Challenging the Business of Distraction

I've seen a lot of discussion recently about brands struggling with the ROI of their social media and content marketing efforts.

And that includes brands with some pretty big budgets.

Coke, who back in 2011 launched the Content 2020 marketing strategy, promised to shift from ‘creative excellence to content excellence’ and produce ‘the world’s most compelling content’. They said this would capture ‘a disproportionate share of popular culture’ – according to Jonathon Mildenhall at Coke.

How’s that worked out for them? Well, according to a recent article in Harvard Business Review – entitled Branding in the Age of Social Media – not too well.

“In 2012, Coca-Cola launched its first big bet, transforming the static corporate website into a digital magazine, Coca-Cola Journey. It runs stories on virtually every pop culture topic—from sports and food to sustainability and travel. It’s the epitome of a branded- content strategy. 

Journey has now been live for over three years, and it barely registers views. It hasn’t cracked the top 10,000 sites in the United States or the top 20,000 worldwide. Likewise, the company’s YouTube channel (ranked #2,749) has only 676,000 subscribers” 

It’s not just the big brands dealing with this challenge. Let’s face it, we’ve all been burnt in the last couple of years by doing marketing that was more intent on selling the content itself rather then our products. Too often we've focused on short term engagement metrics, without enough follow through on brand or sales drivers.

So it's worth asking – since when did the business of distraction start being a measure of marketing or business success? To plot a way forward, it's worthwhile having a look back to see how this happened.

Things started to change in the early to mid 2000’s, when the growth of the personal web and the rise of new social platforms meant consumers began to have far more control over the type of online content they consumed, and where they consumed it. As a result, a lot of marketing shifted from driving brand messages measured in ROI, to becoming more focused on building trust through content engagement.

In this new era, with the consumer having an infinite choice of content at their fingertips, marketers turned their focus to earning attention. The theory was that campaigns and content had to be more entertaining and informative, aimed less at selling, and more on building trust. Content marketing was therefore created to engage and build likeability, not drive direct sales.
The assumption, or hope, was that along with the growth of fan ‘likes’, would eventually come the sales 'love'.

“The thinking went like this: Social media would allow your company to leapfrog traditional media and forge relationships directly with customers. If you told them great stories and connected with them in real time, your brand would become a hub for a community of consumers. Businesses have invested billions pursuing this vision. Yet few brands have generated meaningful consumer interest online. In fact, social media seems to have made brands less significant. What has gone wrong?” HBR, March 2016

A major factor we sometimes forget in this development was the pro-active role played by social media platforms in advocating content engagement as an end unto itself. They were uniquely positioned as the nexus between customers increasingly looking to curate their own identities, and consumer brands looking for a platform to gain attention for their content.

Many of these social media companies, struggling to find a business model up to that point – suddenly found their sweet spot. The more content they got on their platforms, the more time they could keep people engaged there, and then the more they could charge companies for advertising revenue. So platforms like Facebook, You Tube, Instagram promoted the idea that the more content brands created to engage fans on their platforms, the better brands would be positioned to build customer relationships.

In retrospect, there were some pretty big flaws to this approach from a brand's perspective:

1. Brands can’t compete or compare with media or entertainment companies (or with the authenticity of fellow consumers’ content) when it came to the quality of content – and people knew it.

“While companies have put their faith in branded content for the past decade, brute empirical evidence is now forcing them to reconsider. In YouTube or Instagram rankings of channels by number of subscribers, corporate brands barely appear. Only three have cracked the YouTube Top 500. Instead you’ll fin d entertainers you’ve never heard of, appearing as if from nowhere.” 

“It turns out that consumers have little interest in the content that brands churn out. Very few people want it in their feed. Most view it as clutter—as brand spam. When Facebook realized this, it began charging companies to get “sponsored” content into the feeds of people who were supposed to be their fans.” Branding in the Age of Social Media, Harvard Business Review, March 2016

2. There is too much branded content out there, and most of it is very ineffective from a business perspective. A study done by software firm Beckon, as highlighted in a recent Mark Ritson article in Marketing Week, noted:

“A study by software firm Beckon recently revealed that although the amount of content had tripled in the past year, there has been no increase in engagement. Just 5% of the total content produced generated 90% of the consumer engagement.” 

“They noted that most content marketing approaches may create content but they rarely, if ever, achieve either the resonance or return that they need to justify their existence. “

3. Most brands are businesses based on selling products or services – not content. Even if we could produce world-class content and and get it seen and loved, this would not necessarily help drive the key brand or business drivers. We settled for what was easy to measure - the engagement metrics. These were great for Facebook, but not so great for measuring a brand's marketing success.

All of this seems obvious now but it wasn't long ago that this sort thinking was heresy amongst many of the world's leading brands who had, with the help of embedded teams from Facebook or You Tube, consumed more than their fair share of the social media Cool Aid.

Thankfully, some pretty important fundamental principles a have re-emerged.

• You are NOT a media company…even if you buy media or create content for media
• You are NOT an entertainment company …even if you do (and you must!) produce wonderful pieces of entertainment
• You are NOT a content company….even if you make lots of different types of content and campaigns

Despite recent progress, too many marketers are still only talking about engagement rates, or how many followers or web visits or video views that they are aiming for. It's not enough.

It's time to stop feeding someone else's business model, and start feeding your own.

The conversation now should be about how marketers can turn every activity into a brand or sales driver. Beyond tracking online sales, there are many different conversion metrics we could be using to drive brand and sales, which differ for each company and industry. The bonus of this approach is it forces us to start looking beyond measuring everything for short-term effect, and get back to building brands for the medium and long-term.

To make this change requires us to re-examine carefully the relationship with measurement and outcomes, between data and creativity, and separating the aims of paid & social media partners from our own business objectives.

This is good thing. As an industry it shows we're growing up.

The time for digital distraction is over, the time for converting attention to grow brands has most definitely arrived.