Most of my friends had bought a few shares of the meme stocks on Robinhood. But an hour before the markets opened, we noticed something strange: Robinhood wouldn’t let us buy any more. We could only sell. There was no explanation why.

Baffled, all we could do was turn to Twitter and Reddit, where accusations ran wild. The prevailing theory presumed that Robinhood was in bed with the hedge funds, restricting regular traders so hedge funds could avoid the disaster of their short positions.

As that day stretched on with no explanation, this theory became fact in the eyes of the internet. Users bombed the app with 100,000 one-star reviews. Thousands announced they were switching to competitors like WeBull. And everyone from AOC to Ja Rule questioned the company’s integrity. When Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev finally spoke to the media that night, he offered a confusing explanation.

As the situation unraveled, it was painful to watch. Disaster could have been avoided if Robinhood had a stronger culture of content.

The tragedy of Robinhood’s response

It turns out Robinhood had a good reason for limiting trades. As users owned more and more stock of companies like Gamestop, AMC, and Blackberry, Robinhood’s required clearinghouse deposits rose tenfold. If the market trends continued, Robinhood wouldn’t have enough cash to meet these requirements, so it stopped certain trades.

Disaster could have been avoided if Robinhood had a stronger culture of content.

Barely anyone heard this reasonable explanation. That’s because the company struggled to communicate this clearly to customers until the following Monday—four days later—when it sent an email explaining what happened. The “Robinhood is corrupt” narrative had already taken hold. Let’s look at a quick timeline of events:

Thursday morning: No explanation as rumors ran rampant.

Thursday night: Robinhood sends out an email to customers with a garbled legalese explanation. (More on that below.)

Friday: Robinhood publishes a clear, well-written blog post that explains why they had to halt trading. But the company only tweets it out, instead of emailing it to customers or surfacing the post in the app.

Monday: Finally pushed out a clear, well-written email explaining what happened and also promote the blog post explainer in the app.

As a content strategist, I’d seen this problem many times before. It’s not that the marketing and comms team sucks. It’s that the company lacked a strong culture of content.

The phrase “culture of content” may sound squishy, but it’s incredibly important. Here are four lessons we can learn from Robinhood’s mishap.

1. Get in the habit of publishing timely content

Robinhood invests in content. They have a solid library of investment content with titles modeled after long-tail search inquires to bring in SEO traffic. But to establish a culture of content, you need to be skilled at more than just publishing evergreen content.

Hire at least one person with real journalism experience, and invest in timely content that helps your audience understand how changes in your industry affect them. These stories add spice to your evergreen content mix. It gives people a reason to come to you when news breaks. And perhaps most importantly, it equips you to publish content in minutes or hours—not days—when things go haywire, written by a journalist who’s trained in simplifying complex topics so everyone can understand.

2. Set clear rules for working with legal and compliance

Given how fast the story spread, Thursday night was too long for Robinhood to email customers with an explanation. But a big reason that email failed to change the narrative is because it sounded like BS to a lot of people:

This was a temporary decision made to best continue serving you, and was not an easy one to make. We know it’s led to frustration and confusion, and wanted to provide some clarity.

As a brokerage firm, we have many financial requirements, including SEC net capital obligations and clearinghouse deposits. Some of these requirements fluctuate based on volatility in the markets and can be substantial in the current environment. These requirements exist to protect investors and the markets and we take our responsibilities to comply with them seriously, including through the measures we have taken today.

My best guess is a well-constructed explanation from the marketing team got put through the car wash of the legal team, and an unproductive message came out the other side. This underscores why it’s so important for marketers—especially those in financial services—to have clear rules of the road with legal and compliance.

3. Develop a thoughtful channel strategy

By Friday, Robinhood also managed to publish a well-written blog post explaining what happened. It posted the explanation on Twitter but didn’t email it to customers. Crucially, it didn’t promote the content to customers through its app until Monday.

This underscores the importance of having a strong channel and distribution strategy, and knowing how and where to reach your customers as quickly and effectively as possible. As soon as Robinhood had a solid explainer in place on Friday, it should have pushed it out via email and the app to ensure as many people as possible saw it.

