You know why some of the biggest US publishers like Gannett, Dow Jones, and the New York Times hate Brave Software and sent it a cease and desist letter?  I’ll tell you why, because Brave has a browser that’s all about stopping ad targeting and people-tracking.  It just got $4.5 more million to keep working on it.  Jack Marshall reports that founder Brendan Eich isn’t waging a war on advertising or trying to hurt publishers’ revenue.  In fact, he says he’s helping them because “all this data is being shared and that doesn’t benefit anybody but the arbitragers.”  Brave intends to get ads in front of people, but in more privacy-conscious ways.  Meanwhile his browser speeds desktop browsing up to 60% and mobile browsing up to 300% because it’s not bogged down by the third parties.

Programmatic advertising is the data-driven, automated marketing dream, right?   Well not for everybody, because it’s geared toward platforms that have mass audiences.  But if you’re a super niche-programming play, such as oh I don’t know, podcasting, not so much.  In fact, Lindsey Bennett reports that at the International Advertising Association event by Nova, several people thought programmatic becoming the way of the world might kill podcasting in its adolescence.  Head of Creative Services Andy Milne said, “If you just buy the best CPM available and stick it in there, you lose contextualization.  No one will accept an ad if it’s contextually irrelevant.”  Mamamia Women’s Network’s Monique Bowley thinks podcasts should focus on sponsored content, not ads, and went on to predict in 5 years, podcasts will have gone to a Netflix-style subscription model.

Sure Facebook live video streams are great, but wouldn’t they be a lot better if they were interrupted with 15 second video ads?  I bet you’re like me and think that’d be an awesome user experience.  And that’s what Facebook is testing with some publishing partners.  Garett Sloane writes in AdAge the Zucker-man always said he thinks pre-roll ads ruin the viewing experience.  Guess he feels different about interrupting a live event.  They’ll use ads from existing video campaigns but marketers can opt out.  One agency said, “We wanted to opt out immediately, because there was no reporting and you don’t have control over where the commercial shows up.”  But 22squared’s Chris Tuff says it could work, depending on the ad creative.

Trends are always fun to hear about, although guesses about future trends are like scary exes, everybody’s got one.  These come from Jessica Ann so see if you see what she sees, see?  1. Getting rid of, once and for all, the thought that gaining followers or Page likes should be a goal.  More does not equal effective.  2. Emotional content is more crucial than ever, people aren’t swept off their feet by specs and features so much anymore.  The caveat to that is, emotional storytelling is not easy and not anyone can do it.  3. Source info in a concise way and please those very short average attention spans.  And make sure the info you gather up speaks to your audience’s pain points in a fun, creative way.  What trends is Jessica missing?  Tweet me @brandcontentst.

What do we want?  Seamless, continuous experiences across multiple devices.  When do we want it?  A couple of years ago.  But the Mobile Advertising Around the Globe 2016 report from Marin Software says you better know the strengths and weaknesses of each channel, and how people are using them.  Peggy Anne Salz reports apps make up about 90% of all time spent on mobile, so how’s your app ad game?  The report shows a shift in click share away from desktops to phones, with tablet clicking “relatively flat.”  For display ads, at the end of 2015, 71% of all display ad clicks were on a phone.  Tablets were again, flat.  What’s the deal with tablets and phablets not catching fire in terms of ad clicking?  The report says by the end of 2016, 45% of all ad dollars will be spent on smartphones, moving it ahead of desktops.

I like Bill Carmody, you know why?  Cause he validates me.  Forever, I’ve griped to whoever will listen, which is nobody, that Facebook’s a giant bait and switch on marketers.  Spend money to get people to join Facebook, build their user base, then be forced to pay to get content your fans literally asked to see in front of your own audience.  Seriously?  Well Bill says consider the possibility Facebook’s a colossal waste of money and we’re all getting played.  In addition to paying to talk to your own audience, Bill doesn’t like that we’re not allowed to reward people with something of value in exchange for a desired action, like a like or share.  API won’t work with Twitter, app restrictions, access to customer data; he’s got a lot of issues, mostly about rising tolls to reach your audience and perpetually changing rules so you can’t ever really stick to your Facebook strategy.  Preach it.

