Vincent Heeringa takes a look at the state of content marketing and how its management determines its effectiveness.
Browsing: content marketing
In the past year, we’ve seen media organisations take advertising services in-house, with TVNZ Blacksand and NZME’s CreateMe, and now 99 is taking on the work of journalists, by launching its Newsroom, which will see it create editorial content marketing for its clients with a writer and editor. We talk to managing director Paul Manning about how the agency is taking on media organisations.
Narrative’s Vincent Heeringa on why shares, clicks and likes are bad yardsticks for marketers and how social sharing is the equivalent of casual sex.
In what might seem an unusual approach for a company rolling out Ultra Fast Broadband (UFB) across New Zealand, Chorus has included a print element in its latest campaign.
In today’s multi-channel climate, brands need to be very shrewd about how they get through to their audience. Traditional advertising just ain’t cutting as much mustard as it once did, particularly with the young’uns. Spark has recognised this, and following on from its last collaboration with NZME, which focused on what life might be like in 2025, it’s again enlisted the publisher to bring a second piece of content marketing to life, this time targeted at small business owners.
Nike has gone the content marketing route by creating an original web series to get more women into fitness (and buying its shoes).
At the recent CAANZ session ‘Who’s buying? The future of content commercialisation in NZ’, several industry commentators weighed in on whether content marketing is nothing more than an annoyance. Here’s a rundown of what Metro’s Simon Wilson, The Spinoff’s Duncan Greive, MediaWorks’ Alana O’Neill, Fairfax’s Ellen Read and former Herald editor-in-chief Tim Murphy had to say.
Claudia Batten is currently on the Better by Design Study Tour in the US along with a number of other Kiwi overachievers and she says the success of Contently—and the attitude of its founder Shane Snow—shows that marketing now needs to come from a place of integrity and sincerity.
As has increasingly become clear, content marketing is an effective, progressive and less intrusive way of reaching an audience. The modern audience has less time for shouty or obvious tactics. We’ve grown smarter, wiser and more distracted with a myriad of content options to consume, particularly the millennial audience, which is spending less and less time in front of the television. While perhaps a few years ago it would have been hard to see it coming, banks have gotten very good at employing content marketing tactics, particularly when targeting a younger audience. We thought we’d take a look at a few examples from the main players.
In this day and age, it’s becoming increasingly clear that people don’t like being obviously advertised to. We don’t have the time, patience or interest anymore. A modern audience is a more distracted audience, it’s true. Content marketing company Scribble knows this, and it came up with a clever initiative to get Twitter users in the marketing realm (but not necessarily) spreading some ad hate in an attempt to champion content marketing
In a world where search engines are increasingly becoming the first port of call to find information, Colin Kennedy says serious, rational messages compete poorly with more emotive, conversational and down-to-earth content offered. But content marketing could help change that.
Content marketing and its dodgy cousin native advertising are big areas of focus for brands and media owners at present. And they’re also big areas of confusion, with no set rules on disclosure and very little data for this market. The IAB NZ’s Standards & Guidelines Council is aiming to change that and has set out on a mission to gauge the level of activity, build a resource on the topic and help educate and showcase what is currently being offered in New Zealand.
We keep hearing it: TV is dead and digital is the dream; your ticket to ever-lasting marketing glory. But BrandWorld’s Mike O’Sullivan says TV is still alive and well and consumers’ passion for video shows no sign of letting up.
Content is de riguer at the moment. And while there’s plenty of action in this area, there’s also plenty to learn. So, to help with that, StopPress is hosting an event next week for those looking to get a flavour of the latest thinking on content marketing. The Content Marketing Picture—organised in partnership with co-hosts Getty Images and TVNZ—will take place at the Spark Conference Centre in Auckland, Tuesday 5 May, from 5.00pm.
ICG director of content marketing John Baker considers whether native advertising is all its cracked up to be or if it’s just advertorial dressed up in digital clothes.
Contagion’s Tom Bates pinpoints some of the early key trends emerging at the event.
Media agencies are increasingly using editorial tricks to spread their clients’ advertising messages. So is native advertising a con? Alex Lawson doesn’t think so.
