The communications industry is abuzz with content. What does it actually contain? Brittany Golob investigates

In the Mad Men days, content may have been called advertising or it may have been contract publishing. It found its place in company newsletters or radio programmes known as ‘soap operas’. For today’s communicators, ‘content’ encompasses any engaging and authoritative messaging produced by a company. Call it content, but in whatever form, content always adheres to a strategic framework that allows a brand to connect with its audiences.

“Engaging content makes that connection,” Tracey Hutson, head of internal communications at Barclays, says. “It helps set the tone of the organisation and create a culture where colleagues connect with the purpose and values of the organisation.” Reaching an audience, whether it lies internally or externally relies on engagement.

Gilad de Vries, senior vice president of Outbrain, a company that has quietly but thoroughly revolutionised the digital content landscape, notes that when digital media became prevalent around 2010, “What brands needed was a completely new vehicle to engage with their customers in the digital space. In the digital world, there’s so much content that one of the biggest challenges was how do you get people to find that content and engage with the content the brands are producing?” Money, he says, was not being spent on digital marketing when the audience brands wanted to attract had already moved online.

Outbrain provides the now-omnipresent links at the bottom of nearly every online news story to branded content sourced by companies. It then provides links to more content once a user has visited the brand’s own site. By driving traffic to branded content, companies can understand who their audiences are and what they messaging works for them. By applying user metrics to existing content, a company can make its content more relevant and more engaging for its online audience.

Metrics, algorithms and intelligent SEO have all allowed owned content — the messaging produced by a company — to come to the forefront of the online audience’s awareness. “All of a sudden a lot more brands are getting into the content marketing game because the dilemma of creating content without people seeing it and without a return on investment, is gone,” de Vries says. Justin Pearse, head of innovation at Bite and executive committee member of the Content Marketing Association (CMA) concurs, adding that Google’s algorithms enabled content consumption to be driven by SEO, creating more fervor around its production.

The average person in Britain is bombarded with up to 30,000 marketing messages each day. Engaging, authoritative content filters certain messages from the near-constant barrage that assaults the communications landscape day by day.

Social media, for good or evil, has facilitated the way in which marketers and brands promote this engaging content. Brands now know that Facebook likes are not enough, that the need to create a community of followers is more important than simply hoarding those followers.

That, in content marketing, is old news. What has changed since Don Draper and co. roamed the streets of New York is that social media has perpetuated the viewing time of branded content. This calls for longevity of the content itself but also for quick thinking, adaptable stakeholders and agile creative direction. Companies that can achieve this balance not only extend the online viewing period of their content but will likely generate earned content — the Holy Grail of content marketing. According to Azeem Azhar, CEO of PeerIndex, 92% of consumers trust earned media more than any other marketing.

In the coup de grâce of this year’s Superbowl, Oreo let the world know that it could still dunk in the dark. “There’s a line by George Patton: ‘A good solution applied with vigor now is better than a perfect solution applied ten minutes later.’ That sums up where content marketing is going to go,” Martin MacConnol, CEO at Wardour, says. Oreo’s success in this instance is not in that it got thousands of people to purchase sandwich cookies, but that it adopted a nimble stakeholder-creative marketing machine at exactly the right moment.

“The Oreo Superbowl ad illustrates that they are a business that really understands content marketing, and how branded content and social media can work together perfectly to promote a brand,” Sarah Morris and Laura Sanders from Sequence say. Because the relevant creative teams

were physically in the room with the relevant stakeholders, the ‘Dunk in the Dark’ spot received quick approval and was able to make a maximum impact via effective use of social media and content marketing. That quick turnaround then translates to a speedy process of evaluating the effectiveness of digital content, allowing brands to modify their communications based on real-time responses.

Companies have caught on to these changes to the communications development process, and some have begun to – like the advert that was Oreo’s beacon of light in the midst of a blackout – provide added value to their stakeholders through the effective implementation of content.

That added value can take the form of the oft-referenced Red Bull Stratos project in which Felix Baumgartner leapt into the imaginations of consumers around the globe in the biggest content marketing stunt to date. When a toothpaste brand provides information on better oral hygiene or Bacardi takes it’s offline support of the music industry online or iZettle sponsors a taxicab carwash, the content that is produced has authority.

Authority derives from a brand “cutting through the corporate speak,” according to Sequence, and addressing a more savvy consumer with more genuine messages. For Seb Roberts of We Are Social, honesty on the brand’s part stems from personality, wit and experience shining through in a company’s content.

While campaigns like Stratos or Oreo’s now- famed advert are the public face of content, the heart of it lies with stakeholders, who must now take on larger roles in corporate communications.

Long gone are the pin-up girls and brimmed hats of the 40s and 50s, but here to stay at the heart of communications, as it has always been, in one form or another, is content.

“It’s really important that stakeholders get on board with the idea of the importance of content so that they can be an ambassador to make sure it gets done right,” Sanders and Morris say. “Stakeholders need to be able to champion the cause and get the dedicated staff/time/budget that developing good content needs. Internally, it can be a great motivator to encourage individuals to be the voice of a company.”

