’ let’s get creative people of all types together to build the brief together. If possible, we would carve up time to then have disparate teams – brand and partners, tech and creative, business and communications – brainstorm ideas to fuel a future ‘hack’.
If I were creating a broad video strategy to drive goals around relevant awareness, engagement, sales enablement, actual sales and lead gen, for example (let’s say I had both a sales and direct channel to satisfy), I would invite:
Business owners from within the brand (both business and marketing leaders)
Digital agency strategists & creatives
Google & YouTube creative and media strategists
A complimentary multichannel video network partner (e.g. Fullscreen)
Video innovator, e.g. Outrigger Media (their innovative OpenSlate and Vnetic make them strong players)
Read how they were applied to an UGG of Australia program here – “To build essentially its own YouTube "network," Palisades tapped Outrigger Media’s OpenSlate, a tool that assesses and scores 220,000 YouTube channels based on measures of influence, content quality and engagement.
The platform assigns a SlateScore that filters out suggestive content or profanity. Advertiser demand for OpenSlate drove the rollout of a tool allowing media planners to curate their own premium content networks from among approximately 70 million ad-supported YouTube videos. That tool, called Vnetic, rolled out in June.”
Homework & Structure
All good things come in thirds. And all good things require prep and structure. This ain’t your mother’s unconference.’ The first third of the day is building the brief together. The second third of the day is group brainstorming on solutions. The final third is spent on read outs and refinements.
Team participants come in with the following as a very good strawman:
Challenge Statement: In 1-2 paragraphs, we should be able to capture the spirit of what we are trying to do with enough notation to reflect guardrails or conditions we need to work within.
Objectives: These should be clear business objectives against revenue or value-related goals. This is the green fees of any good brief and confirms that we understand what drives our business and
Audience: This is the second most misused field mostly because we rarely get beyond some key demographics. The trick here is to adequately describe who our audiences are such that we know their major common life needs (e.g. paying for college, buying their second house), their most contemporary drivers and barriers when it comes to our products and services, and how they get their information.
Actions: What do we want people to do? What action do we want them to take as a result of our communications?
All team participants come in with ideas on the following to share and build with the team:
Insights & Disruptions: Okay, this is the most misused field. Insights are hard to uncover. They take a good creative mind and meaningful data. Finding 3-4 potential insights about our audiences and the role our products or services can play in their lives is key to the hack. This is what collaborative creative teams will chew on.
Channels: What channels have we already committed to and have infrastructure around? That’s not to say that we shouldn’t innovate on channels. The hack should go wherever it needs to.
Success: Define what success looks like from KPIs to qualitative evidence.
All of that happens in the first part of the day. Then the group breaks up into manageable 8-person, cross-disciplinary teams to brainstorm solutions (volume, volume, volume). Finally, these teams come together to share their ideas. Very little refinement has happened. We are saving that for the after party.
The After-work is the Real Work
At the end of the day, you have a terrific brief. Business owners have demonstrated buy-in. An eclectic group of strategic and creative thinkers have come together to strengthen the brief and start the process of thinking creatively. And finally, valuable partners are given a brief they can get creative on over the next few weeks to come up with some awesome ideas.
Getting teams to work together on the brief and the solution can unlock creativity from how we define the challenge, itself, to the actual ways we aim to meet that challenge.
Reading books can be a chore. Don’t get me wrong, I love books. I have a ton of them and have actually read most of them. Still, they tend to be long (Compared to, say, a tweet) and I tend to take quite a bit longer to read them. My non-fiction book consumption has suffered the most, especially business books. I just don’t have the time.
Which brings me to a brief roundup of three interesting short-form content examples. With Twitter, Vine, Snapchat, Instagram and the whole lexicon of infographics, we have so many formats and platforms available today that can deliver some interesting and short content experiences.
Vox – Everything You Need To Know
I am a big fan of Vox as an editorial source. The page design is a more sophisticated approach to tile-based design. Scrolling and browsing is a pleasure. Founder Ezra Klein and the Vox Media team have created a resource that is just plain easy to consume in short bursts while still walking away with meaning.
Their “Everything You Need to Know…” features are not your usual short-form in that they can actually be a lot of words. But they are organized in brief “cards” that you can easily scroll through. What makes them short is that you can learn a topic pretty comprehensively in a short session. They serve to get you up to speed on a trending idea or story like Charter Schools, Cliven Bundy or student debt in one gulp. They are well-written.