4. Offer comms a seat at the table

Your marketing and comms can’t be left out of the loop when disaster strikes. I have no idea if this is what happened with Robinhood, but given the lack of communication with customers, I suspect it might be the case.

In a world where narratives about your company can form in minutes, the leader of your comms team needs to be informed from the jump. CEOs who consider this an afterthought are asking for problems.

Narratives about your company can form in minutes.

It’s for this reason that I struggle to fully blame Robinhood’s marketing and comms team. Most of the team, including their CMO, has only been there a few months. A culture of content takes a long time to build—especially when the CEO may not be inviting you into the room—or Zoom—where it happens.

Robinhood will come out of this okay. It remains an addictive, intuitive app and the easiest way to buy cryptocurrency. It had the cache to get a $1 billion bridge loan from its investors on Thursday night. Many of the users who deleted the app have likely come back. But not every company will be so lucky, and like Robinhood, they may not know how important a culture of content is until they need it.

The post Robinhood’s PR Crisis Shows Why Every Company Needs a Culture of Content appeared first on Contently.

I experienced just one “You Matter Day” during my time at Ogilvy, when I was a strategist on the IKEA account. A few days earlier, our team released a national commercial we’d worked on for months. The public deemed it racist, and IKEA decided to immediately pull it from air. Thus on “You Matter Day,” I mattered for a greater purpose: scrubbing the ad’s existence from the internet.

IKEA and Ogilvy are both large corporations filled with many smart people. From the first creative briefs to production of the final commercial, we went through rounds of focus groups, concept testing, collaborative meetings, and edits. In deciding to pull the problematic ad, IKEA’s head of U.S. marketing voiced that if a single person could feel offended by the commercial, that was one too many. I agreed with her stance and personally felt the ad was offensive. How did I, or anyone else on the Ogilvy or IKEA teams, fail to prevent this?

From experience, the answer lies in the political hierarchy and siloed nature of agency life. I was a strategic planner on the IKEA account, teamed up with a senior planner and strategy director. The three of us formed one-third of the IKEA account at Ogilvy, alongside five dedicated members of account management and three art directors and copywriters in the creative department. Much like the U.S. government, our three branches were meant to check and balance each other. Much like the U.S. government, that never happened.

Breaking bureaucracy

Ogilvy and IKEA often clashed on ideas and executions. Since the client pays the bills, this meant our team had to figure out where we went wrong. Strategy would blame creative for going off-brief. Creative would blame strategy for writing a bad brief that all but forced them to ad-lib. The senior members of each Ogilvy department were engaged in a constant race to pass the buck, with junior members caught in the crosshairs and nodding along when called upon.

When an agency pitches a client to make a national ad campaign, there is no guarantee the client will approve any of the creative concepts. Fortunately, IKEA bought one of our ideas. It focused on the kitchen and the changing archetype of the American family. Gone are the cookie-cutter days of mom, dad, two kids, and a dog. Modern families more closely resemble the TV show—an amalgam of cousins, friends, and neighbors sitting around the table as one unit.

Our commercial played on this theme, with a mom calling upstairs for everyone to come down for dinner. Only instead of two or three names, she calls down a dozen people—her kids, her kids’ friends, and other members of their extended family. The script was funny; bodies pile out of bedrooms like clowns stuffed in a tiny car. The concept performed well in focus groups, so we moved to filming and production, some of the final steps before an ad goes to air.

In casting the commercial, Ogilvy chose a middle-aged Latina woman to play the mother. When the first cut arrived at the office, I had two initial thoughts:

1. This captures the concept well.

2. This makes me feel uncomfortable. People may find this culturally insensitive and suggest that IKEA thinks Latino families birth more children.

But when an ad sells and moves through the full process, you better have a good reason to derail the train, cost the agency money, and risk alienating every senior manager. In retrospect, I think this is why I didn’t say anything, even as I cringed watching the actress call everyone for dinner.