Eventually, a format gets so hot that even LinkedIn gets in on the action.  The now Microsoft owned professional social network launched a standalone app that lets their influencers – influential people, not you or me – record, post and share 30-second video clips of their highly sought after thoughts.  Venturebeat says it might expand to us lowlifes later on.  On the viewer side, you watch these videos from people you follow right in your feed, and afterward you’re shown other videos on that same topic you might like.  LinkedIn Sr. Product Manager Jasper Sherman-Presser says videos you can embed is on the roadmap, and yes, livestreaming is in the back of their minds and might someday move to the front of their minds.

A Videology study of video campaigns that ran on its platform in Q2 shows that most of you guys, 43%, have viewability as your main objective.  Then comes click thru rate and view thru rate.  Of the campaigns looking for viewability, the vast majority defined that as the MRC standard of half of pixels on the screen for 2 or more consecutive seconds.  Over half of campaigns targeted by behavior, while there was a 115% annual jump in those measuring demographic targeting with Nielsen or comScore, kinda like TV.  Cross-screen advertising saw a 20% annual rise, with most being the big combo meal of PC, mobile, and connected TV.

That’s it.  Thanks for the follows @mikestiles.

Are you happy with social media?  No you’re not.  At least not as happy as you were last year, especially with Facebook and Twitter.  The American Customer Satisfaction Index says overall customer satisfaction with social media is down 1.4% from last year.  But happiness with Facebook plunged 9 and Twitter fell 8%.  Why?  What upset you so much?  The study suggests it’s because Facebook was hit with suspicions it suppressed content, and people didn’t so much like Twitter ditching its reverse-chronological Timeline.  SocialTimes goes on to report only 3 social nets actually went up in satisfaction over 2015; Wikipedia, YouTube and Google+ all were up 1%.  ACSI Managing Director David VanAmburg says global brands with tons of users on Facebook and Twitter are trying to do a lot, while YouTube and Wikipedia specialize.

In this corner, branded content.  And in this corner, pre-roll advertising.  Time to find out who’s toughest when it comes to recall.  The decision is in from Nielsen and branded content gets an average 86% brand recall from viewers as opposed to pre-roll’s 65%.  Wayne Friedman reports in the Television News Daily that as if that weren’t enough, branded content also has the advantage in brand perception.  In affinity it wins 28-18%.  For purchase intent it’s 14-11.  And it wins in recommendation intent 20-16%.  Poor pre-roll.  I know I love a good “Skip This Ad” button.  Now, do you think you can do as good a job distributing content as publishers?  Marketers who work with publishers got a 50% higher brand lift on average than do it yourselfers.

Look at you, you’re sick!  Sick with envy!  You think everyone else is doing content marketing better than you.  Or do you?  Ascend2 did a little survey to find out how you guys think you’re doing compared to all the other people out there like you.  Most, about half, think their content strategy is somewhat successful compared to competitors.  Next at 29% comes somewhat unsuccessful.  Ayaz Nanji goes on to report 54% think their content marketing’s effectiveness is increasing marginally, 35% say it is increasing significantly.  Then they break down the biggest barriers they have.  We have a tie at 48%, lack of an effective content strategy and lack of content creation resources.  One point behind at 47% is budget constraints.  Then comes inability to measure effectiveness, lack of cross channel integration, and lack of compelling content ideas.

Who doesn’t love to have people saying nice things about them?  For instance, you’re the greatest podcast audience in the world, and I mean that.  But does it mean as much if you pay people to say nice things about you?  Your answer might actually be yes, because there are brands that  pay for positive reviews or reward them in some way.  Well Douglas Karr reminds us why that’s a truly bad idea.  You, and even the reviewer, could get in trouble with the FTC.  You could get in trouble with the platform too.  If you get caught, all that paid content will be stricken from internetland.  And then there’s your reputation.  Oh yeah, that.  If you have to pay or reward people to get them to say something nice, the assumption is, no one does that authentically, no one likes you.

Hope you’ve got a podcast going because Pandora needs you.  COO Sarah Clements says it wants more of that non-music programming because it will grow overall listening hours, and half of their users are listening to podcasty content every week…but somewhere else.  They want those ears back.  Janko Roettgers says they’re already streaming “This American Life” and “Serial.”  Their listening hours are up 7% year-over-year, but monthly active listeners went down 1.3M.  They need something else interesting to listen to, and joy oh joy, podcasts are actually cheaper for Pandora than music.  No music royalty payments, which eat up a ton of Pandora’s revenue.  Elton John wants to get paid!

