If it feels like every vendor suddenly has a “State of Something” report, you’re not imagining it. Benchmark studies and branded data have become the new calling cards of content marketing.

While blog posts and brand manifestos still have their place in the ecosystem, they rarely break through on their own anymore. Content fatigue has reached critical mass, and audiences simply scroll past “5 tips for better marketing” articles. At the same time, AI search has changed the SEO game and raised the bar for credibility; in order to rank and get cited by large language models, marketers need original insights no one else can offer.

One solution emerging across industries has been to double down on proprietary data. From HubSpot’s State of Marketing to LinkedIn’s Workplace Learning Report, companies are mining their unique data assets to create content that commands attention, drives citations, and builds lasting authority.

Here’s why the trend is on the rise — and why it works.

Why Now? The AI Search Effect

When ChatGPT answers a question about average email open rates or Perplexity summarizes industry trends, these AI systems pull from sources with transparent, compelling data and authoritative positioning. Branded benchmarking reports check these boxes by providing structured, factual content with clear methodologies and context.

Even in a “zero click” scenario, your brand still benefits from being cited as the source of record. There can be a compounding effect to such attributions: When your report becomes the default data point for “average B2B sales cycle length” or “content marketing budget allocation,” you gain visibility across thousands of AI-generated responses, journalist articles, analyst reports, and competitor presentations. Each mention amplifies your brand’s authority, and the qualified traffic that does flow back to your domain is more likely to convert than traffic from traditional SEO.

How Benchmarking Reports Drive Value

Smart marketing leaders recognize benchmarking reports deliver measurable value across three critical dimensions:

Public Relations Impact

Proprietary data transforms your brand into a media magnet. Journalists constantly hunt for fresh statistics to anchor their stories. When you publish exclusive insights about industry trends, you hand them ready-made hooks — and the result is earned media coverage that would cost six figures through traditional PR campaigns.

Pipeline Generation

Whether gated or ungated, benchmarking reports tend to attract high-intent prospects. Gated reports identify serious buyers willing to exchange contact information for valuable insights, and ungated versions can maximize reach by getting your data in front of analysts and influencers.

Trust and Authority

Publishing rigorous, methodology-driven research signals deep expertise. You shift from vendor to trusted advisor. Transparent methodology matters here — you’ll want to ensure you’re clearly explaining data sources, sample sizes, and analysis methods to give readers confidence in the validity of your findings.

What It Takes to Create a Report That Sticks

Building a benchmarking report that achieves these outcomes requires strategic planning across a few key areas:

Data Sourcing Strategy

Start with data only you possess, like first-party usage data from your platform that provides unmatched insights competitors cannot replicate. Combine this with customer surveys or supplement with subject matter expert quotes for qualitative depth. Aggregate and anonymize to protect individual customer data while revealing category-wide patterns.

Design and Format Excellence

The most successful reports balance comprehensive analysis with scannable highlights. Transform raw data into compelling visual stories by partnering with designers who understand data visualization. Create charts that reveal insights at a glance. Write copy that explains why the data matters, not just what it shows. Package statistics as “snackable” social media content, and include downloadable one-pagers for easy sharing.

Multi-Channel Distribution

Great data dies without strong distribution. To maximize impact, launch your report with coordinated campaigns across PR, social media, email, webinars, and sales enablement. Create tiered assets: executive summary for time-pressed leaders, full report for practitioners, slide decks for internal sharing, etc. And don’t forget to train sales teams to reference key statistics during their conversations with prospective clients.

Optimizing for Citations

You’ll also want to structure your content for maximum quotability and citability by AI engines. To boost discoverability, use descriptive subheadings that work as standalone facts, and be sure to create FAQ sections addressing common questions. Build infographics for visual learners, and implement schema markup to help search engines understand your data. Include methodology sections that establish credibility and, finally, make statistics easy to cite with clear sourcing guidelines.

Consistent Refresh Cadence

A report is only as valuable as it is current. To keep your data fresh, commit to regular updates, e.g. annually for comprehensive reports, quarterly for trend data. Mark your calendar now: If you launch in January, start data collection in October. Teasing an ongoing data initiative creates anticipation and provides reasons for re-engagement.

Pitfalls to Avoid

Even with the best intentions and compelling data, a few critical mistakes can undermine even well-executed benchmarking reports. Here are three to avoid:

Weak Methodology

Small sample sizes and cherry-picked data can destroy your credibility. Invest in rigorous methodology, even if it means less favorable results. Consider partnering with research professionals if your own team doesn’t have the resources necessary to produce a truly top-notch report. And always disclose limitations or margins of error.

Sales-First Content

Readers — both humans and machines — detect and reject reports that exist primarily to promote products. Focus on category-wide insights, include competitor data where relevant, and save product mentions for subtle footer CTAs.

Underinvesting in Distribution

It doesn’t matter how brilliant your report is if nobody reads it. Budget 40% of project resources for distribution and amplification. That number may sound daunting, but without aggressive distribution, even the most groundbreaking data won’t move the needle.

The Future of Authority Marketing

The window of opportunity is open now, but it won’t be forever. Categories without established benchmark reports offer first-mover advantages. So, it’s a good idea to start now: Begin by auditing your data assets, surveying your customers, or analyzing your platform metrics. Then, transform these insights into the authoritative report your industry needs but doesn’t yet have.

As AI search changes how information is surfaced and cited, the brands supplying reliable benchmarks will own the reference points that everyone else leans on. Those who wait risk competing in categories already defined by others’ data.

Need help turning raw data into a report that drives citations and pipeline? Talk to Contently about building your next benchmark study.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs):

What makes a benchmarking report different from a white paper?

A white paper typically presents a company’s perspective or solution, while a benchmarking report is rooted in original data and industry-wide trends. The latter is designed to be cited, compared against, and referenced as an objective standard.

How much data do I need to publish a credible benchmarking report?

There’s no magic number, but larger sample sizes improve credibility. What matters most is transparency: Clearly explain your methodology, sample size, and any limitations so readers trust your findings.

What resources are required to create a strong benchmarking report?

Successful reports usually require collaboration across data, design, and distribution. This might mean partnering with research specialists, investing in design for clarity and impact, and budgeting a sizable share for promotion.

The post Why Branded Benchmarking Reports Are Everywhere Right Now appeared first on Contently.

Earlier this year, we surveyed 1,072 Americans about what they want from branded content. Most told us they encounter branded content regularly, but they also revealed preferences that might surprise some marketers—and make them realize they’re missing a big opportunity.

You can dig into the full findings here, but I wanted to highlight three of the most surprising findings.

1. Brands need to up their meme game (and spend more time on simple, visual content in general)

I know what you’re thinking: Joe, what are you doing? Do you really trust brands to make memes?

Right now, not really! But people love simple visual content like memes and still images. In our survey, it was the second-most popular content format, just behind video. Yet, in a separate survey of 530 marketers we conducted recently, less than 10 percent said they were prioritizing this type of visual content this year.

Clearly, there’s a disconnect. My advice for brands: Hire people who inherently love and understand social platforms. If the person running your Twitter doesn’t know how to speak Twitter, they’re unlikely to succeed. But if they are, don’t micro-manage them. Trust their weird Twitter meme ideas. Great things can happen—just see brands like Steak-umm, RGA, and Denny’s and the incredible amount of love they garner by letting their social team get weird.

2. Consumers crave educational courses

I’ve been relentlessly bullish on educational courses as the future of content marketing. The logic here is pretty simple: People value expertise. You want guidance from advisors at a successful bank or the thought leaders at a B2B tech company in your field. There’s no easier way to earn people’s trust than teaching them a new skill that makes their lives better.

Our research bears this out—58 percent of consumers said they were likely to take a free course created by a brand.

If you want to take advantage of this trend, Jordan wrote a must-read about how to do just that in his LinkedIn newsletter this week.

3. Social impact storytelling drives purchase consideration

I wrote about the research behind the power of social impact storytelling in December, and now our own research backs this up. Seventy-four percent of consumers said they were sometimes or always more likely to buy something from a brand after reading about the positive impact it had on the world.

Integrating these stories into your content strategy is a no brainer. Eschew the press release, and focus on stories that illustrate your company’s larger initiatives. One of my favorite examples is Bank of America’s “Bees of One Bryant Park,” which showcased the company’s climate change initiative through the story of the 300,000 (!) honeybees on top of the Bank of America building.

If you found these trends interesting, don’t miss out. Check out the full report.

The post 3 Surprising Things People Want From Branded Content appeared first on Contently.

My teacher had a charming way of wording things in English because her personal vocabulary was like a complicated French-accented soup: a linguistic bouillabaisse. That’s how complex and lovely things can get when you pour in terms from multiple cultures. In the marketing world, professionals tend to glom onto useful marketing buzzwords as a shared language, and those terms can actually prove useful to professionals in adjacent industries.

As the marketing and media industries continue to look more and more alike, their lexicons overlap too. Ultimately, marketers and media employees want the same thing—engaged audience members—but we’ve all been taught to talk about attention and audience using industry-specific terms.

For all you media folks out there who are planning a switch to marketing, we’ve put together an introductory translation dictionary for you. You can also use this dictionary as a lead tool, if you’re a marketing exec who wants to hire a team of Pulitzer Prize-winning writers for your brand’s blog. You’ll need to speak their language to recruit them, and veteran newspaper reporters don’t necessarily know what “map against your KPIs” means.

No matter why you’re reading this, these thirteen alphabetically listed terms should help you communicate across the divide. So let’s get started!

Call to action (CTA)

A call to action (CTA) is a bit of language in a blog post or piece of content that prompts the audience to do something specific.

The primary difference between marketing and the mainstream media (which I’ll call MSM from here on out) is that every single piece of marketing content should require a specific action on the part of the reader, even if that action is just”read more”. For a brand, it’s not enough if 1,000 people read a blog post—those people need to click through to more content, subscribe to an email newsletter, or make a purchase. Content marketers never make content for content’s sake.

Meanwhile, a media company like Hearst might publish a feature article in the print edition of Esquire magazine, and the sole “point” of that article might be “make the reader feel like they really get Chris Evans.” Functionally, it’s fluff. Artistically, it’s likely reaching for the standard of a classic celebrity profile like “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.”

To many, injecting a CTA into a piece of writing is to sully the art form. A CTA is what makes a piece into “sponcon,” or sponsored content. But increasingly, CTAs are looking like useful tools for the MSM. Many media companies have begun putting CTAs on their websites—the pop-up warning you that you’ve reached your third free article for the month and will soon need a paid subscription is one example. A lead form for a magazine’s free email newsletter is another.

CMP

A content marketing platform (CMP) is software for organizing the content marketing process. It looks a lot like a CMS (content management system), but a CMP is designed to help marketers do their jobs effectively. A CMS, on the other hand, serves many different kinds of professionals at once.

Most writers at media companies simply use the CMS as a place to paste in their writing. At media companies run by tech executives like Bustle Media Group, writers may routinely use a CMS for social packaging and basic SEO metadata too, but they still typically turn to platforms like Parse.ly and Chartbeat if they’re interested in their audience metrics.

Over in marketing world, all that audience data is usually baked into a CMP. At least, it’s there if you’re using a good one. You wouldn’t buy a CMP without data reporting capability, and the really stellar options have a transparent workflow management interface.

Content campaign

A content campaign is a plan for the strategic use of content marketing around a specific goal. This one is a pretty one-to-one translation of “editorial package.” I heard colleagues say “package” and “packaging” constantly while writing for magazines and media companies, and now that I’m in marketing, everyone says “campaign.” Why? No idea. But there’s your translation.

Just like an editorial package, a content campaign is a multi-format publishing plan that might comprise social media posts, videos, gifs, email newsletters, press releases, merchandising, print media, and blog posts. It is the central effort of several content-adjacent teams to get people’s eyeballs on a particular piece of content.

Data-driven

A data-driven strategy or program refers back to data gathered from different avenues on a brand’s target audience. In the MSM, journalists who routinely parse out study findings and crunch numbers in order to report on them often self-identity as data journalists. Not every journalist is a data journalist—that’s how Nate Silver was able to create FiveThirtyEight with a central data-breakdown “gimmick.”

It may be difficult to work as a journalist in the MSM without having any knowledge of statistics, but it is completely impossible to do similar work in marketing without those skills. Though a lot of media still relies heavily on anecdotal evidence like interviews, opinions, or criticism, marketing lives and breathes data.

In the mainstream media, one celebrity’s personal experience with divorce is a compelling enough story to stand on its own. No MSM writer is going to interrupt their lede about Bradley Cooper and Irina Shayk divorcing to dig deep into the national divorce rate, but a content marketer at a dating app company probably pumps out a blog post per week on that data.

Gamification

Gamification is a psychological trick that inspires us to enter sweepstakes, pour hours into Candy Crush, and buy all our lotions at Sephora just to watch those loyalty points rack up. (Just me?) Even if you’re not a marketer, you’re probably familiar with the concept of gamification—it’s the way brands turn engagement into a game-like process that rewards active players with little incentives.

Some especially savvy media companies have played with gamification in recent years. Inverse.com’s email newsletter reward habitual readers by racking up points, which readers can spend in the media company’s webstore. The New York Times has published several stories that use interactive UX designs, and these psychologically “reward” readers for clicking around with funny animations. This gamification of a company’s own website is also a hallmark in data visualization journalism like the stories on FiveThirtyEight.

Hub and spoke

To use a hub and spoke model in content marketing is to center all pieces of content around a single enterprise project. It’s a metaphor: there’s a hub at the center of a bicycle wheel, and each spoke that supports the shape of the tire connects back to that central hub. Content marketers like to advise writers to focus on a “hub” piece—usually a longform e-book or whitepaper—and then build supporting pieces of content around it, like spokes.

If a writer in the MSM were to write a single definitive feature story and then spend the next few weeks writing short blog posts about the same story, well, they’d be accused of being derivative. There’s a vast cavern between reporting on a beat and repeating yourself, and that’s what keeps “hub and spoke” out of the minds of most media writers. The only time you’ll see editorial strategy of this kind in the MSM is if a newsroom is particularly attached to search traffic (as marketers are). When I worked at Inverse, a website modeled after Bryan Goldberg’s now-ubiquitous “search-driven” strategy, we called hub and spoke strategy “topic swarming.”

Ideation

Ideation just means pitching or brainstorming. Sometimes marketers use a ten dollar word when a ten cent word will do. (See also: “utilize” and “leverage” when you could just say “use.”)