Vox also has truly short-form content with their “Explained in 2 Minutes” videos. The video that explains Bitcoin is a great example and also a part of a sponsored content play by GE. The video uses a well-written (and opinionated) voice over graphics approach and really helps frame a way of thinking about Bitcoin (a new kind of payment network but a “crappy” currency).
The GE sponsorship is under the rubric of #Pressing, “Unique views on policy from the best in news” and continues the brands exploration of content marketing, this time from the paid side.
Lowe’s Fix in Six
Can a :06 Vine video actually be useful or is the format destined to be the distraction not the substance? Just watch Lowe’s Fix in Six video on making staining a fence easier than a Tom Sawyer crowdsourcing gag. Then watch the cupcake pan flower-growing video. You get the idea. These guys/gals have really created something wonderfully useful in an impossibly short format. I would subscribe to Lowe’s Twitter feed just for these videos alone.
They have republished the Vine videos on a Tumblr page but, surprisingly, not kept that page up to date. The Tumblr gives them more visual control of the page and also puts them in that network. It does mean that the page is a duplicate of their Vine account. That doesn’t seem like such a problem because most people consumer Vines from within Twitter – one video at a time – and the Tumblr feels like a better aggregator than the Vine page.
NowThis News
More like Vox’s “Explained in 2 Minutes," NowThis News features go even shorter to give us the gist of a topic trending in the news now. Here’s their snapshot, “The company was founded by Huffington Post co-founder and former Chairman Kenneth Lerer, and former Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau. From studios in New York and Washington DC, NowThis News produces over 50 daily video updates for Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Vine, YouTube, Android and Apple apps and the mobile web.”
Take a look at their video on eCigarettes. The :18-long video compiles provocative video and images with text overlays that tell the story and a driving beat hat keeps it all moving. Jump into a section like “US” and the latest videos will simply play one after the other to give you a digest of the news…probably faster than even scanning the newspaper story on the same subject.
This is all a little unnerving if you think of this as a sole source for your news. But that just isn’t most people’s behavior. We graze for news on TV, in our newspapers, on Twitter, in our RSS readers. Why not rely on a digest format for those stories bubbling up in the zeitgeist that just aren’t your passion but you need to know about? And most importantly perhaps, it is all designed for mobile consumption.
I will still read books, but I also love short-form that strives to go beyond the distraction and deliver content that is valuable.
Brands will spend between 17-18% of their total marcom spend on social media within 4 years. They will spend more on social business solutions. They are seeing value and expecting more every year.
The key reason? 90% of us look to friends and family for the most trusted recommendations on products, service and issues. 70% of us count on consumer opinions online above traditional media. And it’s only going to grow. Millennials are three times more likely than Boomers to look for a social opinion on choices they make.
The future is brand advocacy. And it cannot be faked, gamed, or outright ‘bought.’
There are only three ways to connect with and build a strong relationship with customers and stakeholders these days.
Deliver highly relevant content or service. This could be advertising, media relations or what we call ‘owned’ content (including valuable services). Now it’s all highly targeted and tailored. No more 360 degree ‘onslaughts’ of interruptive advertising. Now our messages must be deemed highly relevant to our targets to earn their attention. Lets use the ‘10 degrees’ that matter. Useful content to run a sustainable business from DuPont. Better ways to use member ‘points’ from American Express.
Be discoverable in search. When people search Google, Baidu or Yandex, brands need to be there for all the topics that intersect between a person’s intent and where the brand can add some value. Ford on fuel efficiency. Hellmann’s on Real Food recipes.
Earn our way into their ‘social graph.’ To succeed in social media, we must become genuinely valuable to the people we serve and earn their attention, their advocacy and their business. Inviting people as VIPs into the launch of the new Ford Explorer in Facebook. Sparking a social conversation about the dreams of the next generation of Chinese from Johnnie Walker. Helping Hong Kong parents celebrate their baby pictures in a much bigger way from Huggies.
How we form opinions about products, services and issues is constantly changing. It’s imperative that we make social a new way we do everything.
What is Social@Ogilvy?