That’s no excuse for my lack of action. I wish I had seen the forest for the trees and spoken up while I could. For those still in the agency business, I really hope they feel empowered to do the right thing, even if it pisses off the powers that be. Agencies need to break down the walls that separate internal departments and implement initiatives that create a flatter organization.

Addressing diversity issues

Pepsi famously made a similar gaffe two years ago with a commercial starring supermodel Kendall Jenner. The ad depicts Jenner joining a protest rally and walking to the front lines, confronting a white police officer on duty. She hands him a Pepsi, and he breaks into a smile. The brand surely thought it was being woke. Instead, this problematic ad seems to imply that Kendall Jenner can cure racial and political unrest with soda. The backlash was immediate and severe. Pepsi pulled the ad after one day.

Beyond structural issues within ad agencies, a glaring hole in these two cases was a lack of diversity. Agencies tend to exist on the coasts, staffed with largely white, affluent, liberal employees who create ads for the whole country even though they only make up a small slice of the American pie.

Starting in 2015, the #OscarsSoWhite movement shined a light on lack of diversity within the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and a failure on the Academy’s part to nominate people of color. Prominent black actors and directors, including Will Smith and Spike Lee, skipped the ceremony in 2016, the second straight year that all 20 lead and supporting actor nominations were white. In response, the Academy unanimously voted a week after the 2016 nominations to double its number of female and minority members by 2020.

I think a comparable approach could go a long way to helping fix the ad world. We need to implement programs that boost minority interviews and hires. Most importantly, this has to be done at a senior level. That way, groups that are misrepresented can take a stand to confront these problems from within.

According to a 2019 survey by Adobe/CMO.com, “sixty-six percent of African-Americans said they feel their ethnic identity is often portrayed stereotypically [in advertising], a sentiment shared by 53% of Latino/Hispanic Americans.” It’s crucial that multiple members of every race, creed, color, gender, or religion pictured in an ad can view it and offer opinions before any campaign is released.

If we can’t trust agencies to fix themselves, an industry-wide initiative would be beneficial. Independent ad review boards should be constructed and ideally, all ad agencies would see the immense value (and optics) of joining. Money talks in advertising and often leads to bad decisions. Setting up a third-party review step could help eliminate the financial incentive agencies face to proceed with problematic ads that cost months of time and thousands of dollars.

It’s time for a change. Ad agencies need to unite for a “You Matter Day” that honors every person impacted by their work, not just some.

The post How Problematic Ads Get Approved (And Ways We Can Prevent Them) appeared first on Contently.

Money affects everyone. Finances can dictate what we do, where we live, and how we make decisions. It’s a wide umbrella, spanning everything from consumer banking, investment banking, credit cards, fintech, insurance, and more. The fact that many finance organizations try to reach B2C and B2B audiences simultaneously adds another factor to the equation.

Financial services content is also incredibly complicated. Understanding how to pick the right insurance or save for a mortgage can literally change someone’s life. Companies in this space have a unique opportunity to build meaningful relationships with consumers.

To capitalize on that opportunity, finserv companies allocated an average of $23.3 million for their content marketing budgets in 2019, per Contently research. This number includes content creation, distribution, technology, and talent.

Finserv companies are doing a decent job getting a bang for their buck. However, there’s still room for improvement.

To help marketers be more efficient and effective, Contently created this new report that examines the state of financial services content marketing. The first part compares finance against other industries and highlights content benchmarks. The second part explores tips and strategies marketers can use to stand out from their biggest competitors and create content that performs.

Brands spend large sums of money on content marketing. It’s time they made the most of their investments.

[If you prefer to view a PDF version of the report that’s easier to print, we’ve got you covered here.]

Report Methodology

Data for this report was compiled in November 2019. The industry benchmark statistics in the first part of the report came from an internal dataset of 86,270 pieces of content across all industries, measured by Contently’s content marketing platform. Of that sample, 25,544 pieces of content came from financial services companies.

Data in the second part of the report came from StoryBook, Contently’s content strategy tool, which measured top-performing topics, formats, social shares, and more for 2,292 pieces of content from financial services companies.