Journalistic

To be “journalistic” in your content marketing work means that you operate “somewhat like a journalist.” You technically interview people at your company and write Q&As. You apply for press passes to trade conventions and cover them the way a journalist would cover a convention. It’s a sliding scale, though. Occasionally, “being journalistic” means you are close to a journalist as a bottle of orange Gatorade is to an orange.

Here’s the thing, though, and I say this from experience: a lot of professional writers in the MSM are just as “journalistic” as content marketers. If you cover the film industry, for instance, and you’re not at a trade publication, chances are you’re not actually breaking “stories” as often as you are publishing explainers and breaking down fan theories. That kind of writing is closer to “making content” than it is to “doing good journalism.” So in this case, marketers just found an apt word to describe a multi-industry phenomenon.

KPIs

Your key performance indicators (KPIs) are a group of measurable values that demonstrate how swiftly a marketing department is working toward its business objectives. Example: if your business objective is to increase your brand’s sales enablement program, your KPI for that goal might be “we will produce twenty four new marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) this quarter.”

Sidenote: you might be wondering why KPIs are “key” performance indicators instead of just “performance indicators.” The answer is that marketers love to say the word “key.” You’re not just gathering coworkers in a room—you’re inviting key stakeholders. You’re not just telling an audience what a slideshow is going to involve—you’re giving them key takeaways. Don’t ask me why “key” is key—it’s just one of those marketing industry mysteries we don’t talk about, like “how did they get Henry Rollins to speak at Content Marketing World?!” and “why am I the only one in this office who washes their own coffee mug?!”

ROI

You’ll often hear marketers ask for a project or story’s demonstrated return-on-investment (ROI), which is just a fancy way of asking, “How did this do?” If you’re a MSM writer or editor, you might associate ROI with audience metrics like page clicks and social shares.

Marketers tend to have a deeper understanding of ROI because they wear more hats than the average writer at a website or magazine. At a media company, functions like social media strategy, newsletters, video, UX design, SEO, and aud dev are typically split across a team of people, but in a content marketing department, everyone does a bit of everything. That’s why all marketers are responsible for proving ROI on their work, whereas writers are often just told how their stories are doing by other teams.

SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of formatting online content according to parameters set by Google’s algorithm, in order to make that content appear higher on a search engine results page (SERP).

Most writers know what SEO is in a vague sense, but they’re probably not responsible for implementing a strategy. Most media companies tend to separate search data from the pitch process, drawing a line in the sand between the science and art of publishing effectively. For marketers, that line is irrelevant, because the art of content creation will always come second to the science—however, you do need both to do content marketing well.

Because of a lack of education on the subject, many writers think of SEO as simply turning their headline into a question that readers might Google. Content marketing requires a more nuanced understanding of optimization, from meta data to keywords and longtail subject authority.

Snackable

If a piece of content is “snackable,” it means it’s designed to be engaged with in a single sitting. A longform piece of writing is not snackable, but an infographic posted to social media is snackable. Because content marketers typically work in a more diverse array of media formats than writers, they come up with ways to categorize these offerings.

Again, marketers fall in love with buzzwords, but you don’t have to say “snackable” to get a job in the industry. You can just call a social graphic or an infographic or a gif whatever it is.

Thought leader

Admittedly, this is the one content marketing buzzword that creeps me out. A “thought leader” is just an industry critic, talking head, or influencer, but something about that particular phrasing reminds me of Charles Manson.

I’m not alone either. In 2017, progressive outlet The New Republic published an op-ed calling thought leadership a hollow product of income inequality in the Western world. Thought leadership in a business setting, the article argued, is sort of a weaponization of TEDTalk-style presentations, and a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. “The rich have empowered a new kind of thinker—the ‘thought leader’—at the expense of the much-fretted-over ‘public intellectual,'” David Sessions wrote. “Whereas public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky or Martha Nussbaum are skeptical and analytical, thought leaders like Thomas Friedman and Sheryl Sandberg ‘develop their own singular lens to explain the world, and then proselytize that worldview to anyone within earshot.'”

So, it’s up to you whether thought leaders are harmless LinkedIn influencers or agents of late-stage capitalism. You should just know the term if you’re working in content marketing, because a lot of folks fancy themselves thought leaders.

UGC

User generated content (UGC) refers to any online media created by the audience members following a brand. Because marketers want to inspire relationships with their audiences, even more so than the average writer, they tend to put emphasis on UGC. If a brand asks followers to tweet their own stories about a product, or take a photo at a branded event and share with a hashtag, they’re requesting UGC.

Interestingly, MSM writers like to joke about avoiding UGC—see the whole “reply guy” controversy, the “don’t @ me” mindset, or the persistent “don’t read the comments” meme. It’s all done playfully, but the punchline is that a MSM writer doesn’t really want to be bothered with feedback from random readers. Social shares are appreciated, but a modern critic or reporter doesn’t like to think of themselves as embroiled in a constant conversation with the general public. Marketers, on the other hand, are ravenously hungry for that back-and-forth.

Now, this is just a list of thirteen marketing terms that require a bit of context for the average media employee. There are hundreds more buzzwords, disappearing from industry conversations as quickly as they arrive, but if you know this set, you can have a productive conversation with a content marketer. So go forth and network!

Interested in learning more about content marketing? Sign up for Contently’s Content Strategy Series, a free course for content strategists.

The post A Marketing to Media Translation Dictionary For Journalists Turned Content Marketers appeared first on Contently.

As a discipline, content strategy is new; it’s only become a focal point inside most enterprise orgs over the last few years. It’s also been made to seem incredibly complicated. Go to most analyst conferences, and you’re inundated with content strategy frameworks that feature 30 different boxes and arrows, and it all threatens to induce a mild panic attack. Most teams just give up and say, “Screw it. Let’s just post some stuff to our blog and social channels and see what happens.”

It’s the biggest problem most content marketing teams face. And it’s killing the industry.

When I was named Contently’s Head of Marketing a few months ago, there was a lot I wanted to tackle. Messaging! Lead scoring! Sales enablement! The freaking website! But more than anything, I wanted our team to remember that great marketing means putting a single goal above all else—helping your audience solve their biggest challenges.

That’s why I’m incredibly excited to announce the launch of Contently’s Content Strategy Series—an in-depth educational course to simplify content strategy and help our audience build an actionable framework for their content marketing programs.

https://player.vimeo.com/video/348187522?api=1

Our first module covers brand awareness and thought leadership. It features four video lessons, accompanied by exercises, worksheets, and templates to complete with your team each week.

The full course will cover the entire customer journey, with a new module released each month. I can’t take the credit; it’s the brainchild of our marketing team, particularly our two brilliant professors: Executive Content Strategist Deanna Cioppa, and Associate Editor Emily Gaudette.

Sign up here—we’ve made the course free to the entire content marketing community for a limited run. And stay tuned. When it comes to helping solve your biggest challenges, we’re just getting started.

-Joe Lazauskas, Head of Marketing, Contently

The post The Content Strategy Course You’ve Been Waiting For appeared first on Contently.

As content marketing, product placement, and art blur together, there’s a space opening up for brands to make something unexpected. Provided, of course, it doesn’t come off like “My Journey to Self-Love, Sponsored by the J.M. Smucker Company and its Major Subsidiaries.”

Apple’s shifting relationship with product placement is s a microcosm of what’s happening in the industry. For years, the tech company quietly made deals to seed images of iPhones and Macbooks in popular television, but Fox has been running a message at the end of TV episodes featuring Apple products that cites “promotional consideration sponsored by Apple.” Now that Apple is developing its own TV shows, its executives are reportedly “squeamish” over the ways products will appear in programming.

Now that brands are creating their own content, many don’t need to pay for placement. In 2015, a movie about a toy brand (supported by that toy brand) was nominated for an Academy Award. The Lego Movie did not end up winning Best Original Song, but Lonely Island performed “Everything is Awesome” alongside several dancing, life-size mini figs. There wasn’t a huge to-do about The Lego Movie being an extremely successful bout of content marketing, partially because consumers aren’t always aware of corporate interests, and partially because the movie was just so damn good.

https://vimeo.com/318074749

We’re seeing even greater strides toward brands making content that’s recognized by prestigious, mainstream institutions. This spring, a documentary about a gay choir produced by the home-share platform AirBnB premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. What’s more, an original off-Broadway musical from Skittles was rumored to be in line for a Tony nomination, though it was eventually snubbed.

So, when will the first piece of content from a brand win mainstream accolades from a prestigious institution?

Who decides which content is prestigious?

It’s conceivable for a brand to produce a popular piece of art, and it’s possible for a brand to create good quality art. Consumers decide if something is popular. As long as the content is entertaining, the source isn’t as important.

Unfortunately for brands, defining prestige is up to the artists, critics, and influencers in the creative industry—you know, the folks who cringe when they hear the word “brand.” However, as that old guard tries to protect an outdated definition of prestige—being resistant to streaming networks and web series, for example—modern audiences are showing more flexibility.

Most modern audiences understand that entertainment is a business. Look no furhter than the widespread discussion on social media that erupted when Disney bought Fox. Any big Star Wars or Marvel fan knows their favorite characters are as much data points on a Disney spreadsheet as they are beloved heroes. You could argue that concepts like The Avengers or the Jedi, proliferated as they are across TV, social media, merchandising, comics, amusement parks, and video games, are just brands.

But that still leaves the lingering question: When will the first piece of prestigious branded content hit the scene? Using film as an example, I’ve mocked up a Venn diagram to explain where popularity, quality, and prestige intersect. Notice there’s nothing in the center—my best guess was Black Panther, but I welcome suggestions. Singin’ in the Rain is another possibility.

If a movie is popular with the masses and of pretty good quality, it’s usually not considered high art. See action comedies, superhero movies, and Star Wars. Meanwhile, if a movie is of good quality and considered prestigious, it probably didn’t blow the doors off the box office or earn mainstream appeal. See quiet indies, experimental art films, and period dramas. Finally, if a movie is popular with the masses and the Academy without actually being good quality, it is what one might call “Oscar bait.” Examples include The King’s Speech, Bohemian Rhapsody, Green Book, Argo, The Blind Side, and the definitive installment, Crash.

A brand could aim to make Oscar or Emmy bait content, but they could also try and create an irreverent, cult-beloved piece of art—the Skittles musical was an earnest attempt at that.

Rethinking the ROI of prestige

Charming the critics and art snobs of the world with content marketing isn’t an impossible feat; it’s just unprecedented. For marketers, achieving prestige isn’t a necessary objective, given that everything in their industry needs to hinge on measurable ROI. There is no measurable ROI for prestige or cultural impact or artistic clout—that’s kind of the point.

But what if a content marketing team hit the zeitgeist with a great piece of art at exactly the right time? It would have to exist purely for brand awareness, and the art itself couldn’t have any messaging about the brand—all the promotion and brand association would have to be implied. And it’s alright to imagine a marketing team developing a great film or TV pilot or novel—so many popular pieces of media are the product of fifteen songwriters or eight screenwriters, a gang of producers, and a director.

We may very well see a truly prestigious piece of content marketing in the next decade, whether that means it’s accepted into a film festival or wins a highbrow creative award. If a brand has any shot at creating art (as opposed to just marketing), it’ll be an argument for the melding of those two ideas. We know that popular franchises, characters, and creative projects can turn into brands, so why not the other way around?

The post When Will Content Marketing Count as Prestige Art? appeared first on Contently.

Dry, academic, verbose, sales-y. A lot of branded content is a chore to read because it either was created by technical experts who aren’t professional writers, or it got put through a carwash of lawyers. (They never spring for the hot wax, but always scrub off any shine.)

But there’s good news: unlocking the essence of your brand isn’t as hard as you think. In our latest episode of Content Marketing Minute, I examine a simple exercise that’ll help you create a brand voice your audience will love. Check it out!

And in case you’re new to the series, here’s Episode 1, which focused on how to create content marketing goals that ladder up to real business results:

And episode 2, in which I unveil a guide for building relationships with a high-value audience:

The post Does Your Brand’s Content Sound Like It Was Put Through a Carwash of Lawyers? Here’s a Quick Fix (Video) appeared first on Contently.

“They weren’t just there to meet me,” Dunham explained on a panel during She Runs It’s “2017 What’s Hot in Media” conference. “They were there to connect with each other. We wanted to tap into that.”

Just about every new media company wants to start a blog that can serve as a central hub for content. The blog facilitates movement between the site and social channels, and is ripe for ad space. What’s striking about Lenny Letter is the way the newsletter format has been able to foster such deep and loyal readership.

Lenny Letter works as follows: Friday newsletters feature interviews. The Tuesday newsletter is filled with personal essays, short stories, poetry, and even branded content. The emails cover a range of political, cultural, and professional topics with the same brazen creativity that has come to define Girls.

From the beginning, the Lenny team has interviewed dozens of other women artists, controversial professionals, and politicians about their work and experience combatting gender bias in male-dominated industries. In Lenny Letter’s inaugural edition, Dunham interviewed Hillary Clinton about her civic involvement in the 1960s, swimming illegally in the Wellesley campus pool, and gutting salmon in Alaska. The team later released a video clip from the interview where Dunham and Clinton discuss campus assault.

The key was to develop what Dunham described as a “snark-free space,” where women could safely share their ideas and commenters “didn’t have the opportunity to become their worst selves.”

“A lot of women feel really powerless right now.”

“The ‘no comments’ feature was very much by design,” Konner said. “There is also something very intimate about [that medium].”

The small team of editors work with writers and designers from all fields, many of whom have never been published or were burned by social backlash. “These women are excited to share because they have been so profoundly bruised on the internet,” Dunham said.

Feminist publications like Jezebel or Bust are known for daily hot takes, but on the panel, Konner was quick to joke that Lenny is more of a “frigid take.” Lenny’s email format has allowed space for its editors to invest in longform stories and other opportunities for fiction and poetry. The average story takes three weeks to produce, and most pieces remain evergreen.

According to Lenny’s editors, high-quality email content has inspired an intensely engaged audience. As of last summer, there were over 500,000 subscribers, and the average open rate flirted with 70 percent. “Engagement is so deep that if you don’t open for awhile we’ll unsubscribe you,” Konner said. “Engagement is the top thing we care about.”

As it turns out, it’s also the thing that attracts advertising dollars.

Lenny doesn’t discriminate (against advertisers)

In October 2015, Dunham and Konner partnered with Hearst to launch a traditional website for Lenny that could complement the newsletter (and provide a permanent space for native and display ads). At the time of the deal, Hearst Global Digital Media President Troy Young told Ad Age its distribution agreement would showcase Lenny content on its other properties—Cosmopolitan, Elle, Marie Claire—treating Lenny (as an entity) like a syndicated columnist. “It’s almost like a modern day Dear Abby,” Young said at the time.

