Dave Trott loves content really

Dave Trott writing in Campaign, ’Content, content, content’,

Content is seen as just stuff.
        
The stuff that goes into the space that’s there to be filled.
        
Think of a lorry.
        
A lorry has wheels, an engine and a cab.
        
And a big space on the back to be filled up with something.
        
It doesn’t matter what you fill it with, the lorry is the delivery system.

I’m a huge fan and greatly respect Dave Trott, I’ve seen him speak at several events, read his books, retweet his tweets and had the pleasure to have a walk and talk with him one evening after an event. I’m always left educated, entertained and inspired. Reading his views about content I feel compelled to write a reply, as I feel content gets such a bad rap and his thoughts are based on a lot of bad work out there.

This is a view which is reflected on industry blogs, magazines, websites and Twitter feeds, and it’s a shame. 

It’s a shame because when brands and agencies realised they could make ‘stuff’ cheaply and on ‘owned media’ (without media spends on new platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter), it gave rise to lots of ineffective and poorly executed stuff in shiny lorries being put in front of people. 

Most of it made by people who didn’t really understand the opportunity put in front of them.

This has given rise to such derision to the mere idea of content, that content is openly sneered at, especially by the traditional ATL Creative & Media agencies. 

From their point of view they have good reasons to feel that way:

1) They see the thinking, strategy, creative and execution they pour onto their typical ATL campaigns not reflected in the vast majority of content created by either their own content arms or smaller bespoke agencies/production companies/one man bands/YouTube vloggers.

2) The idea that there is no ‘idea’ in content, that it’s not possible for content to help position a brand/product effectively and solve a business problem.
    
3) It threatens their business model around large campaigns with large media spends. 
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” (I can appreciate the dichotomy here when I have the word ‘Content’ in my job title!)
    
4) It requires a totally different approach (if done properly), moving from advertising to creating content which people want to watch. Not advertising designed to make a big impact in a short amount of time whilst usually interrupting the content people were trying to watch.

In Dave Trott’s analogy, if the content of the lorry was full of iPhone’s and I want to buy an iPhone, that lorry and content is very valuable to me. If the content is a Samsung Galaxy phone, I’m going to let that lorry drive past me. It doesn’t have value to me. 

It’s in the eye of the beholder.

Good content is about thinking what the audience finds valuable in terms of their attention. If you deliver on that contract you can make a much more substantial connection than an ad that is interrupting what they want to be doing.

You are creating a product they want, rather than something advertising a product. 

Without getting all Martin Luther King about it, I see a future where all these approaches exist in unison (maybe not banner ads), and anything classified as content truly delivers on that promise and isn’t just fodder for media spends or for robots to watch.

The delivery system facilitated getting the idea in front of the right people.
But the important thing was the idea.
To put it simply: it was idea first, delivery system second.
But by relegating the idea to content, it becomes far less important.
The delivery system must now come before the idea, before the "content".

I just don’t agree with this. Content is still about an idea. You then work out where the audience spends most of their time and design content in the most suitable way relating to the audience, brand and platform. 

Dave Trott has a brilliant diagram he draws live in his talks, and rather than focusing on platforms it starts with a human. The human is the medium, (not a shiny platform) - and quite right! If that human likes what they watch/read/hear, they will tell their mates, family, colleagues, followers etc. 

Content is no different here.

At an APG talk recently Dave Trott spoke about how he approached his personal Twitter account, and that an expert was brought in to ‘teach’ him how to use the platform. 

Dave said he ignored all of what the expert said and just started writing some jokes, posting quotes and some links to interesting articles relating to advertising. He would then intersperse this by promoting his blog posts and his books. 

Brilliant blog posts, jokes, quotes and links to interesting articles is valuable content, and frictionless to access apart from some blog posts being behind some paywalls.

Links to buy your books is advertising of your product, the thing you sell.

By treating content as seriously as his books (like a product), Dave now has over 21,000 followers. It would be interesting to know how this Twitter activity affects his book sales. It can’t hurt can it? 