Key Findings

For visual learners, here’s a high-level breakdown of what we found:

Part I: Financial Services Benchmarks

Competition for attention has never been higher in content marketing. Legacy firms are battling against each other while trying to hold off a surge of new fintech competitors and startups. Consumers, meanwhile, want financial guidance; they’re just not sure who to get it from.

According to the 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer, financial services ranked last out of 15 industries. On a positive note, trust in the industry is on the rise, increasing 8 percentage points since 2014. This means there’s an opportunity for finserv companies to step up and support their customers. Content is a key tool in those efforts.

Financial services vs. all other industries

Recently, finserv companies have made noticeable progress with content performance. In 2018, audiences spent an average of 1:26 seconds with financial services content. A year later, average attention time jumped to 1:51 seconds, which marks a 29 percent increase

Over that same stretch, though, average engagement rate (the percentage of people who spend at least 15 seconds with a piece of content) and finish rate held stagnant. On one hand, the average finish rate in our data set is impressive in comparison to Chartbeat’s scroll depth benchmarks for all content. Brands are creating longer content, but there’s still room to improve the finish rate.

Financial services companies also took strides compared to brands from other industries. Average attention time for all other industries in our data set only moved from 1:32 seconds in 2018 to 1:34 seconds in 2019. However, the other industries like travel, technology, and healthcare boasted a better average engagement rate (70 percent) and finish rate (60 percent) in 2019. Finish rates in fields like travel and tech may be higher because their topics aren’t as technical as those found in finance.

Consumer Finance vs. Institutional Finance vs. Wealth Management

Next, we examined engagement benchmarks for the three of the biggest subcategories in financial services content: consumer finance, institutional finance, and wealth management.

Consumer finance covers personal money tips and financial literacy, like this Bank of America article about getting the most out of your checking account.

Institutional finance content spans B2B coverage about investment banking and global markets, like this Goldman Sachs report on geopolitical risk.

Wealth management concerns individual portfolios and investing, like this Morgan Stanley profile of a female financial advisor’s philosophy.

To compare the effectiveness of the three subcategories, we looked at average attention time, average finish rate, and average social shares.

Consumer finance, unsurprisingly, dominated the social metrics with an average of 2,046 shares per story. When done right, helpful budgeting and saving tips can go semi-viral because they’re more universal than content from the other subcategories.

However, personal finance advice is also a saturated space. It’s harder to stand out with unique advice since many companies recycle the same topics, headlines, and themes. That may explain why average attention time registers at just 1:18 seconds, almost a minute shorter than the average benchmark for institutional finance.

The success of institutional finance content goes to show that B2B marketing doesn’t have to be dry or boring. There’s a real need for that expertise. And generating 190 shares, on average, is very respectable for B2B content of any kind. These numbers suggest that companies cornering the institutional finance beat are finding creative ways to tie their analysis to relevant news and trending topics people care about.

Lastly, we see that wealth management has room for improvement, particularly the 38 percent finish rate. Marketers creating content about wealth management may not need to drive a lot of social shares, since it’s tailored for a niche audience. Yet there’s still an opportunity to create more fluent and accessible content that holds people’s attention and builds trust.

With that in mind, let’s move to the second part of the report and explore ways financial services companies can build better trust and drive more engagement.

Part II: 5 Keys to High-Performing Financial Services Content

The benchmark data raised a few big questions. First, what are the most valuable financial services companies doing to differentiate themselves? Second, what tactics can financial services marketing pick up from them, regardless of budget? And third, what recommendations could we offer to help finance marketers improve in areas they weren’t doing so well?

To answer those questions, we used Contently’s Storybook technology to analyze 2,292 pieces of financial services content from Fortune 500 brands. Here are our biggest takeaways.

1. Create social videos and infographics
2. Invest in paid distribution on Facebook
3. Develop buyer enablement content to drive conversions
4. Focus on employee education and advocacy
5. Get creative with compliance

1. Create social-friendly videos and infographics

Marketers default to creating written content because it’s easier and cheaper. But brands that rely on churning out generic blog posts are failing to give people what they want: visual content.