On the panel, Dunham referenced a short story written by Alice Sola Kim to show just how creative Lenny has gotten with branded content. Kim’s story was sponsored by General Electric, and Lenny’s editorial team worked with GE to bring some of its research into the final version.

“We got to do this with a brand in a really thoughtful and cohesive way,” Dunham said. “We get to work with super smart editors and are as proud of this as anything that we’ve run.”

Like with the GE short story, Lenny Letter has full editorial discretion over branded content, which means editors have relied on their own network of contributors. This comes back to the original safe-space approach, which the editors feel is critical in the current political climate.

“A lot of women feel really powerless right now,” Dunham said.

Through Lenny Letter’s email, its online site, and the April 2016 deal with Random House to start a publishing imprint, the publication remains a way for women with traditionally marginalized voices to hold a megaphone in the media.

The question will be if Lenny Letter can uphold its feminist values in the face of future corporate deals. What if, for example, a CPG company works with Lenny to craft a beautiful novella, but doesn’t offer women and men equal pay? What happens if an energy corporation sponsors elegant environmental poetry but has a restrictive maternity leave policy?

For now, Dunham and her team are happy to supply a place for women to speak freely. After joyously sipping ginger ale, Dunham released her signature giggle: “I just feel lucky we don’t have a very high snack bar and Ping-Pong threshold.”

The post How Lenny Letter Turned an Unorthodox Media Model Into a Safe Place for Women appeared first on Contently.

Anyone who watches television knows how frustrating that process can be. For networks and advertisers, the frustration is starting to impact them as well. That’s why Comedy Central has decided enough is enough—it wants to keep viewers hooked, even during its commercial breaks. Now, instead of a series of short spots, the network has started airing a custom two-and-half minute “linear commercial pod” once per month.

In other words, Comedy Central is experimenting with the televised version of branded content.

While these spots still interrupt the flow of a program, Comedy Central is hoping they’re more entertaining to watch than an ad for eczema cream. According to a 2014 study by the Harvard Business Review, “the percentage of ads considered fully viewed and getting high attention has decreased dramatically, from 97 percent in the early 1990s to less than 20 percent today.” These longform ads, which conform to Comedy Central’s idiosyncratic style and tell a contained story, are an attempt to turn those numbers around.

If viewers respond to the new approach, the change could be beneficial for Comedy Central’s business. Since brands go directly through the network instead of an agency, Comedy Central cuts out the middleman, which gives the network more control over its advertising, as well as a new revenue stream.

“If Comedy Central can produce ads that are genuinely funny and shareable, they’ll be able to get reach and engagement—the two primary KPIs of any ad campaign,” said Kevin Delie, the director of publisher development at TripleLift, a software platform for native programmatic ads. “For brands, this means the campaign gets attention, which is everything. For the network, they may be able to save TV revenue that is at risk.”

Getting handy

For the first few months of this experiment, Comedy Central is running a short branded series called Handy. No, this isn’t branded content for a new brand of lube (unfortunately). The series is actually about the trials and tribulations of a hand model, sponsored by a different company each episode. As you can imagine, this setup provides the perfect opportunity for humor.

For example, the first brand involved in Handy is Joe’s Crab Shack. Being Comedy Central, the network naturally makes fun of the company’s name. That’s why the spot is called… drum roll, please: “Erik Gets Crabs.”

Not every company that sponsors Handy creates products that lend themselves to sex jokes. Zales powers an episode about the difficulty of getting a closeup of the hands during a wedding proposal. The hope is that the series format will keep viewers wanting more, rather than overwhelmed by the flood of advertisers you normally see in a commercial break.

“Just a few short years ago, TV viewers didn’t have the option of pulling out their mobile device and engaging on social media and email,” Blake Davis, the founder and CEO of Long Drive Agency, said. “Commercials need to be more engaging, whether that means the network is producing their own commercials with the familiar faces of network stars, or creating more personalized content. Either way, if the content is quality, viewers will watch.”

Comedy Central is also teaming up with Viacom Velocity—the full-service integrated marketing and creative content team within Viacom, which owns the network—to develop more longform material. Like many media publishers, Comedy Central is using its full vertical creative stack to get the most bang for its buck.

“The fact that Viacom owns Comedy Central is significant because this would give credit to Viacom’s content studio,” Delie said, “which could enable them to get more deals across their portfolio.”

A new way to advertise?

Comedy Central isn’t the only player changing TV advertising. Many other programs, like Saturday Night Live, are innovating new forms as well.

Rather than using longform ads during the break like Comedy Central, SNL now inserts sponsored content directly into the show, which means NBC can afford to cut down the overall advertising load by 30 percent. The results, however, have looked more like traditional product placement than the more obviously sponsored skits of Comedy Central.

SNL partners with brands six times per year to create these sponsored skits. It’s mostly a win-win situation: Viewers get funny content and fewer ads while brands get an audience focused on the program rather than people scrolling through Instagram.

Comedy Central hasn’t committed to sponsored skits yet, but it still hopes that sponsored content takeovers will give viewers a more entertaining and relevant ad experience.

“I’d love to see a day—whether it be show premieres or tentpoles—where we’re creating content that’s really seamless and organic to the show and can take fans from break to break,” Chris Ficarra, the EVP of integrated marketing at Viacom Velocity, said in an interview with Adweek.

It remains to be seen if viewers will enjoy this form of advertising enough to stick around for the entire commercial. After all, consumers don’t need advertisers to provide entertainment for them—they can easily fast-forward through commercials on DVR or mute the sound until the show returns. Will entertaining content manage to finally grab consumer attention during the commercial break?

Only time will tell. For now, though, we’ll have to be satisfied making Handy jokes.

The post Why Comedy Central Is Replacing Commercials With Branded Content appeared first on Contently.

Thus far, that risk has paid off. It’s possible to argue that native advertising became popular, in part, because The New York Times showed that branded content could be just as good as, if not better than, traditional journalism. Cue the inevitable link to Melanie Deziel’s paid post for Netflix and Orange Is the New Black about the female prison system.

To stay one step ahead of other publishers, The New York Times launched T Brand Studio International late last year to scale its native ad efforts beyond the U.S. The expansion brought on more risk. What if the rest of the world wasn’t ready or didn’t care for native content?

To get a pulse on the global venture, I chatted over email with Nelly Gocheva, the editor of T Brand Studio International. Gocheva spoke about getting brands to be brave, the power of storytelling, and how European audiences feel about native advertising.

How do European audiences compare to American audiences when it comes to advertising?

Compared with the U.S., European audiences and advertisers are still relatively new to the concept of native/branded content. The market is smaller, too, purely geographically, which is reflected in many of the companies’ budgets.

In the U.S. every major media company has already launched a content studio. I think the trend in Europe is still to take off, which would respectively affect the audiences. As everywhere, consumers here are tired and annoyed with direct ads popping up in their faces. What great branded content can do is to provide insight and entertainment. It can help advertisers provide value to their audience, improve engagement, and increase brand loyalty.

Do you approach your native content differently than the American studio? If so, how?

Besides the novelty factor mentioned above, it’s more about the logistics. The New York team usually works on U.S.-based projects, while we create content for brands all over the world and have to adapt to a variety of cultures and ad-market needs and expectations.

But the quality of our work, the creative process, and the approach in general are pretty much the same. We all aim to deliver cool content to our readers that reflects the storytelling caliber of our newsroom. There are a lot of high expectations out there in terms of the quality of our work. We all follow the New York Times guidelines about native content and being transparent with our advertising. We clearly mark and label everything that’s paid for and keep church and state unmistakably separate.

How big is your team? What does your creative process look like?

We launched the international arm of T Brand Studio in September 2015 with four people in London and two in Paris. Currently, we have 11 people, with five more to join us soon. And we’re about to set up a mini Asian studio as a part of our global team to help with clients and projects in the Asia Pacific region.

“Consumers here are tired and annoyed with direct ads popping up in their faces.”

The team is made up of editors, designers, producers, and creative strategists. The creative process always starts with good in-depth brainstorm sessions and, in the end, our crew of audience development wizards makes sure the content reaches the right readership. Simply put, our three-step mantra is: find a compelling story, tell this story with expertise, and deliver the story to the target audience.

What were some of the challenges you encountered when bringing T Brand Studio to the rest of the world?

The challenge in catering to still relatively native-ad-shy international markets was to get international brands to be braver and invest in native content. As I mentioned, the European market is comparatively new to this area, and a lot of advertisers needed to get a better idea of their ROI and why branded content and native advertising are worth the spend, especially when compared with traditional display campaigns. Industry-wide, there are still a lot of potential clients out there that are yet to be convinced that branded content is the best use of their budgets. But we’re here to create branded storytelling that’s worth paying for, with benefits like stronger consumer engagement, and better credibility with consumers. Those are key factors in embracing the format.

How do you think T Brand Studio as a whole has evolved strategically since it launched in 2014?

I’d say the process is much more streamlined now. There are more clients and bigger clients. We currently have a staff of around 100 and have done over 200 campaigns globally. This has given us the reassurance not only that obviously we’re doing something right, but also we’ve gained firsthand direction and insights as to what works best and what not so well in terms of markets, industries, and audience engagement. Based on that knowledge, we keep on developing new products and exploring what branded content can do next.

Do you think native content is in danger of reaching a saturation point?

Definitely not anytime soon. There are markets that are more mature when it comes to native advertising and branded content. I recently read that native ad spend in Western Europe is expected to grow by 156 percent to €13 billion by 2020. So the budgets will be higher, there will be more opportunities, and there will certainly be more competition.

“The role of good content studios is not only to ensure high audience engagement and impact, but also to reach the right consumers.”

Great content is expensive and time-consuming, and the role of good content studios is not only to ensure high audience engagement and impact, but also to reach the right consumers. At T Brand, we’re already looking into VR, immersive events, augmented-reality experiences, and so on.

Can you describe an international T Brand Studio project that stands out to you as particularly memorable and/or effective?

Earlier this year, we worked on a big multimedia project for UBS, centered on the emotional side of artificial intelligence. We ended up interviewing top minds in the field who are making progress replicating human traits in AI, and traveled to Osaka to film a leading humanoid researcher. We also managed to incorporate a chatbot named Rose within the page. Topic-wise for me as an editor, this was a fascinating project, and we won a few industry awards for it. So it was the perfect combination of a happy client, overperforming digital content, and an extremely cool project to work on.

What other major publishers do you think do a good job creating native ads? And why do you think so?

I think Quartz and The Atlantic have done a few great projects. I particularly liked what The Atlantic did for Netflix’s “House of Cards” Season 3. The project was called The Ascent, and it was all about the U.S.’s first couples—a very informative, engaging, immersive execution.

On local UK turf, The Telegraph has been doing interesting stuff. I was on the judging panel of the annual UK News Awards this year and loved the campaign The Telegraph submitted for Nikon. It was a combination of digital and print, simply beautiful.

What’s a common misconception that brands have when pursuing native ad sponsorships?

It really depends on the clients. We have brands who come to us and trust our expertise and creative capabilities completely, and there are others who have a very clear and determined vision of what they want.

It’s the amount of direct branding that often challenges us. Companies need to be reminded that successful branded content relies on rich narratives and relatable stories, not direct, in-your-face product placement, which is what display ads are for.

It’s all about great storytelling. Get the story right and the rest will naturally follow. At the end of the day, it’s a collaborative process, and brands come to us because of our expertise. We guide and advise them based on our experience, skills, and benchmarks.

This interview was lightly edited and condensed.

The post How The New York Times Took Native Advertising Global appeared first on Contently.

There’s no question that I’m in the former camp. During my time at The New York Times’s T Brand Studio, I saw the impact that a creative mindset can have on the quality of branded content. Since then, I’ve spent the last several years advocating—in writing, during corporate workshops, and from countless conference stages—for marketers to adopt the storytelling skills that make journalists successful.

But the learnings can, and should, flow in the other direction as well. By looking at brands investing in ambitious stories, journalists can benefit from understanding and embracing the skills that marketers use to maximize their returns.

Know your differentiators

One of a marketer’s greatest fears is that the client, product, or service will be indistinguishable from the competition. Successful marketing depends on leaning into uniqueness, and marketers go to great lengths to define and explain their differentiators.

Journalists now have the same task. There’s so much content out there, much of it aggregated. Readers have a lot of options for every story. How can you—as a publication, a department, or an individual—make your content different? Why should someone come to your site instead of looking elsewhere?

As a reporter, you might differentiate yourself through a unique voice, perspective, or level of expertise. If you can break a story, that speed will help you stand out. If your organization has access to certain sources, that could be a hook as well.

A good example of this is Gawker Media’s properties, like Gizmodo or Jezebel. They tend to aggregate stories every other publication is aggregating, but with a unique voice and perspective you can’t find anywhere else. The result is big-time traffic. Same goes for a publication like BuzzFeed, whose friendly, idiosyncratic style is recognizable to just about anyone.

You may be covering the same story as everyone else, but you always need to tell it in your own way.

Nobody is “just a writer” anymore

Creating content is expensive and time-consuming. If brands invest in content, they generally try to maximize efficiency by repurposing their work. Without too much work, e-books can become blog posts, infographics, and webinars.

For journalists, preparing to augment your work challenges you to think about storytelling in new ways and, over time, increases your value to your company.

If you’re compiling statistics for a story, look for other ways to visualize that data, the way Mic did with a video compilation about presidential debate interruptions. If you’re interviewing someone, include the recorded audio as a standalone clip, or pair it with with photos to create a slideshow, which BBC News did for a recent story on an archeological discovery. If you’re on location to shoot photos, grab video as well, then shorten those clips for social posts.

As you’re planning future stories, take a few minutes to think like a marketer so you can offer your audience more ways to interact with and understand your content.

Pull back the curtain

According to a 2015 infographic from Bonfire Marketing, 91 percent of customers value honesty about a brand’s products and services. As content marketing has grown in popularity over the last few years, marketers have emphasized transparency as a way to earn consumers’ trust and showcase what their companies do.

While journalists spend a lot of effort advocating for transparency in stories about elected officials, public companies, and so on, they could still do a better job turning that focus to their own work and organizations. Being open about editorial processes and decisions should give readers a reason to trust your content. Instead of just relying on press releases, companies ranging from GE to Harry’s are reporting on their own corporate developments to give audiences an idea of what’s going on.