Content produced on a massive scale for an internal audience, once took the form of an email from a director or of an internal newsletter. Now the need to engage employees’ ever-shrinking attention spans has resulted in messaging being repackaged as content. Coca-Cola, as a sponsor of the London Games, the Olympic period was an opportunity to celebrate and engage employees. The soft-drink giant did so by creating an online portal that featured both user-generated contentand branded content that would appeal to a workforce that is not necessarily office-based.

On the print media side of internal communications, Barclays produces an award- winning employee magazine to engage its employees through content. Hutsen says the publication is successful because it is relevant to the entire 32,000-strong UK internal audience. While the content is dynamic and the photography bold, interviews with the CEO and other senior leaders provide an engaging and authoritative element that compels employees to read the publication.

“[It] provides a format/channel which feels more inclusive, with a focus on content relevant to colleagues,” Hutsen says, allowing that the magazine provides “a different angle and approach from the standard corporate communications.”

Though corporate magazines are a longstanding means of engaging employees, the digital age has introduced new medium through which to address an internal audience. ECNlive, a London-based startup whose informational media screens have popped up in office buildings from St. Pancras to Bermondsey and everywhere in between, provides a means for employers to both digitise and enliven internal communications.

“It’s a proxy for daytime television,” ECNlive founder and CEO Anthony Ceravolo says. ECN visualises corporate intranets alongside interesting content such as entertainment, news and information. Eye-grabbing content such as weather reports and sports scores complement the company’s own internal messaging to address a newly-engaged audience.

Before the rise of digital, a 1998 Independent article heralded the age of contract publishing in which consumers are blatantly targeted by branded content. It’s fascination with the seemingly-novel phenomenon of consumer-driven content may have faded as the M&S magazine proliferated, but, in a world of declining print media, such content is alive and kicking today both in print and online.

The queue at the local supermarket has fordecades seen an interface in stakeholder interests — essentially, generating profits — and consumer relations. Britons have been turning the pages of Waitrose Live or Tesco’s and Sainsbury’s magazines without realising that they are engaging with branded content for years. “The magazine cover doesn’t say ‘Buy Waitrose products’, it says ‘How to create the perfect Easter party.’, so you pick the magazine up,” MacConnol says.

By addressing what supermarket shoppers are interested in consuming during shopping trips — recipes and party planning tips — content marketers can inform their purchasing habits. Targeted engagement, here, as online, is of the utmost importance when creating effective communications. The CMA has found that grocery magazine readers spend 130% more in stores than non-readers. “That works because supermarkets are the place you buy your food, so it taps into the interest and passion of the customers,” Pearse says.

This is the case not only for consumer-facing publications, but also for corporate community management. Luxury car retailer H.R. Owen, launched a members-only magazine as part of its October 2012 rebrand. The thick, paged, matte- printed, quality designed rag is meant to create a family of like-minded petrol-heads out of H.R. Owen’s customers.

“The magazine’s editorial remit was to celebrate the love of cars,” marketing director Chris Harris says. “If you are into cars, you’ll find it very compelling. Its a very soft-sell opportunity to introduce customers to new cars and to introduce ourselves to potentially new customers.” The rebrand was undertaken to modernise the brand and to formalise the relations between the company and its clients. The magazine aligns with that by promoting the H.R. Owen brand as an authority in the world of luxury automobiles.

As content becomes the standard tool of communications teams and marketing agencies, organisations have changed the way they approach communications. Many have begun to seek out‘heads of content’, much as they had ‘heads of social media’ three or four years ago.

Tanya Ferris, MD of Unicorn Jobs, a communications recruitment agency, has noticed an increase in clients asking for job candidates with content and content marketing experience. The skill set, while not fully developed yet, requires a candidate to be “a bit of a geek,” she says. “There are so many new channels that are opening up so you’ve got to be quite a digital technician.”

Livity, a youth engagement agency, has recently appointed Derren Lawford, former head of programming for Global BBC iPlayer, as head of content. He says the desire for engaging content calls for publishers and agencies to address a targeted audience via multiplatform delivery. Essentially, this former journalist will be tasked with generating engaging communications for use in youth engagement activities.

Those who actually do content marketing have done so for years, though perhaps under a different title. Some are former journalists whose experience with storytelling equates to a seamless transition to content marketing. Britain’s Association of Publishing Agencies read the tea leaves correctly in June of last year and rebranded to the Content Marketing Association (CMA). “We rebranded to reflect what our clients were doing,” Patrick Fuller, CEO of the CMA says. The agencies under its remit were producing infinitely more content for their clients, resulting in a nominal, though not literal change in direction. Content marketing creates relationships between the brand and its audience across channels and platforms. “Our members are doing so well because our members employ journalists to build relationships with their customers,” Fuller adds.

While there may be some kinks to work out on the social media front, content marketing is here to stay, Ferris says, “Most certainly, it’s not going to go away and how businesses and organisations present themselves to an online audience is going to be interesting to watch. The traditional communications platforms that have always been print media, broadcast media, radio and so forth are now replicated to the larger extent online. It’s a breakaway from traditional PR skills. Agencies and in-house teams need to be adopting content as part of their communications strategies.”

Long gone are the pin-up girls and brimmed hats of the 40s and 50s, but here to stay at the heart of communications, as it has always been, in one form or another, is content.