Our industry analysis found that videos and infographics outclassed other content formats in terms of average social shares. In fact, video drove eight times as many shares as articles. Infographics, meanwhile, saw twice as many shares as articles. (We’ll get to social distribution trends in the next section.)

(Note: Our dataset excludes LinkedIn shares, because LinkedIn has closed off their API from all third-party analytics tools.)

Most people working in marketing today understand there’s value in video, but many are hesitant to invest in the medium.

When done well, it’s worth it. Visual content is the most effective way to simplify complex technical information, especially for visual learners. One of the most budget-friendly tactics is to produce short explainer videos optimized for social channels. Mint, for example, launched the WTFinance series a few years ago, breaking down major personal finance concepts in 45-second clips that are easy to digest.

If you get the green light for video, the last thing you want to do is stock your YouTube page with clips of two people talking on stage for an hour. To produce videos that resonate with your audience, pay attention to these three areas.

2. Invest in paid distribution on Facebook

Reports are Facebook’s demise are largely overblown. It still attracts over 2 billion people every month, and remains the most effective social distribution channel for both B2C and B2B content.

According to Instapage, the average CPC on Facebook for financial services ads is $3.72—more than double the average ($1.72).

However, this pales in comparison to the CPC on Google for top finserv keywords.

Using SEMRush, we found the average CPC for 10 of the most popular content-adjacent search keywords in financial services for comparison:

Here, we see an average CPC of $16.39 for paid search, meaning Facebook is almost five times cheaper. Not only does referral traffic from social posts help organic search rankings, but you’re also likely to drive additional traffic from the “social lift” of people resharing that content on Facebook.

3. Develop buyer enablement content to drive conversions

When done right, content marketing impacts the entire customer journey. To tie content to revenue, your stories should eventually spark an action—filling out a form, opening an account, signing up for a credit card. In other words, your work assists the customer until they’re ready to make a smart decision related to your company.

We used StoryBook to analyze the most shared content by topic. The most engaging topics—such as reducing risk, insurance 101, and tax planning—tie back to buying decisions. Some news content related to mortgages and insurance also finished near the top of the list.

It’s fitting that content about risk and planning resonated enough for people to share. This kind of advice tends to be practical and applicable to a large audience. State Farm, for instance, drove thousands of shares by packaging together “a collection of articles to help your teen be a safe driver.” The series includes insurance advice for students, info on the costs of certain driving violations, and tips for driving in different conditions. State Farm also includes a calculator tool at the bottom of every article to get a quote, creating a clear path to purchase.

Focusing on enablement content helps brands invest in evergreen financial tools like calculators. These tools empower buyers, letting people navigate a complex decision without explicitly selling to them.

For example, Bank of America built a dedicated page to hold 25 user-friendly tools and calculators that cover retirement, investing, college planning, and personal finance. Creating this kind of content typically doesn’t require a lot of money or time. Take a look at the after-tax return calculator above, which only asks users to fill out two fields before giving them a personalized report.

4. Focus on employee education and advocacy

The success of financial content depends on trust. A blog post full of uniquely insightful 401(k) tips can miss the mark if it doesn’t come from the right source.

The National Foundation for Credit Counseling found that only 25 percent of U.S adults would turn to a bank or credit union if they needed financial guidance, a number on the decline in recent years. However, 35 percent of adults would have no problem trusting a financial planner or accountant.

The same study revealed that 76 percent of U.S. adults said they could “benefit from advice and answers to everyday financial questions from a professional.” The data highlights a sizable gap of people who may not receive the answers they need simply because they don’t trust big financial organizations.

When looking at share of voice results from our research, a related trend caught our eye.

State Farm was dominating in terms of social shares, driving 70 percent of all social shares among 10 companies including Goldman Sachs, Fannie Mae, and Wells Fargo. Did State Farm have some incredible content marketing secret weapon?