A few editorial operations have also started to experiment with these initiatives. The New York Times, for example, launched Times Premier, which shows how big stories and projects come together. Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE) does something similar with its “Behind The Story” series. Depending on your budget, you can even just use Facebook Live or other social channels to briefly take your readers behind the scenes.

If you make your readers feel like they’re part of the team, it could lead to deeper relationships and more engagement. So whether you’re a marketer, a reporter, or a hybrid, remember that it pays to be upfront.

The post What Journalists Can Learn From Marketers appeared first on Contently.

If you’re in the business of creating and publishing branded content, it’s critical that you know how to approach this monster of a topic in a smart and savvy way to benefit both your organization and your audience.

Here are three rules that will help content marketers during the election season.

1. You should probably cover the election

Branded content is not hard news. In most cases, it’s not meant to inform the public in a strictly journalistic fashion. Leaping on an event this huge without a clear strategy is how brands wind up pissing off the very people they’re trying to reach.

Still, content can and should bring your brand into the larger discussion, as long as it offers something of value to your audience. Ignoring the election entirely means missing out on one of the biggest subjects on the planet right now.

Finding success is all about having a smart angle. The best way to determine that angle is to have a firm grasp of your brand’s expertise. Your product may not focus on the electoral college or the intricacies of political polling, but there’s probably a place for you to claim a piece of the conversation.

For example, if you’re a B2B platform that helps small businesses streamline payroll and bookkeeping, your angle could be an infographic that outlines and compares each candidate’s platform for boosting small businesses, or a video interview with an economist who explains how policy decisions have affected small business in the past. Networked Insights, for instance, has been publishing election predictions based on its social analytics data.

Granted, there are exceptions to every rule, and not all brands would be wise to join in, even if they have something smart to say. For pharmaceutical companies or health-care service providers, it may not be appropriate to offer content that touches politics. It’s the job of a good content marketer to know when to step in and when to gracefully bow out.

2. Give your audience information that they need, and nothing else

Once you’ve nailed the best angle for your election content, then comes the work of choosing what information to include and how to present it. The key here is knowing your audience and their needs in as much detail as possible. If you’ve found an angle that works, it will shed light on a topic that is uniquely interesting to your audience, solves a problem for them, guides them in an important decision, or all of the above.

Take the small-business hypothetical. Many small-business owners are chronically busy and rarely have more than a few minutes to browse the web during the day. But they’re also acutely aware of how decisions made in Washington regarding issues like group health care and taxes can affect their day-to-day operations.

This is a savvy audience, and the marketer’s job is to provide them with new insight or knowledge that they may not have time to research or obtain on their own. A side-by-side comparison of the small-business tax plans of each candidate is useful even if constituents already know who they’re vote for, since it explains what legislation could potentially make it to Congress in the next few years.

Granted, keep in mind the usual rules of engagement when creating your content. An eight-minute video may be more of a commitment than your audience is willing to make, even if the subject matter is important. Even an infographic will need to be succinct and easily digestible.

3. Steer clear of pandering

You may think that you know your audience well enough to have a good handle on their political affiliations. But in reality, you have no idea. Voting is a private affair for a reason, and many people prefer to keep their political views quiet (despite how it may seem on social media).

Most brands aim to be inclusive of different beliefs, and the role of branded content is to be informative and engaging to a widespread audience. You may fall on one end of the political spectrum, and you may believe that your brand stands for its ideals as well, but that doesn’t mean your content should take sides, even if doing so could lead to increased traffic and earned media coverage.

Plenty of media outlets are ready to dole out praise and criticism, but it makes more sense for your brand to adopt an informative approach. Remember, in branded content, as in politics, good judgment is the key.

The post 3 Rules for Creating Branded Content About the Election appeared first on Contently.

The social giant partnered with ABC to live stream the debates via Facebook Live, putting the much-hyped feature on the national stage. Early reports suggested the debate drew a Super Bowl-sized audience. And Politico reported early Tuesday that 55 million people watched debate-related videos on the platform, building on Facebook’s success with the Democratic National Convention, when over 28 million people tuned into the live stream.

Outside of Snapchat, there is no more interesting corner of the social media universe than Facebook Live. Live has been touted as Mark Zuckerberg’s pet project, one he’s “obsessed” with. Some believe Live is the key to Facebook’s future—a resource that will help it compete against broadcast television. Others doubt that Live will ever take off. But no one can deny the potential of live video on a platform that has over 1.71 billion users.

What makes that potential even more incredible is that Facebook Live was almost shut down before the public ever got to see it.

The birth of Facebook Live

Facebook’s mythology is rooted in humble beginnings—a site started in the dorm room of a socially frustrated Harvard freshman. Similarly, Facebook Live began in relative obscurity.

After graduating from Columbia’s journalism school, Vadim Lavrusik joined Facebook in April 2011 as the journalism program manager. He launched Facebook’s partnership efforts with the journalism community and set to figure out how to make the platform more useful for reporters.

“I had been trying to convince people at Facebook to build live video four years ago when I was working with journalists,” Lavrusik said. “But the technology wasn’t quite there, and also I think people internally just didn’t believe it was going to be a consumer use case.”

But over the next few years, mobile technology accelerated. Data plans grew, and 4G LTE became widespread. In the fall of 2014, Lavrusik made his pitch again.

“We were able to convince our executives to give us one engineer,” he recalled. “I remember the fall of 2014, when we had recruited one engineer to work on it, [John Fremlin], and he had made some progress by December. We started to get more infrastructure engineers involved, and then Meerkat launched in March of 2015.” [note] Allison Swope, a product manager for Facebook Mentions, recruited Fremlin. [/note]

People inside Facebook were still skeptical of the live-streaming project. According to Lavrusik, the biggest concern was whether Facebook could build something that could compete with established platforms like Periscope and Meerkat.

“My argument was always, look, we have the scale,” he said.

Lavrusik’s argument resonated. Facebook transferred him from the media partnerships team and made him a product manager for Facebook Mentions, an app that helps verified celebrities engage with their fans. Lavrusik and Fremlin pivoted the seven-person engineering team to work on Facebook Live, with plans for it to operate as part of the Mentions app.

“They were all working on different projects, and I was everyone’s least favorite person because I was getting them to work on something they didn’t want to work on,” he said. “Once we started making more and more progress, actually everyone got really excited.”

On August 5, 2015, Facebook launched Live on a limited basis to celebrities with a verified page. Even though the product “still wasn’t in a great place,” by Lavrusik’s own admission, it got its big break. The day after the launch, comedian Ricky Gervais went live from his bathtub.

It was a bizarre yet charming video capturing Gervais’s trademark awkward humor. Over 800,000 people watched it.

Right after the launch, Lavrusik showed the initial response to Facebook CCO Sheryl Sandberg and her direct reports. “Everyone had their ‘aha’ moment in the room,” Lavrusik said. “They were like, ‘Wow, we get it.'”

It didn’t take long for celebrities like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Perez Hilton, and Carson Daly to broadcast using the app. Soon after, the team opened it up to all users, not just celebrities. And as they did, a treasure trove of data came back that would make Live even bigger.

“This thing is going to blow up”

Internally, Facebook monitors a metric that focuses on how friends share. The goal is to figure out how to get more users to post original content that’s native to Facebook, instead of just liking, commenting, or sharing a link from an external news outlet.

“Our U.S. release [of Facebook Live] basically moved that metric more than all of their other launches and efforts over the course of the previous year combined,” Lavrusik said. “At first I was like, ‘Oh, this can’t be accurate’, and then we had another analyst look at [the data] and it was real. I was like, ‘This thing is going to blow up.'”

Then Mark Zuckerberg saw the data.

Zuckerberg was already a fan of Live. But then he saw how much people were sharing live video compared to links and other video formats. He also noticed that, on average, people were watching live streams three times longer and commenting 10 times more than on regular video.

With Live, Facebook had an instantly valuable product. The videos were exclusive because users had to access the platform to create them. Since streams were live, the content was timely. And there was also an inherent interactivity to them, since people could comment as they watched.

“Mark was like, ‘Wait… why wouldn’t we make the video tab all about live video?'” Lavrusik recalled.

Live would give Facebook something it needed: a dedicated home for video. Zuckerberg planned to announce the new tab at Facebook’s F8 Summit the following April. Facebook’s product team liked the suggestion, telling Zuckerberg to expect a plan the following week.

Only days later, however, Zuckerberg emailed the team. He laid out product specs for the Facebook video tab and ordered the entire media engineering team to spend the next few months focusing on Live “in lockdown.”

Lavrusik’s team suddenly went from 12 people to more than 100. They worked through the end of March to make Facebook Live accessible to all users in time for the F8 Summit. Rumors spread that Zuckerberg was more “obsessed” with Facebook Live than he’d been with any Facebook feature.

Then, a couple of weeks before the announcement, Lavrusik left Facebook.

The future

Since Zuckerberg announced Live with much fanfare in early April, telling users that it’s “like having a TV camera in your pocket,” the media has been considering one question: How big will Facebook Live really be?

Outside of all things Snapchat, Facebook Live has been the biggest social media story this year. After more than 800,000 people watched BuzzFeed explode a watermelon with rubber bands, Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed’s founder, boasted that they had cracked the code, producing something online capable of topping the reach of live TV.

BuzzFeed’s watermelon video had 800k concurrent views, a number @peretti says “is the first time we’ve had a number comparable to live TV."

— Natalie Jarvey (@natjarv) May 2, 2016

At the Digital Content NewFronts conference in May, media companies eagerly assured advertisers that Facebook Live was a game-changing platform.

To capitalize on that momentum, Facebook also paid approximately 140 publishers and influencers a combined $50 million to start creating video for Live.

some more numbers on what Facebook is paying media companies/celebs/athletes to do FB Live https://t.co/Gqaujftimp pic.twitter.com/s2rxGuqi7F

— Steven Perlberg (@perlberg) June 22, 2016

But the content that might have shown the greatest potential for Live didn’t come from a media outlet or established publisher. Instead, it came from a 37-year-old mom from Texas named Candace Payne, or, as you probably know her, Chewbacca Mom.

On May 19, Payne live streamed herself in her car, unboxing a Chewbacca mask she’d just bought from Kohl’s. Her infectious laugh made it hard not to smile while watching, and Payne soon went viral as countless media outlets embedded the video on their sites. In total, it’s been viewed over 161 million times.

This type of success story highlights the potential of Facebook Live as a large-scale platform for both media organizations and professional content creators, as well as a place where amateurs and influencers can build an audience and go viral.

“The vision is basically, ‘How can we create the next generation of TV on mobile?'” Lavrusik said. “It’s going to start with this video tab because that will be a discovery surface for you to actually consume and discover interesting creators or content.”

Why, then, did Lavrusik leave Facebook while sitting atop the live-streaming world?

Facebook’s broadcast problem

“Most people think I’m crazy because they’re like, ‘Why would you leave your baby when your rocket ship is taking off?’ For me, I felt like that rocket ship was taking off, and I wanted to build another rocket ship.”

As The Wall Street Journal reported last month, Lavrusik left Facebook to launch a “one-to-few” live-streaming app called Alively. The startup was born, in part, out of user behavior trends Lavrusik noticed at Facebook.

When Facebook Live rolled out in the U.S., Lavrusik was surprised to see that teens used it at a much higher rate than anticipated. “We asked people who would try it once and wouldn’t use it again why they hadn’t used it again, and the number one answer that we got was along the lines of, ‘I want to be able share live, but I only want to share with a few people.'”

Facebook has known about this problem for a long time. The platform has become a place where you broadcast updates to everyone in your life, not share information only with close friends.

“I knew that we weren’t going to solve this problem when we made this strategic decision to basically punt on it and focus on making Facebook really good for broadcasting to lots of people—growing your audience, almost using Facebook Live to become famous, things like the Chewbacca lady,” Lavrusik said.

For now, Facebook has a legitimate challenge when it comes to the intimate sharing of live video with small groups of friends. That space seems destined to be dominated by Snapchat—which started dabbling with live streaming through its Live Stories feature this year—or by an upstart competitor like Alively.

The measurement problem

The biggest questions about Facebook Live come down to money.

Facebook clearly has a video measurement problem. Last Thursday, The Wall Street Journal revealed that Facebook had inflated the average viewing time for its video ads for more than two years, infuriating advertisers and damaging trust. When calculating the average time users spent watching videos, Facebook excluded sessions of less than three seconds. Facebook told Publicis Media it likely overestimated viewing time by 60 to 80 percent.

Even if the data was accurate, it would still be difficult to assess the value of live video for advertisers. BuzzFeed and Peretti, for instance, argued that the 800,000 concurrent viewers on their watermelon clip represented a turning point for online video, which could now compete with primetime TV. CNN, for instance, averages 723,000 primetime viewers.

The problem, as Kevin Draper explained on Gawker, is that Nielsen calculates television viewership on a per-minute basis. In other words, it’s an average of how many people are watching across each minute of the show. Draper writes:

Since it was broadcast live, the watermelon explosion has been watched by 10.7 million people, per Facebook’s count. If those people were as engaged as online World Cup viewers—and I’d venture that, on average, they were less engaged than people watching the most popular sporting event on the planet—those 10.7 million digital views would translate into an average-minute TV audience of 28,563 persons. If Peretti brought that number to advertisers at the NewsFronts as evidence of wild success, they would’ve laughed in his face.

Nonetheless, Facebook is forging ahead with a pricing model resembling television advertising’s. In August, Facebook rolled out the ability for publishers to insert 15-second mid-roll ads that would essentially act as commercial breaks for live streams. The feature is still in the testing phase, and Facebook doesn’t know if it’ll become permanent.

“That type of format doesn’t work as well for something like Facebook Live as it does for TV, because TV is completely a broadcast model where the audience can’t interact with the broadcaster,” Lavrusik said. “They can’t leave feedback.”

Lavrusik suggested that advertisers and Facebook could find a different solution, such as allowing advertisers to insert polls and other interactive content into mid-roll ads. However, the mid-roll format may not work as well for influencers and amateur video content creators, since they may not have the structure in place to sell and program 15-second spots. Facebook seems more intent on convincing those folks to use Facebook Live over other platforms like YouTube or YouNow, rather than setting up advertising infrastructure.

To tackle this problem, Facebook might adopt a tip-jar format, which has worked thus far on YouNow. Another possible avenue, Lavrusik said, calls for users to pay to have their comments and other interactions featured more prominently in the feed. He also said that branded content was a logical solution.

“What works for people who have huge audiences is different for these kind of digital influencers who might have smaller audiences,” Lavrusik said. “You need something that incentivizes up-and-comers to actually create content and grow their audience using this format. Then you also need something that works with existing models for big media companies and influencers with huge audiences.”