Many of you do a lot of eye rolling while you’re listening to the Content Marketing Quickie.  That’s alright.  You don’t know what I’m doing with my eyes either.  But one day we might be interacting in virtual reality and every facial expression will be reflected in our avatars.  This company called Veeso has a Kickstarter going to be one of the first to capture all that subtlety.  Actually what they’ve got is a face-tracking developer kit, no content, you have to make that being the hot VR developer you are.  Lucas Matney writes that in addition to being able to show emotions, eye-tracking sensors capture your line of sight.  It turns out, and this was news to me, eye contact is important to social interactions.  All this has some interesting angles when you think about virtual customer service.

Boy, knowing why people share stuff on Facebook would make life easier if you’re tasked with getting engagement metrics up wouldn’t it.  Your new best friend is Fractl, because check out what they learned.  Ashley Carlisle reports women share more than men, and of the women who share at least one time a day, 7 out of 10 of them share several times a day.  Men and women share for one main reason, to entertain their friends.  But women are a little more diverse in their motivations.  22% more likely to do it to express themselves about things they care about.  37% more likely to do it to get an emotional reaction.  For men and women, the older they are, the more likely they are to share stuff and do it more often.  Millennial men, or dudes, are the least likely to share.

If you’ve got a hot blog on Tumblr with lots of readers, Tumblr thanks you because they’re about to sell ads on it.  Calm down, simmer down now…you’d get some money for it, and if you don’t want ads you can change the settings to make sure there aren’t any.  You can even stop ads from running just on one post.  But ads on blogs will be the default so you have to take action if you don’t want them.  Tumblr’s funny in that they want to make money, so it’s time to better monetize their 65M users and their content.  TechCrunch says there aren’t that many details but basically, the way Tumblr’s Creatrs program connected brands to influencers, the same can now happen for you and your blog.  Founder David Karp wrote, “It’s been a busy summer—next up: getting you paid for your work.”  Tumblr, of course, is owned by Yahoo, which means it’s now owned by Verizon.

Likewise, Reddit wants to also make money and monetize, except their dance is a little trickier because that user base tends to be pretty snarky and jump on marketers who are less than authentically trying to connect with the youngsters.  But founders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian are working to make that brand-user connection more honest…at least more honest than on Facebook.  Huffman says, “When advertisers come with honest intentions we see higher engagement.  We don’t see hostility.”  So George Slefo reports that on August 4, here comes Promoted User Posts, a new ad product where you can sponsor user’s posts.  The post’s creator will be asked their permission and if they say yes, they get Reddit Gold which gives them platform benefits.  Reddit strategists will keep watch and tip brands off to any organic posts they see that might be sponsor-worthy.

That’s it.  I’m asking for the follow @mikestiles.

Sujan Patel lays out some interesting marketing stats for us including a few that might surprise/frustrate you.  You keep hearing how important it is to have a documented content strategy right?  Yeah well fewer, that’s the opposite of more, fewer marketers have one than last year.  57% of B2B marketers are using print and offline promotions over content marketing, even though only 31% think it works.  You’ve got to admire the commitment to failure don’t you?  65% have a lot of trouble defining what content is and isn’t effective.  60% of marketers don’t know how to make engaging content, that explains a lot of what you see.  One more.  Marketers are mostly using social content, case studies and blogs as tactics.  The most effective tactics however are in-person events, webinars and webcasts, and case studies.  What, they got case studies right.

What do you think of when I say “Pleasure-Arousal-Dominance?”  No one would blame you for thinking about the nasty.  But it’s actually a model used to test the emotional reaction to content.  Fractl used it to test Reddit images and found the top 10 triggered emotions that cause content to get shared.  And they’re all positive feelies!  The top 3 are Happiness, Surprise, and Admiration.  But Andrea Lehr reports studies show it’s actually the right combo of valence, arousal, and dominance that make things go viral.  Valence is the positivity or negativity of an emotion.  Arousal ranges from excitement to relaxation.  Dominance goes from submission to being in control.  The bottom line is if you can surprise people, you’re in good shape, no matter what the levels of arousal or dominance.  So, try to make something we don’t see coming.

