RightSpot Media | Digital Performance Marketing

How content marketing “renews the contract” between advertisers and consumers

Posted on Monday, February 2nd, 2009 at 3:24 PM by Simon Smith  |  Comments (0)

It’s no secret that over the past few decades, advertisers and consumers have had a strained relationship.

As a recent episode of the excellent Age of Persuasion describes, the unwritten contract between advertisers and consumers has long been this: advertisers support valuable content with sales messages, and in exchange consumers let those messages—commercials—into their eyes, ears, hearts and minds.

This contract was largely created by Albert Lasker, who some consider the father of advertising. Lasker creatively determined that advertising could support the creation of original programming. He’s credited with inventing soap operas.

Today, Lasker’s contract seems quaint. Advertisers and consumers are in a battle for attention. But "content marketing," a new approach that builds off established principles, promises to renew the contract while both improving consumers’ lives and advertisers’ sales.

Online, valuable content is your strongest collateral

By the end of the 20th century, Lasker’s contract had unravelled.

Advertisers pummeled consumers with ad formats that provided nothing in return, like posters over urinals and automated telemarketing calls. Meanwhile, consumers responded with tools like TiVo that let them consume original content while ignoring sales pitches. It was all-out memetic warfare: the more consumers ditched and filtered traditional media, the more advertisers looked to interrupt their everyday life in ways that were harder to screen.

In the midst of this war, a new battlefield emerged: the internet. Advertisers’ early reaction to the internet was massive interruption warfare. And so they filled websites with annoying banners and popup ads. This proved to be a bad idea, because the internet (a) was traditionally uncommercial and (b) put more control than ever into the hands of consumers. Hence popup- and banner-blocking software proliferated, and the battle shifted decidedly in favor of consumers.

Which brings us to today.

Most traditional advertisers still haven’t figured out the internet. And so they continue to throw huge budgets at "building their brand" online and experimenting with the latest fads, from viral marketing to social media.

Yet in the trenches, a few smart marketers have been making money online from day one.

Why? Because they realized a truth that’s only now percolating out: on the internet, your most important marketing collateral is valuable content.

Consumers don’t want to be sold, they want to be helped

The old contract stated that consumers would accept advertising that supported valuable content. But with consumers having more control than ever over what they consume, that contract’s no longer valid.

The new contract states that if marketers provide consumers with valuable branded content that addresses a pain or provides pleasure, they’ll consume it and use their now finely honed media savvy to filter out the hype.

While this model has been around for awhile (known by such terms as "custom content," "custom publishing," "branded content" and "branded entertainment"), the key difference online is transparency. 

Whereas companies might have previously hidden behind a thin veneer of editorial credibility (with magazines like "Harry" for clothier Harry Rosen), today they must remove that veneer in order to get closer to customers with content like relationship-building blog posts.

In short, advertisers used to support publications and broadcast shows in order to benefit from their credibility and relationship with consumers. If consumers liked Johnny Carson, for example, perhaps they’d also like the orange juice advertised between segments of the show. Similarly with ads in magazines and newspapers: advertisers hope to gain credibility by association.

Not so much anymore.

Today, consumers can and want to go directly to the source. They like and trust journalists only slightly more than advertisers (and that’s debatable), see stars constantly undermined by scandal, and go straight to blogs for news and YouTube for entertainment.

Similarly, they want to go straight to a brand for help with a particular problem. But they don’t want to be sold. Rather, they want to be helped with informative content, and want to develop a long-term, trusting relationship with the people providing the products and services they consume.

To renew the contract, marketers must think like publishers and broadcasters, and strive to provide the value and credibility for which they used to turn to publications and shows. They need to deliver valuable content transparently, establish a one-to-one, permission-based relationship with consumers, and stop assaulting them with unwelcome interruptions.

This is the promise of content marketing. Advertisers ignore it at their peril.

Tags: content