To virtual reality and beyond

As of today, Facebook’s hyped video tab has still only been released to a small percentage of iOS and Android users. Since Facebook has not released usage data for Facebook Live, it’s unclear how successful video has been on the platform. However, Lavrusik claims that before he left, Facebook had already eclipsed live-streaming competitors like Periscope, YouNow, and Twitch even before it rolled out Facebook Live.

“Facebook will win the one-to-many fight because of that scale.”

Despite the reach of its platform, Facebook’s biggest challenge for the future will be differentiating itself from those competitors, which is where virtual reality could come into play. (Facebook owns Oculus, which makes VR technology.)

“We started working pretty closely with our 360 team on Live 360, and I think that there’s going to be a big investment there,” Lavrusik said. “It’s going to take time for that to come to fruition. But you think about Facebook’s advantage, it’s the ability to move faster than some of the traditional media companies. They could figure out and jump into the live VR space before a lot of these traditional folks figure it out.”

Today, you might only opt to watch a presidential debate on Facebook Live out of necessity. But if Facebook Live were to become the dominant platform for live VR, that could be a game-changer. With 1.71 billion active users and growing, the platform’s potential is too big to bet against.

“Facebook will win the one-to-many fight because of that scale,” Lavrusik said. “Because you have so many people on your platform, you can deliver them the best audience and the most relevant audience.”

This piece has been updated to acknowledge John Fremlin, the engineer responsible for Facebook Live. 

The post The Untold Story of Facebook Live appeared first on Contently.

Elizabeth Spiers, a veteran of the publishing world and the founding editor of Gawker, announced a new venture on July 1 that will work inside—and report on—this increasingly muddled boundary between the real and the virtual. Named The Insurrection, her firm will conduct research for clients and is developing gaze-tracking analytics tools for the virtual reality (VR) industry. Unsurprisingly, given Spiers’s background, The Insurrection will also publish a digital magazine about virtual reality: There Is Only R.

The publication’s name is a nod to Musk’s theory that we are already living a virtual reality: Since we can’t distinguish the virtual from the real, there is “only R,” or reality.

Part of Medium’s beta platform for publishers, There Is Only R is meant to cover the growing VR community for both industry insiders and the merely curious. Pieces range from light-hearted listicles (“A List of Emerging VR Sub-Genres“) to in-depth opinion columns (“How Virtual Reality Will Democratize Learning“).

Besides launching Gawker under Nick Denton in 2002, Spiers was also the founder of Breaking Media, a digital media company that included the titles Dealbreaker, a Wall Street tabloid; Above the Law, a legal tabloid; and Fashionista, a fashion tabloid. Most recently, she worked closely with mattress startup Casper on the brand’s digital publication, Van Winkle’s. There Is Only R is branded content, too, although for Spiers’s own company.

We recently caught up with Spiers at her new offices in New York to talk about her new publication, what makes good branded content, and when she thinks we’ll see widespread adoption of VR.

What was the motivation behind There Is Only R?

Before we started The Insurrection, I worked mostly in traditional and digital media. I worked recently in branded content for Van Winkle’s for Casper.

What was the last display ad campaign you loved? Nobody can answer that question, because [an answer] just doesn’t exist.

You can do branded content well, but most people don’t. They don’t have very high standards for it. If you do it well, it can be an incredibly cost-effective marketing tool—way more so than display ads and traditional ads. There was no way we weren’t going to do a content thing for our business.

What was behind the decision to use Medium as your publishing platform? What are the benefits?

I have worked on and off with Medium. I wrote a feature for Matter [a digital magazine] about utilizing Medium for publishers. I’m interested in any medium that would make publishing easier.

I’m not in the publishing business anymore per se, but I’m still interested in what new models there are and how to monetize. From a user perspective, the platform has great design. It’s great for longform. It’s very clean.

What makes branded content work? When does it work well, and when does it not?

The biggest thing brands do is try to compare a branded content effort to the quality of a display ad campaign. They’re just apples and oranges.

What was the last display ad campaign you loved? Nobody can answer that question, because [an answer] just doesn’t exist. It’s a low bar. Display ads are a minute of impression, and the best-case scenario is like, “Oh, that’s funny.” By the nature of the way they’re constructed, they’re not really going to engage anybody.

We are not competing with Bloomberg. We are competing with Spider Man Reviews Crayons.

So what does branded content have to compete with? It has to compete with anything that you can read, watch, or pay attention to during that same time period. If it’s not compelling enough, people just aren’t going to pay attention.

When I was at Breaking Media, I was editing Dealbreaker, which was supposed to be a hybrid trade publication and gossip site for Wall Street people. We would get a lot of tips from junior analysts working at banks. One day we got the same tip from four or five analysts: Spider Man Reviews Crayons.

At the edit meeting, I showed my staff that we are not competing with Bloomberg. We are competing with Spider Man Reviews Crayons. If five bankers are sending me this as a tip, we have to make something at least as compelling as this. It has to be entertaining and something that people would share with their friends.

You have written about Casper and their publication Van Winkle’s as an example of great branded content. What did they get right?

It wasn’t meant to directly sell mattresses, but to establish authority in the area of sleep. If that’s what you want to do, you have to produce content that feels academically credible, that people actually want to read.

There are really exciting things happening in VR that are far beyond the low-end stuff like 360-degree video or Pokémon Go.

One of the writers we hired was predominantly a science writer with a feel for pop culture. If they get cited on science sites, that’s a win, [and] if readers are sharing content because it’s interesting, then that’s great as well.

Let’s talk about VR. Where do you see it headed, and when will we see mass consumer adoption?

Mass adoption will happen faster than you think. There are really exciting things happening in VR that are far beyond the low-end stuff like 360-degree video or Pokémon Go. Those are gateways into more complex AR [augmented reality] and VR. Everybody has lost their damn minds over Pokémon Go, and we will see a whole host of AR games in the next few months.

You just don’t see people conjuring these dystopian fantasies that VR will be the end of civilization.

Right now, there’s a wait for wider hardware adoption. In the VR community, people tend to gravitate to Oculus or [HTC] Vive. But there’s this funny competition thing right now to get people used to the technology. For example, if you buy a Samsung Galaxy phone, [some] get a VR headset for free. The catch is that you have to really do the experience to understand the appeal.

Google did a great video for [the HTC Vive game] Tilt Brush. You get a sense from the video what the experience is kind of like. It’s not as cool obviously as being in it, but it’s enough to intrigue people. There are things like asymmetric gaming that will be huge for VR. When people look at that market, they think that, basically, if you have a full Vive setup and you’re playing and other people are watching you, that will make others go out and buy it too.

China is moving very fast in VR, as well. There are a lot of mid-market head-mounted displays coming out of China. I also think that market doesn’t have the same trepidation as the American market does about what the cultural implications of VR are. You just don’t see people conjuring these dystopian fantasies that VR will be the end of civilization.

What happened to Google Glass? Were they ahead of the game?

Google Glass is interesting. It’s not like it shut down. I think they’re finding business clients now. Somebody told me a while back that there are first responders buying Google Glass in California so that they can transmit what’s happening directly to the EMT and the doctors could know what was happening before patients came in.

It strikes me as a good, reasonable choice. But historically that’s what Microsoft’s market strategy has been: finding an enterprise use for it and figuring out consumer stuff later.

Do you think adoption is just a case of the mass consumer becoming comfortable with the technology? From my understanding, the underlying technology has existed for decades.

Virtual Boy was a VR headset that Nintendo put out in the mid-1990s. It was an abysmal failure, mostly because people got nauseated in like five seconds—the computing power just wasn’t there. It had this really slow frame-speed, which is probably the number one reason people get nauseated.

The people who did Virtual Boy, I don’t think they were off-point about what the possibilities were and what you could do with it. It was just impossible to execute at the time because the technology just wasn’t there. And now it pretty much is, and it’s really going to be there in two or three years.

You see a lot of Hollywood studios pouring money into VR, but there does seem to be some hesitation on the part of conventional content creators to make VR products. I think they’re sitting around waiting for it to get wider adoption.

So when do you think we will see mass consumer adoption?

It depends on what exactly you’re talking about. I think for immersive VR, that’ll be standard gaming technology in probably three years.

In terms of people using it for non-gaming applications, you’ll see it here and there. There are health care companies right now using VR for pain management. I think when people get used to the idea that it’s not scary gamer tech, you’ll see wider adoption.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

The post Elizabeth Spiers Reveals Why You’re Thinking About VR and Branded Content All Wrong appeared first on Contently.

Today, Chip Wilson’s yoga and fitness apparel company racks up over two billion dollars in annual revenue, largely because it’s come to embody a lifestyle. It’s the stuff of active soccer moms, meditation devotees, and women who only consume organic food and raw juices. You don’t just wear Lululemon. You are Lululemon.

The broad scope of lifestyle brands like Lululemon can present a huge content opportunity. But it can also be difficult to zero in on a mission when your brand appeals to so many different people. Marketers are left answering questions like: Who, specifically, is the target audience? What lifestyle content topics are relevant? And is anything truly off brand?

What is a lifestyle brand?

This desire to embody a brand—or, rather, to find a brand that embodies you—is the mentality that lifestyle companies hope to impart on their customers. “Lifestyle” is a broad category, describing everything from travel to DIY, parenting to single living, cooking to fashion, beauty to sportswear. Lululemon, for example, creates an active, wellness-oriented culture through athletic gear and yoga mats. Lifestyle brands like Lululemon sell their culture, not just their product.

Creating a culture-based mission

Defining a mission statement is the first stop on the path to lifestyle brand status. To get there, brands have to know their customers very well. While B2B companies need to answer the question “What service does my product provide?” lifestyle companies need to ask “What kind of unique culture will my brand embody?”

To do this, companies first need to delve deep into their customers’ psyches. What food do they eat? How do they feel about current events? What are their passions? How do they spend their free time, even when they’re not interacting with the product? In short, who are they, and what kind of person do they want to be? This isn’t news, obviously. Market research and surveys are staples of brand development. However, this knowledge of customer behavior can be used differently by a lifestyle brand: Instead of just informing product development or targeted advertising, it also informs the specific culture that the brand creates through digital and other marketing—and the mission statement that drives it.

The components of a powerful mission statement

The mission statement that guided Lululemon’s rise to success provides a strong template for brands developing their own mission. It’s a statement that guides the brand without feeling unnecessarily restrictive.

A mission statement summarizes crucial information that determines a company’s path forward, so it’s important to get it right. The statement should answer these questions:

• What does the company do or provide?
• Who is the customer?
• How does the brand address the customer’s needs?

Lululemon’s original mission statement reads: “Creating components for people to live longer, healthier, fun lives.” There are a few significant factors at play here.

For one thing, notice that Lululemon’s mission is to “create components,” not “sell gear.” There’s a big difference. “Components” might include activewear, water bottles, and yoga mats, but it might also include healthy living tips, running clubs, yoga classes, green juice recipes, detox programs, and books about meditation.

The fact that Lululemon doesn’t limit its mission to products shows that the company recognizes all the other aspects of being a lifestyle brand. The fact that it creates culture is inherent in its mission.

Think about how the company answers the question “Who is the customer?” As a fitness brand, Lululemon knows that its customers are active, wellness-oriented and health-conscious. From there, it can infer other things about them. They are probably interested in diet and nutrition, travel, self-reflection, community, holistic medicine, and events pertaining to those topics. They are generally well-educated and interested in bonus lifestyle topics such as travel and art. This informs the “components” that the company will create in order to build culture around its products.

And finally, per our mission statement guidelines, how does Lululemon address its customers needs? The answer is through the “components” that help customers “live longer, healthier, fun lives.” These components include yoga gear, classes (so customers can get involved and meet others in the community), ambassadors (so they can learn about Lululemon from someone like themselves), healthy living advice, holistic nutrition tips, wellness ideas, travel, inspirational stories, and news pertaining to active living.

Creating culture through content

Never before has there been such an inclusive and far-reaching opportunity to build a brand’s culture. Social media, email messaging, and video and blog content all support a brand’s culture. As a result, content is one of the most important aspects of a lifestyle brand’s marketing plan. Lululemon’s blog and social media topics include wellness tips, personal accounts by athletes and prominent yogis, information on trending health topics, interesting stories about art and culture, and informational how-tos about a conscious, active lifestyle.

All of these factors informed the Lululemon Manifesto, a collection of branded phrases that convey customers’ lifestyle and values. The manifesto is deeply informed by market research. It contains inspiring, uplifting messaging that appeals to Lululemon’s active, success-driven, health-oriented customers. “Do one thing a day that scares you.” “Friends are more important than money.” “Sweat once a day to regenerate your skin.” “This is not your practice life. This is all there is.”

Drawing the line

With so much room for variety, marketers are often left wondering what is truly off brand. The most direct way to tell is to ask whether or not it violates the company’s mission statement. In this way, the mission statement serves as a hard-and-fast line for deciding what will bring the brand value and what will not.

However, given the broad scope of the lifestyle space, some issues will need to be given close examination on a case-by-case basis. Let’s take the example of healthy recipes within Lululemon’s brand messaging.

Many Lululemon customers are vegetarian, a long-held tradition within the yoga community. However, other customers may go a totally different route with their diets. The recent trend of Paleo eating is popular among some fitness gurus, as are gluten-free and low-carb eating. How, then, should Lululemon handle health and wellness posts pertaining to dietary choices? Should it create a positioning statement detailing where the brand stands on matters of diet?

Probably not. Since it would risk alienating customers if it took a position, the best way to handle the issue is to not take one at all. While many wellness brands offer gluten-free and meat-free dietary advice, Lululemon has largely opted out of this content topic. The brand hasn’t published a food-related post since February 2015, when it included an interview with a popular vegetarian food blogger. Instead of including information about vegetarianism specifically, the blogger’s advice was broader. In other words, while Lululemon acknowledges that eating healthy is important to its customer, it doesn’t tell her how to do it.

Let’s compare this approach to that of Crossfit, the fitness and muscle-building program that’s inspired thousands to take up a Paleo-based eating program. The company’s mission clearly states, “Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar.” In its first two words, the statement alienates vegans and vegetarians, discouraging them from partaking in Crossfit’s fitness culture. As a result, the niche has been filled not by Crossfit itself, but by independent bloggers and bodybuilders who can capitalize on the need for veg-friendly culture within the Crossfit community. It falls to the brand itself to determine what cultural choices would be in direct violation of company values, and which are simply limiting its reach to a larger potential audience.