Are you a freelancer?  Are you going to charge me by the hour to research and answer that question?  Shubhomita Bose with Small Business Trends says you guys are in big demand, especially if you’re a developer or content marketer.  Upwork Skills Index listed the fastest growing skill set demands and they are UX design, ASP development, Shopify development, English proofreading and SEO writing.  That SEO writing, video editing and lead generation are the top content marketing freelance needs.  But those who know future technologies, including VR and Augmented Reality will do fine as well.  Upwork’s Stephane Kasriel says, “This information can be leveraged by smart professionals who continue to educate themselves to capitalize on market demands.”  That’s just in case you don’t win America’s Got Talent.

What do people want in the way of content?  Entertainment and information, right?  So on the information side we might want to look at where, how and why people like to get their news.  Pew Research Center says people aren’t ignorant, 70% follow national and local news somewhat or very closely.  81% get at least some news digitally; sites, apps or social.  People mainly count on news orgs for news, imagine that.  But don’t underestimate the importance of friends and family.  In fact, when it comes to trust, they trust family and friends as much as the news orgs, which 74% think are biased one way or the other.  62% get some news from social, but they’re a lot more skeptical about that as a news source.  Okay here’s the part where you brands should pay special attention.  Once they find an information source they like, 76% go back to it over and over.  And if they get news a few times in a week from somewhere, almost 3/4 remember where they got it.

Time to engage in America’s favorite game show, “Make Millennials Happy!”  Unless you’re one of them, they’re more important than you.  And if you, as a marketer, are trying to please them, Michael Svatek of Rivet Works has some insight.  They get distracted easily.  From 2000 to 2015, the human attention span dropped 33% to 8 seconds.  So make the content easy to assess and easy to move on to the next story.  Millennials get over 5,000 marketing messages a day, so they’re working hard to not see ads, even good ones.  Just 1% says a clever ad influences them.  And you better be authentic because that’s more important than the content you make.  If you come across as real and sincere, they MIGHT share personal info with you, and you need that badly because they like personalized stuff.  And they want to co-create with you.

Ever hear of the Federal Trade Commission?  You might want to read up on them because they’re the ones that set a lot of the rules we marketers have to follow.  But Jonathan Crowl reports the sorta good news is they traditionally haven’t had much of a clue how to handle branded content or native advertising.  They’re studying it again, especially issues with location tracking and privacy language.  Their latest rules made publishers be super explicit labeling native advertising, and a lot of people thought it would hurt the tactic.  It really didn’t.  Dedicated Media found out people spend as much time with branded content as with regular content.  Jonathan’s suggestion is why wait around for the FTC?  You already know consumers don’t like to be lied to or tricked, you know labeling native advertising won’t hurt it, so find out what your customers want you to do and do that.

As a public service, The Content Marketing Quickie is going to keep you out of jail.  Well, maybe not jail, but we at least want to help you avoid a huge fine and a public relations disaster.  A blog is a very demanding thing, a beast that needs to be fed.  And part of what it needs is images.  These aren’t always easy to find, and they can be expensive.  So what some corporate bloggers do is, well, steal.  They might not even know they’re stealing.  Douglas Karr tells the tale of a client that used a photo marked royalty-free from a Google Image Search, then got a bill for $3,000 for using it.  He lists copyright infringement as one of the big 3 legal gotchas bloggers run into.  The other two are defamation (turns out you can’t legally hurt reputations using false statements, even though the media does it multiple times per day), and CAN-SPAM violations involving commercial emails.  That could get you a $16,000 fine, and I’m betting you don’t have it on you.

Look at 2016 fly by, zoom!  We’re already halfway through it.  Nothing stays the same.  It was just a couple of months ago we weren’t even hearing the words Pokemon Go.  Social media marketing definitely never stays the same, so Lee Odden called to our attention things we should be paying attention to.  1. Facebook’s dominance isn’t going anywhere, so plan for it.  2. Video’s dominance isn’t going anywhere.  Facebook’s Nicola Mendelsohn says in 5 years, Facebook will probably be all video.  3. You’ll get more social advertising products and options cause it’s pay to play.  4. Social chat bots will boom to satisfy real-time engagement.  And 5. Social automation will help you get the right content to the right people at the right time, all integrated with a marketing dashboard for reporting.

