In the November 10, 2013 business section of the NY Times, David Carr writes about Contently and companies producing their own content.
This is an interesting article highlighting a growing aspect of advertising, brand publishing.
Traditionally, if a company wants to promote their brand to an identified target audience, it has relied on paying for placement on someone else's platform. Even if you are deploying the finest in native advertising techniques, the premise is still the same. If you want to sell fashion, you buy ads in fashion magazines. If you want to sell to tweens, you buy pre-roll on Justin Bieber's youtube page. If you want to sell cutlery, you buy a spot on Food Network, or a page in Saveur. If you want to sell energy drinks, you well uh, create your own series of extreme sporting events, your own magazine, and become a revolutionary brand. Well done Red Bull. But for every Red Bull, there are the fast followers that think this is the new revolution, and for every fast follower that needs help, there is Contentlty.
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| Cool Poe with Shades from Contently.com homepage |
I guess if you are looking at your media budget thinking that advertising is too expensive, and "I could do that," or perhaps, "none of these media outlets really fit who we are," then, be like Red Bull -- and put all of that would-be-spent-on-advertising-money into becoming content creators and publishers. Why put your ad next to content that someone is reading? Instead, write your own content, and have your brand be the content.
No longer do you need to worry about finding the right vehicle to promote your brand or product, create your own vehicle!
This amazes me. Wouldn't it be easier and cheaper to advertise intelligently?
If you tried to be like Red Bull, you might consider hiring some writers, some art personnel, some producers. Are they going to be full time? Is this an ongoing freelance project? You're not just going to do this once, are you? How do hire a writer, when your brand makes popcorn? How do you know they're any good? What results could you expect from what they create? What is my distribution method? How is anyone going to see this?
Tough questions, and Contently smartly has identified a need. They realize that they can aggregate a pool of writers that they have deemed qualified and provide the ad-branded-but-not-advertising-content that these companies are looking for.
Their premise is simple, if you have access to talented writers, people will find the good content and not care that it came from a brand.
As Carr points out in his article: "Bank of America sponsored an article written by a Contently freelancer about the 50th anniversary of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech and ran a sponsored post that was distributed by The Associated Press."
Buzzfeed, creators of posts like, "the 10 cat .gif's you need most in your life" pays their writers based on how viral their native advertising posts get. Great for integration of organic content and native advertising, but is it good for the readers?
Do you as the reader care? After all, if it weren't for Bank of America, you wouldn't have read that great piece on MLK. If it weren't for Dove, you wouldn't be aware of how women really feel about their bodies.
Maybe we will get to the day when we start to subscribe to Heinz Ketchup Magazine, or the TheraFlu variety hour. Seems inevitable.
