There’s a great scene in Fight Club where Tyler Durden says, “It was right in everyone’s face. It was on the tip of everyone’s tongue. We just gave it a name.” I don’t know who named it, but Content Marketing is on the tip of everyone’s tongue. Our clients are embracing it and expecting change.
Many of my Integrated Production colleagues are hearing the call from clients to solve their content needs and do so at increasingly smaller budgets at real-time speeds. At the same time, clients aren’t satisfied with low-cost corporate video shooters doing the “low-budget” work, while their agencies don’t get out of bed for less than a $500K TV spot. Rightly so, we’ve been saying we should be involved in helping craft all brand messaging; clients are calling us on it.
Perhaps Content Marketing describes the shift from campaign-centric thinking and doing to always-on thinking and doing–a shift away from big-moments-in-time and toward near-real-time communications. Content Marketing could prove to be as disruptive a change to agency structure as digital was almost 20 years ago.
You’re probably thinking: Isn’t everything an agency does Content Marketing? Yes and no. Content Marketing needs to be planned using tools like editorial calendars and partnership opportunities, but much of it needs to be envisioned, created and distributed on the fly, and it’s always-on. The opportunities for a “brand as a channel” forces a different team structure and mentality for producing work.
We’ve formed two unique teams that tap into one another as needed, but are structured independently. First, the NewsRoom team is comprised of folks who monitor and analyze conversations happening around our brands and help craft responses in the short, near and long term.
The second team, Agile Video, is built around a journalist/writer, staff director, agency producer/line producer hybrid and editor. Complementing them are designers/infographics experts. The teams are smaller, independent and self-contained. The teams can deploy quickly and, of necessity, skirt some of the protocol for campaign-based marketing, such as pages of briefs, layers of oversight, and rounds of internal and external check-ins. This requires a disruptive leap of faith for the agency teams in creative and production and a high level of client trust.
Maybe Fight Club is an ironic film to reference; its premise was that advertising makes us want things we don’t need. But that might be the twist that Content Marketing delivers. At its best, Content Marketing is marketing that works so well you don’t mind that it’s advertising.
(Matt Bonin is chief production officer at Ogilvy & Mather New York.)