Dave mentioned the expert had around 400 followers.

This is the point.

Think of your audience, create content which will be valuable to them on the chosen platform and where the brand/product is relevant/intrinsic/authentic (remember we are selling stuff), and you will create a strong connection, you might even build an audience around your content, and that growing audience will be quite incentivised to purchase products off you.

That’s what content is and what content can do.

What if brands treated content like a product?

What if brands treated content like another one of their products, not as another way to market their existing products?

Framed this way, it completely shifts how to approach a successful content strategy. Focusing on what real people actually want or need, rather than another way to market existing products or creating content for the sake of it.

Image: Via TopDesignMag

What is Content? (Or the million dollar question)

When talking about content, the industry speaks about engaged audiences and building audiences. This is what content can do. (Good content, that is). Traditional advertising at its best can communicate complex ideas around a brand/product/service in such a way that it not only articulates what it does but can also evoke an emotional response in the viewer. It advocates the benefits in a way that resonates.

Cheap and abundant media, matched with very high quality tools for creation of content is allowing any company, brand or individual to create content which has as much chance as finding an audience as anyone else (media spend aside). To actually standout in this vast sea of content we have to be creating value. You need to create value for someone in order for them to connect with you. I don’t think the aesthetic quality is the main issue here, it’s about making something relevant for the brand/platform/audience. And this is where I think many people can’t get their head around content, it’s about finding and embracing a niche.

Embrace the niche

Brands have to discover and then embrace their niche. Full unashamed wallowing in your chosen subject/topic/product. By truly connecting with an audience, no matter how small or big, you create value for all involved.

If I visit a brand’s YouTube channel, what is the channel about? What do I find? Their TV ad, an interview with the CEO and maybe some walkthroughs of how to use the website? Not many people will subscribe to that. When you visit BBC1, Dave or Film4, you have a clear idea of the kind of content you’re going to get. This is no different to a YouTube channel.

Red Bull, GoPro and Dove have all adopted a niche which allows an audience to quickly understand what they are about and know what kind of content they can expect from them.

Find your niche and deliver on that.

The solution for many brands should lie in utility. If I’m a beer company, it seems highly sensible to me to have an app to find the most interesting bars in my area. Entertaining is so hard now because there is so much stuff. We should be looking to help people, to provide value, and offer them some sort of service.

Tom Goodwin writing in NewsCred

I would agree that entertaining is hard, but when it works it will really make an impact. You just have to go into it with your eyes open. Utility, as Goodwin says, is a great way to harness content to provide value to people.

Content as Product

So the idea of creating value, at its core, has led me to settle on content as product. Traditional advertising is promoting a product. What if we treat content simply as another product from that company, rather than the promotion of another product?

In marketing, a Product is anything that can be offered to a market that might satisfy a want or need. Wikipedia

So what if we approach content to satisfy a want or need of real people? It certainly places it in the frame of thinking audience first doesn’t it?

Some of the worst content produced (outside of general quality and executional issues) can be exposed with one simple question: “Who is this for?” When it is seemingly impossible to say so, from just watching it, it’s safe to say it’s just stuff made for the company producing it - whether to satisfy their product team, CEO, board or even the agency that made it.  

A (good) company would have a very clear idea about who the market is for their product or service. They would then develop, test, iterate and release the product to the public, and if the product created value in the eyes of the market it would sell and be a success. Content has to do the same thing, it’s out there in the wild and the value it creates determines its success. Like a product, a positive outcome will benefit the company that created it.

Agencies should embody that approach when creating content for their clients, and of course they do when promoting the products of the client, but when it comes down to creating something original that still embodies the client’s values, it’s no wonder the industry has collectively scratched their head at delivering on this.

Building your own little production factory as the content arm of the agency does nothing to solve this either. It’s not about making stuff cheaply or even efficiently. You have to make something that resonates with a particular audience.