It turns out the answer is yes—although when we started to look around, we saw it wasn’t much of a secret. A lot of their social activity was seeded by company’s insurance agents. For most of the last decade, State Farm has used a tool called Hearsay Social to make it easy for thousands of agents to find and post relevant content on Facebook. This system led to a snowball effect for social sharing.

Marketers love to talk about personalization, but their plans fall flat because of logistics. It’s hard to justify spending a lot of money to create content for a specific audience. That’s how finserv companies end up with general listicles meant for a general audience.

State Farm, meanwhile, incentivized agents to share content by arming them with specific stories that could subtly remind people of the benefits of being insured. According to our research, a short interactive article titled “Frozen Pipe Losses Up in 2018” has generated almost 13,000 Facebook shares.

The article offers clear tips for avoiding frozen pipes and calls out the states with the most frozen pipe water insurance claims. It’s not going to win a Pulitzer, but it’s a helpful piece of content ideal for increasing share of voice.

5. Get creative with compliance

Marketers find few things as grim as compliance. So before we get to the keys of compliance, let’s talk a little bit about death. (Trust me.)

When a famous person passes away, The New York Times can publish a detailed, reported obituary immediately. When Steve Jobs died in 2011, the Times had a 3,500-word article up within an hour. The obituary writers don’t possess other-worldly typing speed; they’re just well prepared. While covering Jobs’s death, for instance, the writing started in 2007. When the time came to let the story go live, all they had to do was give the article a final check.

Mastering the content approval process isn’t as fulfilling as writing an important longform article, but it’s important nonetheless. And with some creative thinking, it doesn’t have to be a headache that gets in the way of your job. You can still publish content at the speed of news.

In highly regulated industries like finance and insurance, you can’t just publish whatever you want, whenever you feel like it. Brands have to deal with oversight groups like the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). You can, however, work with your compliance team to find reasonable solutions instead of always treating them like a nuisance.

In financial services, savvy companies tweak their workflows to avoid approval timelines that can last upwards of three months. If you meet with compliance at the start of the project, they’ll at least be aware of what you’re working on and can flag potential issues ahead of time.

An adjusted workflow might look something like this:

Marketers have started to figure out how to build better relationships with compliance teams. If you’re looking for more efficiency, here are a handful of help exercises that can help you increase productivity.

As a final piece of advice, it helps to use some sort technology platform when figuring out compliance. Given that compliance issues often result from a lack of transparency or communication, relying on manual processes doesn’t always work. Technology can handle the logistics, freeing up marketers to focus more on the creative parts of their job. Additionally, it’ll automate certain things like record-keeping, version control, and workflows if you need to review anything down the road.

Conclusion

In 2020, capturing attention is only going to get more competitive in the financial services industry.

The good news is there’s still an opportunity for companies of all sizes to create meaningful content and build long-term relationships with customers. People need financial advice. They crave that expertise. They’re just looking for it to be delivered in a thoughtful way.

The companies that want to stand out and lead the industry need to concentrate on the entire content lifecycle. They have to put as much energy into content distribution, compliance, and sales enablement as they do the creative process. It takes time to build a high-performing content program, but if they put in the work now, their investment will pay off.

If you’re interested in creating high-performing content, click here to set up a free consultation with one of our content experts.

The post Financial Services Content Report: Industry Benchmarks & 5 Keys to Success appeared first on Contently.

The sign reads like a parody of the worst kind of lifestyle advertising. What does being a sister have to do with yoga? The more I walk by it, the less sense it makes. The third line gets to me the most, though. “I am authentic” just doesn’t communicate anything concrete or valuable to the consumer.

There are plenty of popular marketing terms that irritate me (“subject-matter experts,” “micro-moments,” “thought leadership”), but “authentic” bothers me the most. While crappy buzzwords are usually just convoluted ways of saying simple things, “authentic” is especially problematic because of its hollowness. Marketers frequently use it in a way that’s either meaningless or contradictory.

Now I get to make sure that the word never ends up on The Content Strategist.