Throughout the course of the last year, Getty Images has been making a point of identifying the visual trends that define business culture in the modern age. In addition to seeing changes in media representations of women, middle-aged people and beauty standards, Getty has also drawn attention to the way technology is influencing photography through extreme close-ups and point-of-view cinematography. And as the world stands poised to draw the curtain on 2014, the team at Getty have taken a moment to look at what the future in a new article published on its website.
The inaugural Ad:Tech New Zealand conference took place yesterday at the AUT Business School, with around 400 people in attendance. And while measurement is one of the digital realm’s major strengths, Todd Wheatland, global head of strategy at content marketing agency King Content, used his time on stage to prove the famous quote (that wasn’t actually uttered by Einstein) of ‘not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts’.
Following on from ANZ’s move into publishing with BlueNotes, BNZ, RaboDirect and Westpac have now made their own forays into the content marketing landscape. But the approach that each bank has taken differs not only in terms of the content being covered but also in terms of who produces the material for publishing. We take a look at what each bank is doing in this space.
The appetite for content marketing is growing rapidly, with much of it happening in the digital space. Many brands have invested in their own content marketing teams and platforms. Publishers like Fairfax, APN and Tangible Media all have their own content marketing teams working on both digital and print. And agencies of all stripes are also trying to make hay while the sun shines by filling up the variety of channels consumers now use. Now Brendan Jarvis and Ron Sneddon have joined the fray with Story, a standalone business that has a “laser-like focus” on digital content marketing.
Wanting to prove there’s more to Australia than theme parks, Tourism Australia and Air New Zealand have launched a content marketing campaign with Yahoo and Tangible Media to lure Kiwis for a holiday over the ditch. The campaign goes for a fresh, inspiring view of Australia beyond trips to the East Coast gateways – beginning with Western Australia.
There’s been a whole heap of discussion about the rise of native advertising recently. Some see it as the future of marketing; a way to insert relevant commercial messages into editorial content. Others see it as subterfuge; the advertising equivalent of mutton dressed as lamb. John Oliver appears to be firmly in the latter camp, so, as he says in typically comical fashion, if you can insert an ad into news, why can’t you insert news into a product?
Brands have seen the opportunity to shake themselves free of the tyranny of paid media and embrace content marketing. But it pays to look before you leap, writes David MacGregor.
In an effort to make the online news-reading experience less time consuming and little more convenient, Aucklander Anthony Patrickson and his team have developed The Daily Youser, an app that gives iPad users access to content from different sources in one place.
It’s no secret that brands are increasingly moving away from traditional forms of paid media in favour of other options like branded content, native advertising and owned media, with a recent PWC report in Australia showing 67 percent of marketers were shifting their spend from bought to owned channels and a quarter of marketers spent between 20 percent and 30 percent of their budget building their own media channels. But Resene has been ahead of the curve in this regard, with its twice-yearly magazine Habitat launching back in 2004. And it is continuing that evolution with the launch of a new responsive, content-rich website www.habitatbyresene.co.nz.
To some degree banks have always been publishers, producing voluminous pamphlets and documents relating to their accounts, interest rates and credit card deals. And while this has served the utilitarian purpose of providing information to both current and potential clients, it has always been a bit vapid in the story-telling department. So, in an effort to fill the narrative-shaped hole in its offering, ANZ has launched BlueNotes, a digital publishing site updated daily with news stories directly relevant to the bank and the financial industry.
Brands are increasingly turning their noses up at traditional forms of advertising in favour of publishing content that doesn’t just interrupt the audience but also engages with it. Ogilvy’s digital group head and creative director Greg Whitham takes a look at what works, what doesn’t work and what brands need to do to ensure that their publishing efforts drive results.
Although content marketing has become one of the latest buzz phrases uttered at conferences, it has actually been around since 1895, when John Deere started Furrow magazine, a publication dedicated to information for American farmers. Following this in 1932, after seeing value in being associated with well crafted content, Procter and Gamble sponsored a radio programme via one of its soap brands, adding the term soap opera to the vernacular. It’s from this historical standpoint that a Getty Images video recently published on YouTube discusses how content marketing has evolved over the years to eventually give us a range of modern applications that that not only contribute to branding but also entertain viewers.
As part of its strategic insights related to the marketing industry, Getty Images recently released an article by Catherine Toole, the chairman of Sticky Content, that discusses how the increasing popularity of content marketing is making brands look more like publishers.