Content Marketing Is Changing Advertising, Not Killing It

Ten years ago, ClickZ published an article that claimed advertising is dying. It's been a common theme there for the better part of a decade. The most recent claim was made just a few days ago.

ClickZ isn't alone. Fortune recently ran an article that cited the exponential growth of ad blocking and how some companies are trying to find workarounds that mitigate the impact (if you can imagine). Others are focused on specific networks where advertising is its own worst enemy, like Facebook.

These articles are all well and good to make you think, but most of them miss the mark in understanding what makes advertising work. Advertising isn't a medium or reliant on any particular media. Fundamentally, advertising is the art of persuasion and it has been around a very long time.

"Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art." — William "Bill" Bernbach, founder of Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB).

As such, you can't kill advertising anymore than you can kill communication. All you can do is change its trust for the times — from attention grabbing special effects to emotionally authentic — and alter its distribution model — from mass media broadcast to social, mobile, digital, and environmentally interactive.

But hasn't the field always done that? The Golden Age of Advertising wasn't spurred on by the birth of television and mass media print alone. It was largely the result of the creative department becoming more important than account executives alone, with mass media serving as a spark only because it meant that a great concept had significantly more reach than any other time in history.

Given that digital has expanded the potential reach of mass media, a second Golden Age of Advertising could be pinned on content marketing, social media, and next generation technologies that will put digital at our fingertips almost everywhere. Maybe all advertising needs is to get back to its roots to be relevant and that means getting back to the creation of great concepts.


The M6 razor commercial is an excellent example. After being freed from the constraints of a 30-second television spot or a single page of print, the creative team behind the concept was able to tell a story that can hold the viewer's interest for three minutes while delivering two persuasive messages.

For my purposes, this 3-minute spot includes a third. While it's always easy to think content is king, it's really the great concept that remains sovereign. One unforgettable message has a real impact.

It also touches on what is wrong with turning out terabyte after terabyte of forgettable content. There is no great concept behind the bulk of content marketing and there needs to be if we want to benefit from the art of persuasion — the heart and soul of advertising. Without it, we're winking in the dark.

Content Agility Is The Next Step In Content Strategy

Some marketers have earmarked content agility at five years out. It will happen much faster than that in a multi-channel, multimedia world. It's happening now to offset the content creation explosion.

Specifically, content agility addresses the increasing need for horizontal and vertical structures that can organize content not only by search (placing the burden on the consumer), but also by logical pathways (publishers providing opportunities for expansive content). The general idea of content agility is to save consumers time (not demand more of it) by providing clear pathways to their goals.

What does content agility really look like in the future? 

One early example of content agility was featured in a commercial for the Google Nexus 7. Although the commercial focuses primarily on consumer-generated searches (given that it is a Google commercial), content agility takes the concept further by providing consumers touch points that provide opportunities to follow nonlinear pathways toward specific topics and deeper research.


Specific to this commercial, content agility would not wait for the consumer to define a search term, it would be designed to open pathways in nonlinear directions (e.g., to learn more about a president or to learn more about speeches or to learn more about self-confidence, etc.) simply by touching the president or his speech or his hand gesture. Such an interface would feel impossibly intuitive.

What can content agility really look like today?

Right now, most content marketers create content and flood every social channel where they have an outpost with the new content, screaming "hey look, new content." They load it up with hooks and baits too because the entire objective (as stupid as this sounds) is to make us feel an emotional tug to click on a link and learn more (only to be disappointed about 98 percent of the time).

Content agility doesn't operate in this manner. It creates a content hub with increasingly deeper content that is also interlinked with all other content assets when appropriate. For lack of an inactive example, think of Wikipedia cross linking but with a greater emphasis on visual presentation (over text), inactive media, and scroll over interfaces.

Social network marketing can be handled in much the same way. As mentioned, most marketers burp out the same content leads across all channels. But what if they didn't? What if each social network featured very specific content, giving participants different reasons to each network rather than seeing the same content on all of them? It makes more sense and creates much more dynamic engagement.

A few recent articles that are exploring content agility. 

• 5 Tips To Liven Up Long Stories by Geoff Livingston

• 3 Tools To Create A Social Media Hub by Per Scmitz

• Introduction To Intuitive Content Creation by PSFK Labs

Does Your Content Marketing Consider Customer Complexity?

As much as marketers are working to understand their customers as data points, many of them still need to understand their customers as real people. That is the fundamental challenge with big data — retaining the ability to see the unique individual within the throng of the crowd that it tends to track.

When you separate out one individual from the crowd, even as a thought exercise, it's easier to ask relevant questions. Who is this person? What do they want or need to know? How will they make their decision? What content would they be most interested in receiving? How will they use it? 

With the exception of this space (which is driven by a different purpose), I ask myself these questions every day. And when the opportunity presents itself, I spend time with the people we want to reach. 

People are infinitely complex and you're fooling yourself to think otherwise. 

If I have learned anything in advertising and marketing over the last 25 years, it's that consumer profiling just isn't good enough. While it can be helpful in capturing a snapshot of behavior and communicating it to other marketers or executives, it tends to dismiss the complexity of people.