Last year, Contently started developing cross-functional teams to add new features to our software. The philosophy was that bringing people together from different departments could lead to a more insightful perspective. My team—consisting of account managers, developers, salespeople, talent managers, and editors—focused on improving the editing experience. So we developed a tool, called “Brand Assist,” that could quickly identify common issues like passive voice, plagiarism, broken links, and blacklisted words.

These triggers provide a snapshot of a story’s technical quality so editors and decision-makers can spend their time on the big picture.

Calling out blacklisted words became a subtly important part of that process. Every publication operates with an editorial code, and in the world of content marketing, editors often enforce very specific rules related to marketing goals and brand governance. I’ve talked to brand editors who aren’t allowed to publish certain terms, like “Super Bowl,” due to copyright concerns. Others may not want to include names of competitors or competitors’ products. You’d be surprised how two or three of these blacklisted words can sour an otherwise good draft in the eyes of some editors. Now writers can check the list before they start a draft to proactively avoid compliance missteps.

As the managing editor of The Content Strategist, I also saw the feature as a way to tighten the language on our publication. Eliminating “authentic” has become part of my editorial code, alongside a few other preferences that aren’t shared by all publishers. For example, we always use the Oxford comma because it eliminates any ambiguity when grouping terms in a list. And we don’t capitalize job titles, because there’s already enough emphasis on someone who gets to be the senior ninja of customer happiness. The more rules we add, the harder it is to stay on top of them all, especially when new writers and editors need time to learn our style guide.

During my three years at Contently, I’ve noticed more writers and PR contacts relying on the A-word as a crutch in pitches and articles, normally as a way to explain why some campaign was successful. It’s such a vague word that could be replaced by more substantive alternatives like “genuine,” “honest,” or “self-aware.”

On the brand side, marketers of all kinds have been falling back on “authentic” as well. But what exactly does that mean? Language is certainly an important differentiator in marketing, yet every company wants to be authentic and sell authentic products. This type of advertising has become pervasive. A pizzeria in Salt Lake City can’t offer customers authentic New York pizza unless it’s actually located in New York. (Of course, pizza places in New York don’t have to explicitly say they’re from New York.)

To me, the mistake conflates identity with quality. It assumes that a pizzeria’s appeal comes down to some imprecise superiority rather than, say, talented chefs, unique recipes, and fresh ingredients. This kind of thinking obscures the good qualities and differentiators that brands should actually emphasize. The more they push for authenticity, across all industries, the less the word means.

If the word shows up in a draft, I remove it every time (unless the writer uses it satirically).[note]I broke my own rules in this piece, but it’s for a good cause.[/note] If it’s part of a quotation, I try my hardest to cut out that sentence and look for a more meaningful talking point from the interview. Having this automated assistance ready for me on every draft saves time and simplifies the approval process. All I had to do was enter it into our publication guidelines.

Our editorial team puts a lot of effort into preserving clarity and consistency throughout our articles. I think we’ve been successful thus far because we treat our audience with intelligence. Marketing clearly has a language problem—if you’re skeptical, I’d encourage you to read the series that Joe Lazauskas, our editor-in-chief, wrote last year on bad buzzwords. Now we get to address that problem head-on, one word at a time.

The post Why We Stopped Using the Word ‘Authentic’ appeared first on Contently.

But these frustrations are nothing compared to when marketing approaches compliance.

Compliance and marketing have a notoriously complicated relationship. Today, marketers aim to produce engaging content and other marketing assets at a rapid clip. This doesn’t always jive with legal, which wants to mitigate risk. When talking with marketer friends, I’ve heard rants ranging from “Does legal even listen to our corporate goals?” to “They’re all plotting against us at happy hour, aren’t they?”

The conversation soon turns to tactics. Experienced marketers talk about “greasing wheels,” “smoothing feathers,” and a dozen other clichés for manipulating other departments in the name of “getting shit done.” Free pizza, unsurprisingly, does seem to go a long way. But even the best New York slice can only do so much.

Over the past few years, I’ve learned from marketers who regularly produce compelling, relevant, and timely content with legal as a standard part of the workflow. Here are their stories.