Another interesting parallel with product, is the idea of generating revenue. Most advertising is obviously not designed to generate revenue for the company selling the product. But some companies have been able to do this with their advertising. The LEGO Movie is probably the ultimate example of content as product, with gross revenue currently at $468 million. Guinness World Records is also a company using content as product. They sell licenses to TV companies globally to produce locally relevant TV shows featuring the abundance of records featured in the book. Both these examples have treated content with as much respect as their core product.  

The Google Creative Lab have always seemed to take this approach too. They create complementary or new products that are in line with Google’s main consumer products. They are creating new content using Google’s platforms for real people. A walk through of Abbey Road, a Chrome game which syncs your mobile and computer to play Super Sync Sports, an interactive music video using Arcade Fire’s ‘We Used To Wait’ as a soundtrack to an evocative trip to your hometown using Chrome & Streetview in The Wilderness Downtown. These are fantastic examples of delivering people value through content.

A brand wouldn’t just make any old rubbish to sell to people, they wouldn’t stay in business very long. So why is so much content made in this way?

This is our chance to act like product managers with the content we create for our clients. It’s time for people who say they make content to be held to the same standards as the product sold by their clients.

It’s time to make content people want to watch.

Context is the new content

Kenneth Goldsmith wrote a great post in the LA Review of Books, It’s a Mistake to Mistake Content for Content, which brilliantly explores how context is the new content. He uses some great examples to make his point, his own crusty MP3 collection, photography, Twitter and here Instagram:

The more people who use an apparatus, the more feedback the company receives about its camera, the smarter it becomes, drawing more users to its base, thereby increasing the manufacturer’s bottom line. For this reason, Instagram keeps adding new filter sets and features in order to retain and broaden its user base. To Instagram, the content of the photos people are taking is beside the point; the real point is that they keep taking them in order to fortify the apparatus.

It's really interesting to think about the sheer volume of content available to us, alongside the variety of ways we can now consume that content. Goldsmith's point that the apparatuses surrounding the artifact are more engaging than the artifact itself warrants exploring, especially with a great example around photography.

Anyone with a smartphone in their pocket is carrying a high quality stills and video camera to capture any moment whenever they want. I always used to mock the tourists who would use videocamera's (remember them?) to relentlessly capture their holiday destination from their point of view. I would say to myself that they would never revisit that material, basing it on my own laziness to fire up old videocameras to watch similar material. I remember an old friend of the family would boast how he had 'tens of hours' of DV material of the Moors. I remember just being utterly confused by it. Does that have any value at all, to even him now? Granted, content is in the eye of beholder, so perhaps it could be the perfect artefact for someone, somewhere, sometime, but I can't help feel that his fixation with his new JVC DV camera was the driving force in that marathon session of capturing those landscapes.

When visiting art galleries, you will see within minutes of arriving at an exhibit, people just nonchalantly walk up to a painting, take a photo on their phone and walk off. They almost don't want to look at it with their eyes. They want to look at it through the camera's eyes, capture it and somehow gain a sense of ownership of that painting. The work of narcissism around the relentless desire to share your highlights on social networks is at work here too no doubt.

I find it fascinating to see how people do this at 'moments' in their lives. Go to an awesome concert and only feel really gratified until you've collated 10GB's of photos and video of that gig, that after the obligatory upload to Facebook and showing your mates for a week, it remains buried - maybe until an app which gives you a 'flashback' of your photos from 12 months ago reminds you that it even happened.

I'm guilty of this though myself (to an extent!) and I think anyone who has a smartphone finds themselves falling into this habit. As Goldsmith cannily observes, Management (acquisition, distribution, archiving, filing, redundancy) is the cultural artifact’s new content.

It does feel we spend more time 'working' with our content than actually enjoying it doesn't it?

 

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Comparing hops to apples - How BrewDog are taking a leaf out of Apple's playbook

Since getting into craft beer last year, it’s been easy to keep an eye on what BrewDog is doing, especially when there is a BrewDog bar very close to where I live. The beers are delicious, the branding is great (since the recent re-brand) and the experience in their bars really helps pervade the idea that beer can be elevated to something way beyond Stella/Carling/Fosters.