Time to make some people famous.  Well, in their industry anyway.  The Content Marketing Institute announced the finalists for the top 4 Content Marketing Award trophies, which will be announced at Content Marketing World in Cleveland September 8.  So if you were there for the Republican convention, stick around a couple of months.  Your Content Marketer of the Year finalists are Dan Briscoe and Skyler Moss at Hyland’s, Tobias Lee of Thomson Reuters, Dusty DiMercurio at Autodesk, Margaret Magnarelli in marketing at Monster (wow that’s a lot of M’s), and Amanda Todorovich with the Cleveland Clinic.  Joe Pulizzi says they got 1,300 entries overall and it was clear marketers are starting to really “get” content marketing.

India’s a big place.  Ever try to walk across it?  Really big.  And because Facebook has 142M users there and those users are totally wild about watching videos, they’re piloting the feature there that lets them save videos to watch offline.  Saritha Rai says this is especially useful, at least in theory, in places like India where internet connectivity is eh.  Downloading stuff is expensive, but Medianama.com’s Nikhil Pahwa says 40% of data on phones is video viewing anyway.  They like Bollywood song sequences.  I’m not being racist, that’s what they said, and a big reason why YouTube started the save feature there in 2014.  Don’t live in India but also want some news about Facebook video?  Okay.  Michael Crider of Android Police says they added video saving to the Android app.

That’s it.  Let me inform or amuse you @mikestiles

Who is Animoto?  Does Styx sing about them?  No, that was Mr. Roboto.  Animoto helps brands make videos and they put out the Social Video Forecast, which seeks to find out how marketers and SMB owners are or aren’t adopting video.  eContent reports 60% of marketers and 55% of SMB owners think video marketing is a “must-have” to be relevant.  So it’s no surprise that 63% of both will invest more in it next year.  And that means finding the talent who can do it.  They say it’s a more priority skill in the next year than email, design, or writing.  Far from being egotistical bastards, 23% of marketers see themselves as being either “behind” or “way behind” competitors with video.  The study also shows something that won’t surprise you, Facebook is the big dog social platform for video, with YouTube second, so expect that to be where the paid promotion goes but Instagram will do fine too, especially with the marketers.

It’s one of your most critical, most important distribution channels, so you should care a lot about social media at your company and the fine people who handle your social media.  You should hug them if your HR department allows it, because it’s not easy.  I’ve done it.  Things are always changing, targets are always moving, bosses are rarely happy.  And Simply Measured’s State of Social Marketing Report reveals a bunch of other stressors.  Social teams are still teeny tiny.  Most, 71%, have just 2 or 3 people handling one of the most crucial communications tools in existence.  They’re still trying to show success with engagement metrics but businesses aren’t impressed enough by that to resource them properly.  42% say they don’t have enough for the software they need to publish and analyze.  And this blew me away, I even ran to see if my calendar really did say 2016.  34% surveyed have no software budget period.

A great deal of the content that content marketers talk about lives at the top of the funnel, but there’s another part of the funnel and I learned that at frat parties in college.  Kaleigh Moore lists 5 kinds of content that your bottom of the funnel audience needs and wants.  See if you’ve got all this covered.  Social proof.  They know you like your product, they want to hear from real, happy customers.  A discount, deal, or free trial.  Let them try it on.  Content that shows you know their specific niche.  Proof of your authority to lock up that trust.  And fast response.  InfusionSoft says after 30 minutes, your lead is 21x less likely to turn into a sale.  Automated emails at least let them know help is coming someday.

Having marketing challenges in China?  Join the club.  You can try to lift and spread the strategies from your other regions ‘til your blue, but China will quickly knock your one-size-fits-all dream on its global butt.  Tencent VP Steve Chang says it’s critical for marketers to understand what makes that market different.  CNNIC research shows the US has over twice the Internet users as China and a penetration rate of around 87% compared to 49% of the Chinese population.  But around 90% of Chinese users are on smartphones compared to only around 57% in the US.  US users would respond to mobile ads around 56% of the time, the Chinese 79% of the time.  59% of Americans were more likely to shop on mobile compared to 78% of Chinese.  So knowing China’s social design and usage is necessary to tailor campaigns and use the mobile content that’s in demand there to gather data on user interests and who they view as influencers, also especially important there.