Understanding people with any sense of depth requires a culmination of layered analysis that considers a dozen different aspects at once. For the purposes of illustration, pretend there are three.

Personality (Core). When you work with so many diverse marketers, you become familiar with all sorts of profiling tools that are designed to better understand people. One of the most useful was considering the four personality types (or nine if you prefer) that identify common foundations people operate from. 

For content creators, knowing that controllers needs to know the bottom line, analyzers want all the details, promoters are looking one step ahead, and supporters want to know how it benefits everyone else, can have a profound impact on content structure.

Learning (Input). As recently included in a guest post published by long-time friend and marketer Danny Brown, people consume information differently. In education, for example, learning styles include: visual (see), auditory (told), kinesthetic (touch), and language (read/write). 

Marketers who know it are much more likely to consider a multimedia approach to their digital marketing efforts. Multimodal communication tends to resonate better and benefit from longer recall.

Behavior (Output). While not everyone appreciates it today as they did when the content was fresh, Forrester Research did an excellent job in mapping out a Social Technographics model (or what many people have come know as the social media ladder). The ladder largely breaks down participants by the activities they are most likely to engage in online. 

These would include content creators, conversationalists, critics, jointers, spectators, and inactives (or passive consumers). How these different groups stack up in the data is interesting, but what is more interesting (from my perspective) is how these communication pools choose to consume, adapt, share, and build upon the content they are exposed to (if at all). 

Considering such dynamic individualities makes marketing invaluable. 

Creating content is one thing, but creating it (and embedding it within a content of diverse communication) so that it appeals to various personalities who consume information differently and respond to it differently is something else all together. If you want maximum attraction, retention, and action then the real challenge becomes one of content agility (covered in an upcoming post) delivered at the right time. 

Naturally, this isn't exclusive to online marketing and content. Real communication is much more immersive and seeks to reach people at the right time in the right environment. And considering how challenging that can be, it only makes sense to make sure the content sent makes sense for everyone.

How about you? Do you have any layers or filters that you have found useful over the years? If you do, I would love to know. The comments are yours.

Content May Be King, But People Want Experiences

If you have invested any time as a communicator working in or with social media, there is a pretty good chance that you've heard the declaration that content is king at one time or another. There is some truth to the concept too, which was originally proposed by Bill Gates within a context that might surprise you.

Sure, we can all argue the finer points well enough or be cute and crown the audience, but the truth is that content will reign in one form or another. It's the crux of how we communicate our concepts, ideas, and observations. It's how we educate, inform, and entertain others in the world in which we live.

It doesn't even matter how that content is presented, as long as it is presented well. Write a post or white paper. Shoot a video or record a podcast. Share a picture or create a television series. It's all content.

Content appeals to the immediate but experiences set a plate of permanence.

While teaching Social Media For Strategic Communication at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, last Saturday, we spent a considerable amount of time talking about content and the constant pressure to produce more and more easily digestible content. Almost everybody does, right?

If you believe like most people — that influence and conversions can be quantified by counting actions — then you could make the case that more posts, more tweets, more stuff that people can act upon somehow counts. In fact, this was the thinking that many direct mail houses adopted ten years ago.

If your direct mail campaign has a two percent return from some list, then all you have to do is increase the frequency (or the list) to generate more revenue. Right? Well, maybe not, even if this thinking does explain why online lead generation is overpriced.

If you ask me, I think all these tactical formulas are detracting from something stronger. And this something is tied to a question I asked in class — if more content more often produces results, then why does one sentence from a book read one time or one scene from a movie screened once or one comment made by a teacher one time stay with someone their entire life? And this something can best be summed up by experiences.

Novels work because our brains see them as experiences. Movies work because our heads are hardwired to attach emotion to sensory perception. Social networks climb to the top of traffic charts not because of the content they provide but because of the sensation of experiences we feel. It's not my social media deck that holds anyone's interest in my class but rather the way I present it and how we experience it.


This communication blog (or journal) is no exception. A few months after writing about radio host Bob Fass and my attempt to make this space more indicative of an open format, more people have visited. In fact, more people have visited despite my efforts to undo blog "rules."

I stopped concerning myself with frequency, making this a weekly as opposed to a daily. And, at the same time, tossed out short content in favor of writing something more substantive. The result has been eye opening in that topics that used to have a one-day shelf life now have a one-week shelf life or more.

While I am not proposing this would be the case for every content vehicle, it does provide an explanation tied in part to the question I asked in class. Even when I wrote daily, the most successful posts or series of posts had nothing to do with "Five Sure-Fire Ways To Get More Traffic!" They had to do with the cancellation of a television show or two, the coverage of a crisis communication study or two or twelve, the involvement and participation of people in things that matter (even when it feels personal), and experiments that involved thousands of people besides myself. Good content? Maybe.

Good experiences? Absolutely. As fun as it has been to write satire at times, the gags rely less on writing and more on experiences. People remember because they were part of something.

The future of the Internet doesn't rely on mobile as much as experiences. 