The moment I first went into a BrewDog bar it really reminded me of going into an Apple store. Not the way it looked or the products they sold (obviously). But the approach.

Reading this article in Marketing Week today - BrewDog’s co-founder on how it matured beyond marketing stunts (Beware Paywall!), it struck me again that there is a similarity in the approach and attitude to Apple.

We’re still tiny. We’re less than 0.1% of the UK beer market. Craft beer overall is less than 1% of the beer market. For us it’s not about the size. We’ve always said to people: ‘Judge us on our beer.’ We’re selfish and we make the beers we want to drink ourselves – if we make 100,000 bottles a month or a million, it all comes back to the quality of what is in those bottles. James Watt, Co-Founder BrewDog

Without going into the well trodden exposition of how Apple works, they are a company completely and utterly focused on the quality of their product. Uncompromising some would say. But it is this focus which has brought them tremendous success. When Steve Jobs announced the iPhone at the now infamous (and probably most flawless) Keynote at MacWorld 2007, he said this, when talking about the mobile phone market:

Mobile phones, just about a billion last year, worldwide. So what does this tell you? What this tells you is, that 1 percent market share equals 10 million units. This is a giant market. If you just One percent market share, you’re gonna sell 10 million phones. And this is exactly what we’re gonna try to do in 2008, our first full year in the market, is grab 1 percent market share and go from there. So we’re gonna enter a very competitive market, lotta players, we think we’re gonna have the best product in the world, and we’re gonna go for it and see if we can get 1 percent market share, 10 million units in 2008, and go from there.

It’s like they’re saying the same thing. BrewDog are a much younger company than Apple, so of course they are a little more tenacious with the choice of words, (it helps get traction too!) but it’s the same thing.

You know Steve Jobs was saying much worse off camera about the competition. But it’s a fantastic strategy. Pick a massive well established market, make a product that is fundamentally better than the competition, and aim for a sliver of that market, knowing damn well that that sliver will deliver you the success you need to progress to the next level.

Time to invest in BrewDog I think.

Great planners are schizo

I admit, like many, to suffering from imposter syndrome at times (most of the time in my case). I never trained or worked 'properly' as a planner or strategist at an established creative agency, so I have this constant battle going on in my head, especially when the actual word 'strategy' is in my job title (!).

I have been lucky enough to work closely enough with some very talented people at our own agency, the Google Creative Lab and with strategists in agencies we sometimes partner with on projects. This has given me great insight into how to approach a brief and an audience, especially when combined with my own experience in the industry.

I do take comfort reading things which resonate with how I work, or at least want to work. The fact that 'content' is where I ply my trade gives me confidence though, something quite fun in reading articles or tweets from more established agency strategy people dissing it, or the way the word 'content' is used as this blanket term which covers such a wide range of executions. It makes me feel it's still an undiscovered little gem in the great scheme of marketing and brand strategies.

Anyway, coming back to the point about reading interesting things about what makes a good planner or strategist, I came across this great deck on SlideShare from Heidi Hackemer. It was good to see that many of the observations in the deck resonated with how I seem to work.

I really enjoyed the way the deck was presented, and the points made really spoke to the challenge I sometimes face when you do seem to suffer from spells of split personality on projects. It also highlighted something we are all guilty of which is pigeonholing. We all do it, but if you are what this deck says you are how on earth can people pigeonhole you?

Maybe that’s the point, and that’s the point of a strategist/planner - to be the guy or girl who can’t be pigeonholed, so they made a role which suits them down to the ground. They cover lots of different roles and look at things in lots of different ways. In doing so they are the ones who are able to make something make sense to everyone.

I know many roles I've done in my career never really grabbed me the way this does. It’s a role that is so varied in the way your mind has to work, it really suits a mind that is a little bit schizo.