Social@Ogilvy is the global, cross-discipline team of social experts from across all of Ogilvy’s businesses delivering social solutions to all parts of our clients’ business. This is new. This is bigger than before. We have been designing and executing social media marketing and communications programs for 7+ years as 360 Digital Influence – a specialty practice born out of Ogilvy Public Relations. We quickly grew to deliver social solutions for all sorts of marketing and communications clients.
Now we have grown into Social@Ogilvy. We are a true global network with a common approach.
Integrated Social Media Matters More
The whole PR vs. marketing battle is moot. Social media will inform every discipline and deliver business value for the foreseeable future. Social media as a standalone specialty doesn’t make sense. All the power and potential in social based solutions comes to life when you integrate it into marcom and other functions.
We design integrated social solutions that combine deep disciplines like crm, public relations and shopper marketing and rooted in what drives behavior. We plan around owned, earned and paid media working together for a compound effect and at its heart our work is ‘social by design’ – phrase used now by Facebook but that captures what we do quite well.
A Global Shift
We do believe there’s a new customer and stakeholder journey defined by the increasing impact our networks have on purchase decision and our behaviors. How we buy, vote, and form opinions has changed. We tap into our 130 friends (the Facebook average) to discover, consider, compare, decide and rave about products, services and issues.
This shift is happening in one way or another all over the world. Growth markets like China, Indonesia, Brazil and Turkey will define the next episode of social media use. They are all growing their social network use and outpacing western markets including the US. That’s why we have grown the world’s largest global team delivering solutions relevant in each local market.
And it’s more than just marketing, we design social business solutions that use the collaboration and advocacy strengths of social media to drive value internally and in customer relationships while at the same time managing risk.
Join Us
We will be participating or hosting 23 events in and outside of Social Media Week this week in NYC, London and Hong Kong not to mention a dozen other markets. Join us as we launch this new ambitious business. It's been a wild ride to get to this point and we would love to see you. You can find out more at our new Social@Ogilvy site.
As I mentioned in a my post about the Old Spice viral video phenomena, I was asked to comment on a CNN International story on that topic. Well, since then, we have all learned that the videos contributed to a significant boost in sales. And in a fit of false modesty, I never linked to the CNN story where I was featured.
So, here it is in all its glory. Wait for it, wait for it, ahhhh - hey, wait a minute. How could they get my job wrong it so simple really - "360 Digital Influence at Ogilvy...?" Oh well, it least my jacket didn't moire.
This post is part of a 5-part series. How can we all be successful with the next wave of video on the Web whether you are a show producer or a brand? Creative Marketing Models are one of four important priorities.
Previous posts talked about getting the show and the audience engagement right. But none of this matters unless you have a innovative and effective advertiser model. Pre-roll, post-roll, surround banners and product integration seems to be where we are at right now. Advertisers value click throughs and impressions tied to views. But even views are open to interpretation. Revision3 recently made a higher commitment by defining views as complete views. It's likely that few other producers do that.
Beyond Product Integration
The product integration in magazine format shows like TMI weekly and EpicFu are the most interesting models. Still, I am not sure that product integration in narrative story is as flexible or impactful. It's one thing to put Ford vehicles in network TV shows but quite another to drop product in the background of a niche dramatic video online. We need more.
Engagement
Advertising value is changing. Some marketers understand that and are working hard to put a value on engagement. The time has come for show producers to get more creative for how they deliver engagement with the brands that support them. We need to think in terms of "marketing" not simply advertising for the brand involved in a video program. If you want to ptoduce a show or are already doing so, what is the story you tell advertisers about the ad opportunity? If it's just impressions or even click-to-action your wasting everyone's time. If you are talking about engagement via product integration than you are on the right track.
But you need to go farther. The most entrepeneurial online producers I know come from the Joss Whedon school of creating a show as multimedia brand. That means the video program is but one touchpoint and experience. Email updates and alerts, merchandise stores, related media like music and pictures, live events (like Diggnation's meetups) are all part of the the engagement. Weave sponsors in there. Show them solutions at all levels of the funnel - drive some qualified leads or relevant inquiries. Make them a friend of the show brand and therefore a potential friend of the particpants - then your getting something done.
This post is part of a 5-part series. How can we all be successful with the next wave of video on the Web whether you are a show producer or a brand? Crowdsourcing topics is one of four important priorities and is technically one of my Idea Bar posts.