I used to tell students that technologies in social media mean software. With the advent of Google glass, increasingly immersive projection displays, and the encroachment of the online world into the offline world, I no longer can offer up any such disclaimer. All of it — the hardware, software, and people driving the content and devices — help create the experience and even alter it.

Consider, for example, short stories being published at a pace of 140 characters at a time, characters who suddenly open their new accounts, and one project that included a dialogue and storytelling exchange between four or more accounts (each characters talking from their unique point of view). There are more examples, well beyond Twitter, but the point remains the same. Storytelling creates experiences. Technology creates experiences. Person-to-person interaction on a one-to-one, one-to-some, and one-to-many scale creates experiences.

And the rest? That content without experiences? It still has a place in the world, sure. But the future of social media isn't in producing ever-growing reams of information to get people's attention. It will be to elevate the content into a form of communication that creates a shared experience, online or off.

Can you see this future? And if you can, how might it change your own marketing strategy away from tricking readers into sampling content into some compelling experience that they want to become part of and participate in? The comments are yours to share, your experiences or, perhaps, propose an entirely new conversation. I look forward to it.

Networks Drive Discussions. People Drive Networks.

Everything you think you know about social media today will be obsolete in the next five years. This assumes you are lucky. It's equally likely that everything you know will be upended in the next six months.

This concept of temporal acceptance, perhaps more than any other, is a critical component of any discussion I lead or give about social media. There is a risk in introducing the idea, even if it is the most honest observation someone can make about social media. Most people don't like change.

Instead, most people want to hear about new technologies because the tools tend to drive most discussions. They want to know what these new tools are, how to use them, and if there are any emerging techniques that will give their organization an edge. Those kinds of discussions are useful, sure.

And yet, change has always been the driver of all communication-related fields. We all know it. Marketing, advertising, public relations, and corporate communication have always been in a constant state of change. What social media has done is move them forward at a faster pace, primarily because social media has attached itself to the rapidly accelerating pace of technological advancement as opposed to a singular technology like a radio or television set. This is a space that changes in a blink.

I don't even lump technologies together anymore. I tend to define them as tools (hardware), applications (software), and networks (platforms) with each of these overlaying sectors capable of disrupting the other. In fact, there are so many that no one person can possibly keep track of them all. There are thousands upon thousands of them; ideas that could be the next disruption force in communication.

How do you reconcile this as a communicator today? You don't necessarily have to think about tools.

When people talk about social media, they mostly get it backwards.

When I spoke with the Council Of School Board Association Communicators a few days ago, I anticipated one of the first questions asked in relation to my presentation. How do you, as a communicator, prioritize which technologies to use to reach your audience? They could answer the question themselves. It was easy.

I handed out sticky notes and asked the attendees to write down two of their favorite social media networks, the ones where they spent the most time. Then, while I shared my background, one of the attendees volunteered to sort and stick their responses to the wall in clusters.

There wasn't any surprise, Facebook and Twitter were the most popular. Pinterest was a distant third, but still a noticeably pronounced cluster compared to the rest. There were several dozen others selected by one or two people, ranging from Tumblr and Goodreads to intranets and association forums.

"There is the answer," I said, pointing to the wall. "If I wanted to communicate to this group, then I would prioritize my communication presence much in the same way. Social media is driven by people, not technologies."

Assuming I already had a space to introduce new content and make announcements (blog, website, etc.), my social network assessment priorities would begin with Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest (but not necessarily exclusively). As long as I had a plan and the right assets for each priority network, these are the ones I would tap first (e.g., if I did not have enough visual content, Pinterest would not work).

After establishing planned communication on these networks, I would learn more about the other networks on the radar, even if only one or two people selected them. Each one would be considered based upon their ability to help me effectively communicate about common objectives that the organization and specific audiences share.

Tumblr might make an excellent place for a school board association to reach students. Goodreads might be an excellent network to develop a list of books reviewed by teachers and administrators. A network like Meetup could effectively be used by administrators or unions. There are many more examples in the presentation, specific to school board associations.

Even if only a few members of an audience are already members of these niche networks, the organization may be able attract more people over time. People will mostly be willing to join any network where an organization they know or trust has developed particularly strong assets.

For example, many grandparents joined Facebook not because they liked it but because they wanted to see pictures of their grandchildren. Most people join Kickstarter and other niche networks for the same reason. They are not attracted to the platform as much as the content someone has place there (like a crowd-funding campaign).

The same holds true for all new networks and platforms that are introduced over time. Communication professionals have to assess each potential network on how effectively it can communicate common objectives. Popularity can also be assessed, but mostly as it only relates to sustainability. Networks have to reach some critical mass to survive. Not all of them do.

Building social media into communication plans and measurement. 

Once communicators appreciate that social media does not exist in a vacuum, it becomes significantly more manageable. Rather than break out the entirety of social media into a separate section within a communication plan, each social media asset becomes a contact point along with any traditional communication.

In other words, if a school board association wanted to work with school administrators to establish a stronger academic foundation, social media tools like LinkedIn or Meetup would be included alongside any newsletters or grassroots outreach. Doing so also makes measurement much more effective. Using the principles behind Return On Communication, the measure of success would be based on successfully changing the academic foundation (with a secondary objective that it improves student performance).