Living the life

Lifestyle companies have a unique opportunity to turn their own customers into walking advertisements for their brand. Through these customers, companies show people what their lives could look like if they took up the culture of the brand. Whether you like Lululemon or not, there’s no question of its relevance within the fitness world. Lululemon’s customers’ clearly identify with the company. In many ways, they structure their lifestyle around the products and digital content put forth by the brand.

Lululemon customers aren’t just consumers, they’re devotees. They themselves are the company’s best advertising tool, and that’s because they embody its culture, rather than simply wearing its product.

The post Why Brands Need a Mission to Create Great Lifestyle Content appeared first on Contently.

Jokes aside, I’ve been lucky enough to experience the upside of the native ad industry’s explosive growth. Shortly after graduating from journalism school, I started as a strategist at HuffPost Partner Studio. A year later, I became the first editor of branded content at The New York Times, where I created some of the industry’s leading work with the talented T Brand Studio team. Then I went on to lead pre-sale ideation for Time Inc.’s more than 35 U.S. magazines as the director of creative strategy. Now, less than five years after graduating, I run my own consulting practice and get to travel the world educating content teams.

I’ve traveled a great distance in a short time and think I’m in an incredible position, but as anyone who has made the switch from editorial reporting to branded content creation can tell you, it’s not always the smoothest ride.

You come to the business world somewhat reluctantly, lured by a salary that rarely exists in the editorial world. Your skills translate to the position, which requires solid writing chops, the ability to generate story ideas, a basic grasp of social media, and a willingness to work on a team. You just need to brush up on the marketing and advertising specifics to keep pace, and they tell you that learning can happen on the job.

Your former editorial colleagues don’t understand your new role, at first. (My Native American heritage added a bonus layer of confusion to my already vague role as a “native ad product manager.”) You respond to retorts about “selling out” by repeatedly explaining you’re going to tell good stories. You haven’t gone to the dark side, just the greener side. You’re going to do good work and get paid for it… right?

The first few weeks are a blur of buzzwords and acronyms—brand lift, line items, CTR, ROI, KPI. You write them in the margins of your notebook to look up later when none of your new tie-clad colleagues are around. You buy a new blazer to blend in and start reading the trade press to try to keep pace with water-cooler conversations.

The first time someone asks about the job, you tell them it’s going well. Your sales colleagues are impressed by the speed at which you come up with story ideas. The marketing team loves the cleanliness of your copy when you turn in concept briefs. Clients seem to be impressed by the publications at which you’ve worked. Your team is nice. The cafeteria is pretty good. (Seriously, guys, the New York Times cafeteria is great.)

But it doesn’t take long before you realize that your journalistic instincts—the same ones that made you a smart fit for the role—also make you stick out. You have to be the one who points that a source is unreliable or explain that there isn’t enough public data to support that infographic. “The format feels forced.” “Why is this interesting to our readers?” “What’s timely about this?” But you’re not in the newsroom anymore, and these questions aren’t always answered.

The confidence in your decision begins to unravel. Maybe you hear someone fudge the truth about a deadline to a client as you sit by silently. Or your boss tells you to stop pushing that big idea of yours and just write what the client wants. This is advertising, they tell you, and the client is king.

You start to wonder if you’ve made a mistake. Can you work with people who care more about the bottom line than the quality of the story? Can you shift your priorities to care more about the deal size? Do you even want to? You shudder, wondering if perhaps you’ve sold out. Maybe you’re not cut out for this.

This is where the road splits. I call it the three-month slump, and it’s a critical moment in the journey for most new converts to branded content. Sometimes you contemplate just walking out—motivated by equal parts frustration and self-doubt—after being pushed too far from your journalistic ethics.

But sometimes, if you’re lucky, you have a breakthrough.

You get that client—the one that trusts your storytelling instincts and lets you create something with integrity that even your former colleagues have to admit is pretty impressive. For me, it was the chance to work with Netflix on the “Women Inmates” article that ultimately won T Brand Studio the Online Marketing Media & Advertising (OMMA) Award for best native advertising execution in 2014.

But it doesn’t have to be an award-winning piece of content that changes your mindset. Sometimes the push comes from something smaller. A fellow journalist joins your team, and you commiserate over coffee, vowing to back each other up. Maybe you hear a episode of a podcast like This Old Marketing or Content Convergence with some magical insight that lights your fire again.

Perhaps one day, when you hear yourself make a statement laced with acronyms and buzzwords, instead of wondering who you’ve become, you feel a pang of pride in having learned to fluently speak sales. You’ve figured out how to make this role work without feeling like you’ve sold your soul.

I’ve seen several journalists fall victim to the first fate, ultimately deciding that this version of storytelling tempered with brand objectives and bottom lines just isn’t for them.

But I’ve heard from newer converts that the transition has become easier in recent years. Editorial colleagues are more likely to understand your new role and less likely to demonize you for taking it. Advertisers are slowly shifting toward more journalistic stories that avoid overt promotion.

Thanks to a combination of great colleagues and a few sophisticated clients at a critical time, I muscled through the cognitive dissonance between what my journalism education prepared me for and the reality of working in branded content.

Like so many of my former colleagues, I ultimately came to call this corner of the industry home. You’re welcome any time; it’s not a long journey to get here, just a bit of a bumpy ride.

The post How to Overcome the ‘Three-Month Slump’ of Branded Content appeared first on Contently.

The New York Times ultimately stopped the drought, winning a Grand Prix for its virtual reality film “The Displaced,” which tells the story of the global refugee crisis. And to make sure those droughts don’t happen again in the future, the world’s biggest advertising festival has taken a more nuanced approach to marketing, starting with replacing its “advertising” tag five years ago with more categories.

In 2016, Cannes debuted Lions Entertainment, a two-day event that aims to explore the ways talent and storytelling can elevate branded content. There are also dozens of new awards, borne out of the Branded Content and Entertainment Lions (or lack thereof).

For festival CEO Phil Thomas, Lions Entertainment has been a wake-up call. He believes that the quality of the content marketing entries must improve.

“Clearly there is an issue about the quality of the work,” he told Forbes. “What the jury was saying was, ‘Listen, it is branded, we can see it’s branded, it’s content, but the entertainment side of it is not stacking up in the way in should.’ It’s quite a big statement for juries to do that, so when it happened for the second time, it became obvious that the industry needed to focus on this more.”

The branded content entries grew by 32 percent this year, to 1,843, while the new Entertainment Lions for Music attracted 637 entries. Overall, award submissions were up by 7 percent year over year.

Another issue has been the rise of the “fringe” outside the festival. Over the past years the event has grown well beyond the Palais building to incorporate ad tech and media companies in the port area of Cannes and “the strip,” otherwise known as La Croisette.

For Havas Media Group’s global CEO, it’s time for Cannes Lions to do a better job integrating these disparate parts. In an interview with The Drum, he said, “We should always celebrate great work, but it almost feels to me that there is a bigger conversation happening outside the Palais half the time.”

Outside of the Paiais last week, Yahoo announced plans to invest more resources in branded content creation through a studio called Storytellers. Brands including JetBlue, Dasani, and Farmers Insurance have already signed up, according to the company.

The need for better advertising is why organizations such as the Branded Content Marketing Association have partnered with Cannes to recognize work that pushes past the traditional ad campaign and bring brands, agencies, and content creators together.

Marketers can still have their fun aboard yachts, but from now on, they’re going to have to truly get serious about quality content if they want to thrive in the lion’s den.

The post Why Cannes Wants to Fuel Better Branded Content appeared first on Contently.

But later that week, something strange happened. The second client asked for the same writer to be removed from the company account. A contact said, “She’s just not getting what we’re trying to do.”

For obvious reasons, the feedback confused the account manager. How can the same freelancer have a knack for nailing one brand’s voice while consistently missing the mark for another? The answer, at least to me, is fairly simple: The first client was willing to give honest feedback to the writer; the second client expected her to turn in near-perfect drafts on the first try.

This example may sound like a convenient hypothetical, but it’s true. I would know. I was the account representative who worked with these companies—and several others—that frequently requested new writers. I saw marketing departments that were hesitant to relay candid feedback, opting instead to sweep away minor problems and solicit the services of new writers.

From a short-term perspective, that approach can seem appealing. More fish in the sea, right? Our freelance network consists of 60,000 people, so our clients have plenty of talented contributors to choose from. If one freelancer doesn’t quite get it on the first assignment, the next person can perfectly capture the voice right away.

Yet more often that not, marketing departments are turning their backs on promising creative talent. Even worse, marketers are creating more work for themselves. By repeatedly bringing on new freelancers, they’re going through the same introductions, the same onboarding process, and the same legwork that it takes to repair a problematic piece of content. When you’re not giving clear and honest feedback to your freelancers, you’re going to have a hard time scaling your content program.

Why does this happen? For starters, brands—especially those new to content marketing—may not be familiar with the editorial process. As any editor will tell you, it’s very much a process. It’s normal for articles from your favorite publications to go through five, six, seven rounds of revisions before going live. But to a first-time publisher, that can seem daunting and abnormal, which leads them to make knee-jerk reactions when a first draft needs work.

Perhaps more importantly, there could also be a lack of trust when brands start collaborating with freelancers. What happens inside company walls is sacred, which can lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy of “No one really understands what we do.” While there’s definitely some validity to that mindset—at least initially—it’s also very limiting. Brands need to help make their freelance content creators a reliable part of their team, not just a gun for hire.

“Brands aren’t always able to successfully articulate what exactly they want,” said Danny Borderick, a managing editor who has worked on several Contently accounts. “Look for tangible things that can be addressed, and try to avoid stringing together subjective adjectives.”

This goes well beyond just revising stories. Soliciting story pitches from your writers is one of the most effective ways to build your content pipeline. If a writer pitches a story that is off the mark and you simply move on, you could be missing an opportunity to give feedback that will lead to great pitches in the future.

“As long as you’re asking the right questions, you can get great stories out of otherwise unimpressive pitches,” Broderick explained. “I love it when a client says, ‘Make it look like this,’ and shows me a perfect example of what they’re trying to create. Many writers and designers are able to imitate rather easily, and this is not a bad thing. It means you can build a whole team of contributors who are prepared to consistently deliver what you’re looking for.”

Of course, giving direct feedback can be difficult, and in some cases, candor and criticism can bruise egos. But in most relationships, openness is beneficial in the long run. “It’s in the freelancer’s best interest to please you so they can get more work in the future,” Broderick said, “so they’re much more willing to adapt than you may think.”

In the rare cases a contributor refuses to talk through feedback, there’s a legitimate reason to pursue new talent. But if you’re always waiting for a freelancer to strike lighting on the first try, you’re just going to be sorely disappointed. Be honest, give feedback, and trust that your freelancers have the experience to learn and adapt—after all, these are professional creatives.

To close the loop on the story of our two clients, we encouraged the dissatisfied company to leave comments on pitches and stories that directly addressed concerns. As expected, the freelancer took the notes in stride and tweaked her approach. They gradually got in sync over the next few months as work ramped up. By the time the client wanted to commission a series of longform stories to close out the year, the freelance writer whom they wanted off the account was now their first choice.

Brian Maehl is the talent development manager at Contently.

The post The Biggest Mistake Marketers Make When Working With Freelance Writers appeared first on Contently.

“[We’re going to do] linear TV, digital TV, scripted, non-scripted, social, podcasts, video, branded content… You name it!” he exclaimed, running through the requisite checklist of media-startup buzzwords. It wasn’t a big mention, but it was still significant, indicating that Bill Simmons Media Group, which encompasses both Simmons’ podcast network and The Ringer, plans to follow the pack and enter the jargon-infested world of native advertising.

That means that Simmons and Eric Weinberger, president of Bill Simmons Media Group, get to answer a fun question: For a brand-new media company, what’s the best way to approach branded content?

A few years ago, the answer to that question was a relative mystery, but we have a lot more information to work with today. After all, most media companies have embraced branded content or native advertising in hopes of actually making money. The New York Times has created dozens of in-depth interactive pieces on behalf of brands, earning industry praise and the right to charge six figures for campaigns. BuzzFeed has produced native ads since its launch and is very, very good at integrating brands into cat videos. The Atlantic graduated from publishing Scientology propaganda to making Qualcomm go viral. Sure, a lot of native ads still look like they belong on ClickHole, but there’s now a significant amount of data out there on what works and what doesn’t.

As a result, there’s a lot for Simmons to think about as he sets up The Ringer’s branded content operation. Here are the five most important considerations:

1. Don’t be beholden to any existing native ad model

Even though a few publishers have found success with native ads, The Ringer shouldn’t just try to copy an existing the model. The industry is too young. The biggest advantage Simmons and his crew have is the ability to build the perfect staff and product from scratch.

Simmons’s growing media empire also presents a lot of lucrative opportunities that other publishers don’t have. In addition to The Ringer, Simmons has the Bill Simmons Podcast Network[note]Or BSPN, a great, subtle trolling of his former employer.[/note] and will have his own show on HBO later this year. He plans to build one “creative hub” for all of these efforts. It would make sense for The Ringer’s branded content operation to work across all of them.

2. Sell programs across multiple channels and platforms

Native advertising has mostly meant sponsored blog posts and infographics, but that standard is changing quickly. Increasingly, smart publishers sell brands on their ability to make native ads go viral on third-party platforms like Facebook, Medium, and YouTube. Between Simmons’ owned media properties and all of the third-party platforms out there, The Ringer has the potential to truly “publish everywhere” on behalf of brands, telling stories across shortform video, podcast segments, and longform articles that tie together narratives or themes.

It seems like The Ringer is already on that train of thought. Business Insider reported last night that Simmons plans to partner with Medium on the new site. Still, the site should look for ways to extend the partnership to its branded content efforts at some point, and not just limit it to editorial.

(Update: The site is actually going to live on Medium at theringer.com. Wow.)

Whatever happens, the branded content team should absolutely not start a drinking game that forces everyone to take a shot whenever they say the word “cross-platform.” That’s how you accidentally turn a creative hub into a suicidal cult.

3. Match the creative talent of the edit staff—or at least get close

The one guarantee about The Ringer is that it’ll bring the creative goods. Twelve of the 13 current editorial staffers formerly worked for Grantland, the stupendous longform sports and pop culture site that ESPN shuttered last year following a falling out with Simmons.

But will we be able to say the same about its branded content efforts? A lot of publishers use their reputation for quality editorial to sell brands on native ad campaigns, then fail to build a native ad team that can legitimately compete with the editorial squad. (What’s good, Gigaom?)