Here comes the next full service content marketing studio, and it’s Yahoo Storytellers.  What’s its advantage?  Well they plan to make good use of Yahoo’s longtime editorial expertise, all that data it has, and Yahoo Gemini’s native advertising.  Emma Martin reports it’s about developing, distributing and measuring branded content.  Yahoo Chief Revenue Officer Lisa Utzschneider adds that there’s content consulting services, workshops, influencer activations and partnership extensions.  Speaking of partners, Endemol Shine Beyond is one of Yahoo’s partners on the production side, and President Bonnie Pan calls Yahoo one of the original digital storytellers.  Cause Shakespeare didn’t have Twitter.

We should probably talk about SEO a lot more than we do.  TNW News reports just shy of half of digital marketers say it’s one of their most effective tactics while 39% say it’s also one of the hardest.  Top Rank Marketing Blog’s Julia Ramos heard WordStream’s Larry Kim give these 3 tips and I’m taking them.  #1: Stop putting keywords in your meta titles.  The better performing ones tend to not have the exact keywords.  Your meta should address the intent of the search so people will click your result.  #2: Remember what actually impacts CTR.  The answer is headlines appealing to emotional triggers.  #3: Focus on engagement.  Bounce rate is the #1 indicator searchers don’t like your stuff and Google knows it.  If you have content that regularly does bad, delete it because it’ll hurt how your content looks at the domain level.

If you had beautiful eyes and everyone was always talking about how pretty your eyes are, would you go around with a blindfold on?  Of course not.  A) You’d fall in a hole, and B) you don’t want to hide one of your best features.  That’s why Alex Kantrowitz can’t figure out why Twitter has virtually hidden the ability to temporarily follow people when an event you’re interested in is going on.  He couldn’t even get Twitter to comment on it.  But it’s in the Moments feature.  And what it does is insert tweets right into your timeline from handles you don’t follow but that matter for a little while.  You don’t have to see these in Moments, it’s right there in your regular stream.  Then when the event ends, the follow ends.  You follow an event in the Moments tab by hitting a “Follow” button that’s there sometimes, but sometimes isn’t.  #gofigure.

You didn’t expect Facebook to be happy just being Facebook and staying on Facebook did you?  Heck, you knew that when Facebook put Like buttons all over other sites.  Josh Constine says those see 10B views per day.  But that’s not enough for the big F’er.  Now they’ll have a Facebook Share Chrome extension.  See something you like?  Swell.  Click it and it’ll save to Facebook so you can read it there later.  Can you hear Readability shaking in its shoes?  They thought about getting websites to voluntarily integrate their Save plugin but decided, eh, a Chrome Extension makes more sense.  And get this, because you’re such a forgetful sad sack, when you save something new you’ll be reminded of what you recently saved.

Your c-suite might be waiting for you to tell them content marketing can be totally automated and run by algorithms, no human creativity necessary.  You should quit that company.  Gavin O’Malley writes that Medialink CEO Michael Kassan recently told the content world, “There’s no algorithm that can actually tell you what people are going to like.”  You can make a little better guess from predictive modeling, but people will make gut decisions and marketers have to communicate in more content-like ways.  He says, “What I mean is not that Procter & Gamble or Coca-Cola should be producing the next scripted television show, but they need to integrate their message into that content stream either through native advertising, or more legitimate organic product or brand content.”  Michael thinks, and let us know if you agree, that people don’t want their entertainment and their marketing separate anymore.

Facebook changed their News Feed algorithm again.  I know, shocker right?  I should have told you to sit down first.  And if you’re a publisher, you’re not gonna love it.  For you, just about any tiny, slight, remaining notion that you can get your content seen organically based on how good it is, without paying, is pretty much extinct.  The changes are to make sure people see posts from their friends and family higher up in their feeds.  Venturebeat reports it’ll wind up way up there especially if those friends and family posts get engaged with.  VP Product Management Adam Mosseri says, “If it’s your friends, it’s in your feed, period.”  The change also tries to filter out spam and misleading content.  What’s the exact definition of those things?  Well to their credit, Facebook says “we don’t know.”  What they do know, and want to prepare you for, is that some Page admins might see their reach and referral traffic go down.  But we’re used to that now.  Why it’s almost become a tradition.