10 commandments: Big Swiss bank

The social media crew at “Big Swiss Bank” worked with their legal department to define 10 common issues that hold up the approval of content—10 commandments that shall not be broken, if you will.

The social and legal teams shut themselves in a room and defined these commandments in a common language. If a piece of content risks violating up to three of the commandments, it goes through a specific legal process. If it infringes on four or more, it goes through a stricter process. And so on.

Their workflow is simple: Each piece of content goes through legal with a digital cover sheet that contains 10 checkboxes that need to be addressed. Voila!

Why it’s worth it: Content once took an average of 90 days to get through legal, meaning that every new message was at least 90 days stale. By using this new process, content can go live in under a week, if it abides by all the commandments.

Fixed/flex/free: Global hardware company

Similar to the 10 commandments crew, this company worked with legal to define clear parameters for content approval. Since the stakes were smaller and the major no-no’s were a bit more straightforward, they only required three categories of rules: fixed, flex, and free.

• Fixed rules are hard and fast. They include anything anything that would “break the law” of the brand/brand voice, anything that would break the actual law, and anything that would put the company in a major PR crisis. In short, it covered anything that would get someone fired … or worse.
• Flex rules are creative guidelines. While not hard set rules, these are sensitive areas that require more attention from both management and legal, like things that have never been done before or anything that could be considered provocative or aggressive toward the competition. The rules also include guidelines for formats, story angles, and new channels.
• Free is just as friendly as it sounds. This is a list of common FAQs that any new employee or freelancer would need to know. It also includes a library of work already published.

Why it’s worth it: Given the scope of this company’s content efforts, which include publishing in markets across the globe, there’s always someone new writing stories. The Fixed/Flex/Free model made it easy for everyone to quickly learn what works and what doesn’t. It encourages fresh thinking, and—in most instances—allows the company to publish articles that fall into the “free bucket” without legal review.

The celebrity obituary: Major U.S. credit card company

One of the more darker media practices is the celebrity obituary. Newspapers and magazines have pre-written obituaries for popular celebrities, political figures, and other persons of interests that cover every possible cause of death. Upon an untimely death, these prepared obits help publishers scoop their competition and/or make sure they’re not too late to the news cycle.

A kinder name for this model might be “predictive publishing.” This is when a company prematurely drafts content in response to major events that haven’t happened yet. For example, a major U.S. credit card company drafts explanatory content in the event that The Fed increases interest rates. The content has already been put through a full legal review with areas were flagged for future edits. Because of this forward thinking, the company will be able to take that story to market quickly as soon as interest rates actually go up.

Why it’s worth it: During certain events, like the volatility in the marketplace in Q1 of 2016, people clamor for content explaining what to think and how to act. But most brands provided content that was thin or dated, at best—a missed opportunity as people look for information that can help them plan, understand, or act during market swings. Most financial companies didn’t publish helpful information during the volatile period earlier this year, because it wouldn’t have been relevant by the time it got through legal. The few companies that practice predictive publishing had content ready to publish, and they looked really smart when they took advantage of the moment.

Add legal to your team: Major mutual fund company

When you can’t beat them, ask them to join you. A major mutual fund company that publishes content to empower its financial advisers has made legal a true part of the content team, inviting them to sit among the company’s editors. This move lets legal contribute to brainstorms, stay in the loop, and drink with a pack of writers during happy hour.

Why it’s worth it: In this instance, collaboration between content and legal has resulted in fantastic story ideas. Interactions are quick and pleasant instead of slow and painful. Take a look at your setup—there may be a valid argument for having a member of your legal team sit with content.

When all else fails…

When all else fails, or none of the approaches above are realistic solutions, try spending quality time with the people who deal with compliance. The goal isn’t to get legal to say yes to everything; it’s to get them to stop saying no immediately. Over time, you can get to a place of “yes, but…” or “yes, if…” It all starts with playing nice. After all, it’s harder to say no to an email address with a face attached to it. It’s even harder to say no with a mouth full of pizza.

The post 4 Ways to Make Friends With Legal and Get Content Out Faster appeared first on Contently.