It may be foolish to think that The Ringer’s native ad studio can match the talent of Andy Greenwald, Chris Ryan, Sean Fennessey, and company. It’s difficult to hire established media professionals to take on brand work (although if the money’s right, it’s not that hard). But one of the biggest triumphs of Grantland was Simmons’s ability to recruit and nurture great, young, unknown talents.

When it comes to the branded content studio, The Ringer should be just as ambitious.

4. Invest in proprietary technology

This part might be the least intuitive for Simmons, who has admitted on his podcast to being caught off guard by the technology shifts that hit the media industry while he was at Grantland. The publishers with the most promising branded content operations today have a strong technology foundation.

BuzzFeed, for instance, has Pound, an analytics tool that uses network diffusion to understand exactly how a piece of content spreads through social networks. Vox has Chorus, a content management system (CMS) it relies on to create campaigns with advertisers. These unique pieces of technology allow publishers to differentiate themselves in a crowded content landscape, offering advertisers something they can’t get anywhere else.

5. Go beyond native ads

Smart brands don’t just want native ads that’ll make a temporary impact. They also want to build an owned content operation that lets them publish on their own sites and social accounts, and helps them build a loyal audience over time.

The Ringer, in turn, shouldn’t limit branded content offerings to native ads. As a publisher, if you’re going to bother establishing a branded content studio, you might as well create a full-fledged content studio that serves the many needs of your advertisers. It’s just a smart move.

If I’m Old Spice and interested in launching a men’s lifestyle magazine, for instance, I’m going to listen to what The Ringer has to say. Forget the man your man could smell like. The Ringer has the potential to be the publication your brand could sound like.

The post 5 Ways Bill Simmons Should Build His Branded Content Studio appeared first on Contently.

Although marketing in the age of social means contending with a daunting amount of noise and competition, it also offers dazzling potential for reach and impact if done right.

U.K. retailer John Lewis, for instance, only started producing its annual Christmas advertisement in 2007, but since then, it has become an eagerly anticipated institution of the festive period. The Christmas campaigns succeed by ignoring the hard sell, opting instead to tell heartwarming stories about generous children. The mantra of pathos over product placement is paying off. The 2015 ad was mentioned 23,000 times on social media within just two hours of being released, a testament to the power of smart, emotional content.

The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising found that marketing underscored by emotion performed twice as well as campaigns based around rational thinking. In short, using emotion in content marketing isn’t so much an option as a necessity—as long as you use it the right way.

Happiness and fear

Traditionally, marketing has been dominated by two emotions: happiness and fear. Eliciting happiness is a no-brainer; people associating your business or product with positivity is clearly a good thing. Stories that are awe-inspiring, amusing, or funny are much more likely to be shared than other types of emotional content. According to a 2014 BuzzSumo analysis of the 10,000 stories with the most shares, awe, laughter, and amusement were the three most popular emotions, accounting for 57 percent of the content.

Why not chase happiness all the time? Because consistently hitting the mark is very difficult, if not impossible. A story that is too contrived or too manipulative can make you look disingenuous. Upworthy, one of the first media companies to invest heavily in emotional clickbait, had nearly 90 million uniques in November 2013; last month, however, the site had less than 13 million uniques. The sheer amount of positive content out there also makes it tougher to stand out from the competition. This shouldn’t be a deterrent in itself, but it’s worth bearing in mind when thinking about balancing your output with other emotional triggers.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is fear. Content based on fear has good potential for virality. As Buffer’s Courtney Seiter noted, “The theory is that when we’re scared, we need to share the experience with others.”

In the research paper “What Makes Content Go Viral?” Dr. Jonah Berger, author of Contagious: Why Things Catch On, and Katherine Milkman, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania, found that New York Times content that triggered anxiety performed 21 percent better than average.

However, fear needs to be wielded wisely. While evoking happiness is a relatively broad goal, fear is much more subjective and the margin for error is narrower. For every success story, such as hand sanitizer company GoJo using the swine flu pandemic as a way of emphasizing the importance of its product, there are many examples of companies misjudging the tone of their content, as was the case with Nationwide’s much-criticized commercial from last year’s Super Bowl.

Anger

Aside from happiness and fear, one emotion has seen the biggest rise in popularity as a result of the Internet’s gold rush for clicks: anger. For example, Berger and Milkman’s research found that content that makes the reader feel frustrated or angry is 34 percent more likely to be featured on the New York Times‘s most e-mailed list than the average article.

The key with content meant to anger readers is to frame an aggravating issue in a constructive, engaging manner. Case in point: This interactive data piece from The New York Times challenges readers’ perceptions of how income affects a child’s chances of attending college.

However, like fear, anger is a dangerous emotion to rely on too much. While we all take a secret pleasure in getting riled up every now and then, if a publisher only pushes out content designed to make us consistently irritated, the novelty will wear off quickly.

Sadness

Most brands probably don’t want to be associated with sadness. But, if harnessed correctly, sad content can be beneficial if it’s incorporated into a larger narrative. Charities such as the Salvation Army and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals place a heavy emphasis on sadness in their content, which then helps to emphasize the different ways their initiatives help people and animals. In this respect, if good content marketing relies on storytelling, then sadness can form the crux of the second act of a traditional three-act structure.

The big risk is ending a piece of content on a somber note, which may limit potential for virality. In BuzzSumo’s analysis of the 10,000 most-shared articles on the Internet, only 1 percent emphasized sadness. While it may lack in viral reach, sad content still has the power to start (or continue) a lasting connection between brand and consumer. Unlike fear, which encourages us to share in order to seek reinforcement that others feel the same, sadness tends to lead to a more personal, empathetic response.

Anticipation and surprise

If you’re on Facebook, odds are your feed is full of stories promising to show you things you’ll never believe. Even if you’re against clicking on these posts, it’s hard to deny how seductive they can be. Here, you’re seeing two secondary emotions at work: anticipation and surprise.

The reason readers ignore these social posts is because they often promote low-quality clickbait. But brands and publishers that don’t manipulate their audiences can benefit a lot from a strong headline that teases a topic or a well-timed promotion.

On Pacific Standard, stories about health and behavior typically receive fewer than 100 shares, but Stanton Peele’s piece “The Truth We Won’t Admit: Drinking Is Healthy” garnered more than 7,000. Why? Because of the combination of the headline and a scientifically robust argument, both of which run contrary to a common belief.

Think of it this way: Setting up the anticipation is a good way to get people to click once; delivering on that anticipation is how you get an audience to keep clicking again and again.

Ultimately, however, the goal of any good content program should be balance. All of these emotional triggers have their own benefits, and using them when appropriate is crucial. So the next time you start on a piece of content, don’t just aim to strike an emotional chord—pay close attention to which chord it’s striking.

The post 6 Emotions That Will Make or Break Your Content Strategy appeared first on Contently.

According to Greentarget’s 2014 digital and content marketing survey, just a quarter of law firms have a documented content strategy.

As a follow-up question, he asks, “How many of you envision having a dedicated content strategy between now and the end of the year, or are working on that now?” Additional hands go up. He predicts that between 30 and 50 percent of law firms will have a dedicated of content strategy by the end of the year.

Law firms have money—lots of it. And as Corey’s experiment suggests, an increasing number of them are investing that money into content marketing instead of traditional advertising.

“If you look at law firm websites, you see firms like Goodwin Proctor blogging about intellectual property issues, or Foley & Lardner blogging about the automotive industry, or BakerHostetler and Covington blogging about data privacy,” says Norm Rubenstein, partner at Zeughauser Group LLC. “The list of firms that have blogs is now probably longer then the list of firms that don’t.”

But creating content as a law firm brings challenges. Lack of a content strategy is one, but pushing change for how law firms—a traditionally risk-averse bunch—write and market themselves may be an even bigger one.

Writing, but not like a lawyer

Lawyers are, for the most part, smart and educated individuals. They have opinions and knowledge on a number of topics and industries, particularly the ones they specialize in. For law-firm marketers, their lawyers are “a treasure trove of intellectual insights to draw from,” said Corey. But they face a difficult task: writing comprehensive stories non-lawyers can understand.

At some law firms, lawyers have adopted the discipline and style required by professional journalism in order to create accessible stories for current and potential clients.

Corey recommends law firms adopt a six-step framework for implementing journalistic practices in their writing. This approach combines an organization’s market intelligence and subject-matter expertise with the credibility and the narrative techniques of professional journalism. Here are the steps Corey and Greentarget propose:

This method encourages lawyers to commit to accuracy, fairness, and credibility. It also reminds writers that their primary goal should be to serve their audience.

According to Greentarget, this approach allows organization to “act like media companies” —demonstrating thought leadership and building brand awareness along the way.

Thought leadership, not advertising

Hiring a lawyer or a team of lawyers is a huge investment for companies and individuals; as such, many law firms’ marketing efforts tend to share more characteristics with B2B content marketing than any other industry.

“Compared to consumer brands where maybe there are more nuances, a B2B model tends to be more effective in focusing on the specific people making the decision to go with a particular law firm,” said Peggy Heffner, manager of media relations and communications at Dechert LLP.

This is mostly done through thought leadership aimed at decision makers, meant to differentiate specific lawyers and firms as particularly knowledgeable—and therefore worth hiring.

Dechert LLP, for example, recently went through a rebrand. Like other B2B brands, it concluded that one of the best ways to raise the firm’s profile is through thought leadership, rather than pouring its budget into advertising

“We really wanted to focus our resources towards producing thought leadership that would distinguish our firm, as well as demonstrate our deep expertise in what has become an increasingly crowded marketplace,” said Michelle Lappen Vogelhut, director of marketing and business development at Dechert LLP.

Lawyers display their skills by writing articles peculiar to their field of expertise. Marketers, meanwhile, push for lawyers to dissect the latest laws, bills, and consequential cases and discuss the implications they might have for their clients.

But how to get this thought leadership seen? Firms, of course, have websites, microsites, and blogs—but LinkedIn seems to have recently taken over as the platform of choice.

LinkedIn: The lawyer’s best friend

Where is legal intelligence marketed? These days, it’s mostly on every ambitious ladder-climbers favorite social network: LinkedIn.

Regardless of age group, about 60 percent of lawyers have used LinkedIn professionally within the past week. Overall, 37 percent said they had used it within the past 24 hours. That number is higher than the number of lawyers who’ve used Facebook, Twitter and YouTube combined, according to Greentarget’s survey. In addition, LinkedIn’s publishing platform, Pulse, is providing further opportunity for lawyers to spread their content wide and fair.

For most companies, the company’s social media account is the main focus. That’s not the case for law firms. What matters the most to them is their specific lawyers’ profiles, rather than the firm’s.

“My understanding is that most people who are engaging in LinkedIn are not engaging with the firm’s content—they are engaging in the content of individuals,” said Mary Young, legal strategist at Zeughauser Group.

But producing content as an individual in the legal field comes with challenges. There are restrictions on attorney advertising, but they usually do not prohibit lawyers from publishing articles about legal subjects.

The real risk for lawyers is not an obstacle to publishing articles on legal issues, but the consequences: People may do what the lawyer suggests, and it may not work, creating “malpractice” liability. Lawyers try to protect themselves from this type of liability by making it clear in the publication that it is not intended to create an attorney-client relationship or be legal advice.

For lawyers and law firms just getting started on LinkedIn who’d like to avoid these perils, Young has three suggestions. She recommends lawyers have a profile they consistently update and optimize. “A profile that says someone went to Harvard Law School and has been practicing circus law for 35 years is not sufficient to convince a client to hire,” she said. A strong profile needs to tell clients what the lawyer does and what they love to do. It should feature a professional photo and links to any recent articles or speaking engagements.

In addition, she advises for lawyers to start publishing their own content as well as articles from others in their firm and any outside content that they deem interesting.

Lastly, she suggests that lawyers join groups. Forming or participating in groups actively allows for clients to communicate with lawyers directly.

Content strategy for law firms is new. Things up until this point were reactionary—lawyers waited for a particular case to come down and produced an article accordingly. Now, the focus is on how firms can be a resource for their clients.

“Everybody is in the social content business today,” Corey said. “But not everyone has something to say.”

Blog now, or forever hold your peace. Just be sure you have something important to say.

The post The Surprising New Adopter of Content Marketing: Law Firms appeared first on Contently.

According to research by influencer marketing platform The Shelf, 92 percent of consumers trust recommendations from other people—even if they don’t know them personally—over promotional content that comes directly from brands.

That’s why 65 percent of brands are already participating in influencer marketing. Smashbox Cosmetics recently launched an incubator for YouTubers to use their studio space and products. Many brands are also teaming up with photographers on Instagram to reach new audiences.

And it’s working. As the infographic points out, influencer marketing can increase your conversions by up to a factor of 10. An eMarketer study also that found that advertisers earned an average of $6.85 for every $1 they spent on influencer marketing last year.

The best part of this strategy is that influencer marketing the gift that keeps on giving. As The Shelf notes, 88 percent of influencers tell friends about the brands that sponsor them, and 72 percent share additional posts about their sponsors outside of any contractual agreement.

For example, YouTuber Joshua Evans recently teamed up with Peet’s Coffee to create a branded music video. He then sent this tweet three weeks after that video came out:

So go find the social media mavens who want to introduce your brand to their audiences. These influencers don’t have to have millions of followers. They just need to be engaging your target consumers with a unique voice and quality content.

To be sure you’re getting the most out of your influencer marketing, check out the infographic below.

The post Infographic: Here’s Why Influencer Marketing Works for Brands appeared first on Contently.

Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report for KPCB represents the absolute height of content marketing—a piece of thought leadership that every trade mag has to cover. (We sure did.) Happy that your latest article hit 1,000 shares? Ha. Mary Meeker got Wired to declare her the queen of the Internet.

This was Mary Meeker’s 21st annual report, and she shows no sign of slowing down. In the world of content marketing, she’s Michael Jordan ziplocked in an endless prime. The rest of us can never hope to emulate her success; at best, we can hope to emulate aspects of her game. Publish forward-thinking, insightful content. Do it big. Do it consistently.

Though it might have felt like it for a hot second, Mary Meeker didn’t produce the only piece of content marketing worth taking note of this month. A number of brands made us stand up and take notice of their impressive work. Let’s dive in to the best branded content of May.

(Props to Dillon Baker and Julia Schur for helping with research for this month’s roundup.)

Net-a-Porter: The Net Set

Earlier this year, Forrester’s Nate Elliott released a comprehensive report essentially declaring that Facebook was a terrible investment for brands due to its fast-declining organic reach and the generally insane amount of money that brands pay agencies to manage their social accounts. His proposed solution? Brands should start their own social communities.