Follows are nice, as are new friends. @mikestiles

media

Having made it the bulk of my career, I was sad about the decline of radio.  It wasn’t from a lack of talent who knew how to attract, relate to, entertain, hold, and make an audience want to come back for more.  That was instinct for people like us.  Rather it fell into the hands of a new wave of management that didn’t understand any of those things and refused to trust those who did.  They didn’t get the art of building deep relationships with people you’ve never met.

But as a showman, I was excited, because the mandate to entertain and inform was shifting to brands thanks to a numbing exhaustion of advertising and the rise of this thing called content marketing.  Now countless companies would themselves be putting on “shows,” and the demand for great ideas and entertainers would skyrocket.  Everything we entertainers and journalists were trained in, experienced in, and knew deep in our bones how to do was now needed for branded content.  It was going to be a revolution, the dawn of nearly limitless well-funded, crowd-pleasing, hell maybe even experimental media.

The ebook I wrote back in 2010 talked about this seismic shift and how what’s old would be new again as brands would be the presenters of programs just as they had with the Texaco Star Theater, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, and Kraft Television Theater.  Yes, there would be ads in those shows, but the purpose of the shows would be strictly to entertain and delight a happy audience who would then be present and receptive to ads.  This was going to be great!

Boy was I wrong.

Not all, but most brands could not be LESS interested in customer-centricity, or entertaining and delighting the public.  They are as locked down in merchandising and advertising as ever, just like dear old dad was in his cool Mad Men suit back in the 60’s.  There’s a rejection of the common sense that if you give the public a show they absolutely adore, maybe even are addicted to, that there’s value in that for a company.  I wonder if the creators of Seinfeld, Friends and Big Bang Theory are broke?  They must be!  Because there’s no ROI in making a show that doesn’t obnoxiously market something throughout it, right?  Those shows weren’t worth doing.

Those shows not only worked, they kept working and are STILL working as permanent revenue machines.  Why?  Because they made them.  They at least tried them to see if they would work.

Brands however, can’t seem to get past their inward-focused self-parody of corporate culture long enough to make content that isn’t stuffed with pervasive shilling.  There’s no faith in the content, no faith in the public to reward good content.  Let’s call it what it is, it’s just another ad, only bigger and labeled “content” so we can say at the next convention that we’re big on content.

There’s nothing wrong with talking about content strategy and technology stacks and key performance metrics and business objectives and distribution and data and personalization and targeting.  All of that is essential to maximize the impact of content.  But too many brands are using endless handwringing and circular discussions about these things to put off actually making something for the public.  I repeat, I do not espouse making content without a strategy.  But nor do I think staying forever mired in the mud regarding the content itself is credible.  None of these other things you’re studying and meeting about matter in the slightest, they never come into play, if you can’t bring yourself to MAKE something.

The making is the part brands seem most uncomfortable with.  That’s understandable because they’re not entertainers or journalists, they sell widgets.  They’re far more comfortable trying to make triggering authentic human emotions a technology, data & spreadsheet exercise.  Like our dangerous radio management friends, they’re refusing to accept the art and showmanship instincts required to actually do it.  A brand will agonize 3 years over the entire content ecosystem before it makes a half-hearted, half-funded move.  Meanwhile some 13-year-old dude in Oshkosh does a video in a day and get tens of thousands of views.  The difference?  The kid was seriously committed to making something people would love and that would make them love him.  The brand was…keeping everyone’s meeting calendar full.

Blame a recent Curata study for firing me up.  It shows the biggest skills gap in corporate content marketing is content creation at 41%.  What a running kick in the balls.  This would indicate brands really do think making great content people love is critical, and worth it.  I’m not so sure they do.  If they did and were serious about content creation, the phone batteries of writers, producers, artists and filmmakers would be burning hot.  For the most part, companies are working to get by without entertainers and journalists.  And frankly, if all they’re going to allow is ads called by another name, they can.

Every brand, for all practical purposes, now has its own magazine, TV station and radio station available to them.  The audience is out there and the spotlight is on.  Are you going to leave your stage empty?  I repeat what I ask in my book…what’s your show?  Don’t talk to me about a one-off video or infographic.  What are you going to consistently, reliably, give people that’s for them, not you, that they’ll make a habit of reading, listening to or watching?  Without a show and the show-people who know how to do it, how serious about content marketing can you possibly be?

Photo: digitalart, freedigitalphotos.net

@mikestiles