This series started with this core idea. That's what makes it part of theIdea Bar series which is full of good ideas - each driven by expertise and naivete. Ultimately this simple idea led me to want to throw out my own model on how niche video programs can succeed online.
Threadless as you all likely know is the quintessential Cinderella story for crowdsourcing. T-shirt designers post designs, the crowd votes them up (or not) and the top designs are produced and sold.
Why not do this with your show? In the previous post on Focusing on Value to Niche Communities, I covered catering to the needs of a defined, lean-forward affinity group. Why not ask them for ideas and votes on what would make a compelling show for them? What would make them want to susbcribe? Just like Threadless has the "I'd Buy That" button, our show marketplace would have a "I'd Watch That" and an "I'd Watch That Every Week" voting buttons. The principle is the same - prove there is an audience before going into costly production. What a great way to get marketers on board before you have actually killed yourself bootstrapping production and building an audience.
Now lest you think I am slipping into the territory of the movie, The Player, where the studio exec decrys the need of writers by saying all we have to do is pick out a story from the paper and, "bam" there's our script, let me clarify. Let the crowd tell us what they would find compelling - what topics, what participants, what format - and then let the creative juices flow. We are not talking "exquisite corpse" here.
The biggest barrier to this model is likely to be "ego." Many show creators are trying to express an idea they are personally invested in. It's tough to become open to the audience. Beyond the poor quality of many videos, this issue - which can be called "control" - might be one of the larger barriers to success. Most filmmakers I know are passionate storytellers first. To win online, you must be passionate about your audience first. Diggnation seems to do a good job of this.
Next New Networks started with the promise of a hundred online shows for all sorts of audiences. They have quite a few today but more like 15 than a hundred. What would happen if married that ambition with a crowdsourced model?
This post is part of a 5-part series. How can we all be successful with the next wave of video on the Web whether you are a show producer or a brand? Connecting with niche, affinity communities is one of four important priorities.
The vast "interwebs" has been potent fertilizer on an English garden-growth of niche communities online. We all belong to multiple tribes some of which are more clearly distinuishable and formal than others. We may love a particular music artist, a passion like WarHammer, a craft like t-shirt design, travel to Indonesian islands, or whetever. Some are tighter communities than others. Star Trek fans waiting for the next JJ Abram's movie are a tight group yet they also belong to a broader 'tribe' of Sci-fi fans who are known for their engagement with shows and events. That tribe intersects with the comic fan tribe who may be watching the Next New Networks Pulp Secret. "Crafting" is another "lean-forward" community with lots of enthusiasts assembled from even smaller niche interests.
Building a show that will uniquely deliver value to a particular affinity community almost guarantees a passionate audience. That audience may not be large enough to satisfy the True Show Value (the cost of quality, value to the audience and advertising value formula ) but it creates that solid core who will work as your most vocal ambassadors. The user and brand value of niche video shows has always been about the level of engagement of the participants. Tomorrow I will talk about why we shouldn't call them "audiences" anymore as a passive viewing experience is not what the niche community will thrive on.
Identifying Niche Communities
Finding niche communities and identifying their members is relatively simple. We do it everyday with our Influencer Mapping for brands. Let's say your brand - Brand G - makes some type of super energy efficient home appliance that is really designed to address current concerns about energy consumption, cost, and environmental impact. One niche community is the design and sustainability crew which includes all sorts of designers - product designers, graphic designers, architects, furniture designers (many designers are multidisciplinary). Many of them are concerned and focused on sustainability through design. Huge Ven diagram overlap. Brand G would focus on designing a show and the marketing behind it to appeal to the design and sustainability crew. Then they would broaden it - adjust the content slightly and expanded the marketing and outreach to grow the audience amongst design-concious consumers. As an avid, lifelong reader of Metropolis magazine, I guarantee this magazine which covers design and architecture and its impact is read by a ton of non-designers and non-architects.
Make a video show that they want and need. It might be a regular survey of new consumer products that satisfy our new green priorities. It may include interviews with designers, including audience members about their own experiences. It might be a episodic "How to Make Your Life More Green" with step-by-step instructions on transforming your life or household to reduce your carbon footprint, your costs, and more.
So, start with a core community and design your show around their needs. Then expand the focus to include the next ring of participants. You won't go so far as to dilute the show's value for the core and you will expand beyond a too narrow group fo participants.