Slowly but surely, that’s happening. Starting your own social network isn’t right for every brand—after all, people aren’t eager to bond over adult diapers or batteries or paper stock—but for some brands, it’s worth a shot. Purina recently started Puppyhood, a social network for puppy owners. And now Net-a-Porter—publisher of The Edit and glossy print mag Porter—has launched The Net Set, a social network app that delivers a Facebook-style news feed of trending fashion content and lets users organize into “tribes” based on style preferences. (Finally, the jorts lovers of the world can align and fulfill their destiny of global domination.) Oh yeah, and the app’s content is fully shoppable, essentially making the elevator pitch: Facebook-meets-Pinterest, but for draining your bank account.

The Net Set is still invite only, and we’ll have to wait to see if it succeeds, but the app is gorgeous and has a clear purpose—like all of Net-a-Porter’s content-focused initiatives—so our hopes are high. And if the company succeed, it may set a new bar for brand engagement.

Adobe Marketing Cloud: Audio White Papers For Marketing

Making white papers interesting is a hell of a challenge that every marketer faces. The best content marketers have unique solutions: Jason Miller of LinkedIn makes insane rock n’ roll parallels and turns white papers into coloring books; my boss Shane Snow brings everything back to Ryan Gosling; I prefer sports metaphors.

Adobe Marketing Cloud—maker of perhaps the funniest marketing commercial ever—has us all beat, hiring actor Malcolm McDowell (of A Clockwork Orange and The Artist fame) to do dramatic readings of its white papers. I thought it was gimmicky, but McDowell is so damn sexy that I found myself learning about Digital Marketing Capabilities for Mobile during my entire walk to work. That man is so badass that I would listen to him read about cross-channel marketing, which is something that you can now totally do.

Microsoft: #HowOldRobot

Regular readers of this monthly roundup know that I have a rule: If your brand creates something that makes half our office waste tens of thousands of dollars worth of productivity, you make it in. Microsoft’s accidental viral hit—a facial detection project test site called how-old.net—wins this month.

It went viral in early May with the #howoldrobot as the Twitter users of the world uploaded their photos so the site could guess of how old they are. Most of the fun comes from the site’s hilariously inaccurate estimates… or at least that’s what I keep telling myself. (I’m not 31, Microsoft Robot! I’m 27! And I look young! I got carded 13 times last week alone! Which is a lot of times to be buying alcohol in a week! This parenthetical is making me realize I might have a drinking problem. Let’s move on!)

KFC: The Return of Colonel Sanders

Sorry, that last blurb got a little weird. And you know what else is weird? The 10 spots that make up KFC’s reboot of Colonel Sanders—starring SNL legend Darrell Hammond. We get a bit of Hammond making up off-beat songs while handing out chicken in traffic, and a lot of Hammond interacting with mandolin-playing children. For a second there, I thought I was watching a Wes Anderson spoof instead of a fried chicken commercial.

But it’s the kind of weird you can’t help but talk about, and in the marketing world, that counts as win.

Heineken: Beco das Garrafas

Earlier this month on The Content Strategist, Amanda Walgrove shared the story of Beco das Garrafas, a documentary that Heineken created about Rio De Janeiro’s wild party alley, a place where bottles were thrown in exuberance and madness, and bossa nova was born. Through the narratives of the people who experienced the action firsthand, the documentary brings the alley back to life.

“The great challenge today for brands is how to capture the audience’s attention and get them involved,” Patricia Weiss, the film’s co-producer, told Walgrove. “So relevance, authenticity, and original narratives are the most powerful ways of establishing emotional connection between brands and people today—involving and engaging them without interrupting their lives.”

HP: HP Matter

While on the bus back to New Jersey for Mother’s Day, I went to longform.org in hopes of finding a story to kill the time. I clicked on a link to an in-depth interview with media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, which was an engrossing read, and toward the end, I realized something surprising: I was reading a brand magazine.

HP Matter, HP’s idea-driven digital magazine produced in partnership with Fast Company, is really good, filled with high-quality longform think pieces. And apparently, I’ve been missing out because the Rushkoff interview is just one of five HP Matter pieces that longform.org has chosen to feature in the last year. No wonder Meg Whitman, pictured above, is smiling so bright—her company, like the others featured here, are starting to crack the content code.

Have a suggestion for the best branded content you loved this month that I missed? Want to make suggestions for next month’s best branded content roundup? Tweet me @joelazauskas.

The post The Best Branded Content of May 2015 appeared first on Contently.

On Monday, they revealed they’ve gotten their hands on the Batmobile.

In a BuzzFeed Tech blog post, publisher Dao Nguyen and data-genius twins Adam and Andrew Kelleher introduced Pound, a new proprietary technology that promises to drastically change the way everyone understands how content spreads through the web. Pound stands for Process for Optimizing and Understanding Network Diffusion, which sounds terrifyingly complex. (And it is.) But in layman’s terms, it simply shows how content spreads “from one sharer to another, through all the downstream visits, even across social networks and one-to-one sharing platforms like Gchat and email.”

So instead of just seeing your shares in buckets (100 Facebook, 50 Twitter, 30 LinkedIn, etc.) you see exactly how that content spread in a tangled web from its original sharer to other channels.

For instance, BuzzFeed analyzed how its six tweets about #TheDress diffused and spread across the social landscape. Those six tweets resulted in nearly a million views but also drove hundreds of thousands of views via other social networks. You can see the clusters of shares in the graph below—dark blue for Facebook, light blue for Twitter, and white for other publishers that picked up the story.

^{Image via BuzzFeed, by Adam Kelleher}

The GIF below provides a look inside one of those share clusters; it’s fairly difficult to understand without reading BuzzFeed’s explanation two or three times, but essentially, you’re seeing how even though Twitter is the source of the share diffusion, the story actually spreads to many other social networks as it heads downstream.

As the explanation pointed out: “In fact, clicks from Twitter represent only a quarter of the total downstream visits rooted in the BuzzFeed Twitter account!”

^{Gif via BuzzFeed, by Adam Kelleher}

But enough dorking out on data—what does this all mean?

Tens of millions of people share BuzzFeed’s content every month, and they’re social-first in every sense of the buzzword; 75 percent of the site’s 200 million monthly visitors come from social sources. BuzzFeed is already excellent at creating content that will thrive on social, and it tests the hell out of every element of its stories, from the headline to the order of points in a listicle, and optimizes accordingly.

If BuzzFeed can figure out how to optimize its content even further for social networks based on a deep understanding of how content spreads, the potential benefits are huge. Even just a 10 percent boost in the social performance of BuzzFeed’s stories would mean 15 million new visitors a month. (And likely more, since the benefits of social are inherently exponential.)

Lucky for us, BuzzFeed included its own list of possibilities for how it could use Pound:

• Can we propose stories that will appeal not only to you, but also to your friends and followers?
• Can we use Pound data to power A/B tests? Can we make the site and apps better not just for readers, but for their friends — and thereby increase the impact of our site?
• How effective are specific promotions, not just based on first-order traffic, but on all of the downstream sharing and traffic that results?
• Can we predict the potential reach of a story based on its content or other features about it?
• Can we filter out the effect of big sites or celebrities promoting our content, learn what average people actually like, and produce more of the right content for everyone?

These are fascinating and exciting possibilities—particularly the ability to predict the reach of a story based on its features and content, which would allow BuzzFeed to eliminate duds and maximize hits. But the biggest implication could ultimately be in what it means for the company’s bottom line.

What this means for BuzzFeed’s business—and work for brands

In BuzzFeed’s blog post, the authors made clear Pound confirmed something they’d always assumed: Sponsored content spreads the same way as editorial content. They used a post from Target—“I Tried The Fanny Basket And It Saved My Life“—as an example. This is important because it allows BuzzFeed to use Pound to sell its sponsored content offering. Salespeople can say, “No one understands social like us; we know how to create viral content for your brand better than anyone else.” Then they show brand execs this image of Target’s viral diffusion and wait for $100 bills to fall from the ceiling.

^{Image via BuzzFeed, by Adam Kelleher}

It’s clear that BuzzFeed is thinking about Pound largely in relation to sponsored content. After listing all the possibilities of how Pound could improve BuzzFeed editorial, the authors ask: “Finally, can we do all of the above for sponsored content? In fact, we are currently seeking beta partners to help us think about how Pound data can benefit advertisers and their audiences. “Since then, they’ve added a note announcing that they’re looking for beta partners to create data-driven content using Pound.

But in addition to sponsored content, there’s another way BuzzFeed could monetize Pound: by licensing it as a software product. If Pound truly lives up to the hype, most publishers will want to get their hands on it. BuzzFeed may not want to give away its secret sauce, but at the right price point, it could be worth it. And by the time the company does that, it’ll already be working on its next technological weapon anyway. All we can do is wait for Jonah Peretti’s LOL Signal to light up the Gotham night sky.

The post BuzzFeed Just Cracked the Code on How Social Content Spreads, and It’s a Big Deal appeared first on Contently.

Since there really hasn’t been a formal definition of a microsite, I’ll go ahead and create one:

A microsite is a branded content site that lives outside of the company homepage and/or brand URL.

That’s it, really. What differentiates a microsite from a company blog or newsletter or any other branded platform is that it has its own independent URL—likely one that doesn’t include the name of the company sponsoring the site. If you have to register a new domain name, you’ve got yourself a microsite.

But wait! you cry. Can’t microsites exist within a brand’s own site?

Sure. All rules have exceptions. But generally, if a microsite lives on the company’s URL, we’ll call it a “branded vertical.” Like this one.

Now that we’ve gotten the semantics out of the way, let’s break microsites down by their type and value. All microsites can be subdivided into two categories:

1. Sites based around a campaign

Campaign-based microsites are independent sites (i.e., their own URL) created for the sole purpose of anchoring and/or supporting a branded campaign. They’re launched, populated with content (be it written, video, visual, etc.), amplified using whatever strategy the brand sees fit, and then left alone.

An example is Prudential’s “Bring Your Challenges” site, which offers interactive features about the financial life cycle of the average middle-class American. You can watch videos, take quizzes, and track stats that might be relevant to your life. The Prudential-branded site, which lives on BringYourChallenges.com and is almost entirely self-contained (you won’t get spit out to Prudential.com), is part of a multi-platform campaign including TV and print ads and plenty of digital buzz.

The advantage of sites like this is pretty clear: You build it, you amplify it, you leave it. If you’ve tackled the hard part of creating a great site—which plenty of brands are doing—then you can pat yourself on the back while the traffic rolls in. Whether you update the site every occasionally or amplify it on an ongoing basis, the bulk of the work is behind you. Your evergreen microsite stays forever green.

2. Sites that publish regular, ongoing content, presumably for the indeterminate future

These sites act like media sites, in that they publish original content on a regular schedule—and they never, ever quit (unless someone pulls the plug).

A familiar best-in-class example is Red Bull’s aptly named Red Bulletin. It functions like a healthy online magazine in just about every capacity—daily publishing, full staffing, regular redesigns, constant iteration, and steady growth.

This category is a lot harder to pull off successfully. For one, it’s not easy to launch, grow, and maintain a content site that stays relevant, and that people actually want to read. If these were simple tasks, mainstream media sites—run by creative professionals who do this for a living—would have an easy time finding a fit in the digital marketplace, and then growing ad infinitum.

This scenario, of course, is not the case. Finding white space in the marketplace (a.k.a., “finding an original way to write about topics that people care about and that aren’t already being covered to death on other sites”) is a challenge for anyone launching anything on the Internet. If you get this part wrong, your site is doomed.

Even if you get it right, as Red Bull did, you have to go bigger and bigger (and, often, use bigger budgets) to keep that audience, and to top other sites in the same space.

There’s also the basic truth that creating new content, day in and day out, takes a level of work and commitment that would make most people run for the hills. The Internet is a beast that must be fed nonstop, and keeping it sated takes budget, time, and resources. This means hiring a team, overseeing and managing that team, then meeting and tracking and iterating and relaunching and all the other expensive, tricky tasks required to maintain and grow a content site. There’s no end in sight, no guaranteed reward. Years of toil on a microsite might still result in meager readership. The Internet owes you nothing, whether you’re a newbie blogger or a C-suite exec.

Are ongoing-content microsites worth it? It depends on the details of your situation. (And the discussion of microsites’ ROI is worth its own column—coming soon!) If you can pull a microsite off successfully, there’s a big upside: You’ll have a powerful way to communicate directly with an audience, and build relationships over time.

Without question, though, before you embark on a microsite, you need to lay out a careful strategy to determine which of these two categories it should fall into, and why. Whether your microsite becomes the next Red Bulletin or dies a silent death depends on it.

Melissa Lafsky Wall (@Lafsky) is the founder of Brick Wall Media.

The post What the Hell Is a Microsite and Why Do I Need One? appeared first on Contently.

Some might choose to tackle the Gen Y demographic and wait on learning more about younger kids. Others might just group these audiences together and figure they’re killing two marketing birds with one stone. But Deep Focus’ latest Cassandra Report, Gen Y and Gen Z want very different things from brands, and now that people who are a part of Gen Z are making independent purchasing decisions, that distinction is very important.

It seems this generation is more tolerant of online advertising than its Y counterpart. Twenty-eight percent of Gen Z consumers want marketers to reach them with online ads compared to just 16 percent of millennials. Also, Gen Z prefers being sold a cool product (60 percent) over a cool experience (40 percent), while Gen Y prefers the opposite.

As Marketwired points out, Gen Z is more than twice as likely to respond to advertising that features “real people” as opposed to celebrities. This fits right in with the study’s finding that Gen Z’s favorite website is YouTube, where celebrities are often relatable people who share digital experiences with viewers and introduce them to new products. Meanwhile, Gen Y’s favorite website is Amazon.

As far as behavior is concerned, workplace author Alexandra Levit explains in The New York Times how Gen Z has separated itself from previous generations by prioritizing independence and eschewing tradition: “Gen Zers are growing up in a healthier economy and appear eager to be cut loose. They don’t wait for their parents to teach them things or tell them how to make decisions.” Similarly, Deep Focus found that 93 percent of parents surveyed said their teen and tween children have at least some influence on their family’s spending and household purchases.

As Deep Focus CMO Jamie Gutfreund said, “If, as a brand, you aren’t putting energy into understanding Gen Z, you are losing an opportunity to anticipate the future of consumer behavior.” Or, evidently, the present.

Check out the Deep Focus infographic below for more telling data about the generation gap.

The post Infographic: What Gen Z Wants From Brands appeared first on Contently.