Marketers: adjust your settings
Green Light for blue-sky thinking
Guinness's October 'cloud' ad floated softly near many of the YouTube videos I've been watching lately. It's a 30-second version of a TV ad which has been sliced down for the web. It normally appears with the option to click out after five seconds and go through to my chosen video (what YouTube call a TrueView in-stream ad). Like any of those ads, it has five seconds to hook me, five seconds to pique my curiosity before I can escape.
In those five seconds of mandatory viewing, there's no reference to Guinness. We see a cloud moving over sea, its shadow moving onto a quay and then over a slightly confused chap under some girders, at which point, BAM, I'm bored and I'm definitely clicking out to see the video I came to YouTube for, and Guinness has had ZERO brand impact on me.
Granted, I'm a curious person, and because we work with YouTube it pays for me to understand how ads get served, so I've watched the ad through - but purely for that reason. It's a nice ad, it's a pretty ad. It's been well-received as a creative puff piece in the advertising world, as you'd expect from one of the world's strongest drink brands, (although unnamed critics have said it fails to link to the brand). But it hasn't been thought through for YouTube. It's a simple case of someone not understanding the platform. It's the online equivalent of having 14-point font on a ten-foot billboard - it just doesn't make sense.
And let's be clear, this is not a case of where creating a 'viral' ad that, shareable for its own content alone (á la Dollar Shave Club), has missed the mark. Nor is it a case of understanding just the potential for reach of a platform (staying with Gillette, as we're talking razors) but falling short. It's a misunderstanding of the fact that content AND platform TOGETHER are far more than the sum of their parts. Publishing content that is tailored to get the most out of the given platform has the potential to deliver multiples of the expected impact. This is about having your agency, and your marketers understand the potential, and the constraints, of the platform on which you're placing content. Get that wrong and you may as well sit on the toilet ripping up €50 notes, throwing the shreds between your legs.
But I'm not a marketer, I'm a journalist. Right?Platform consciousness is as crucial for journalists as it is for advertisers. Not all content is suitable for all formats. Where, say, video is shoe-horned into a page thoughtlessly, it fails to have the desired effect. Where a longer article is copied from a blog to newspaper site without the links, it is weakened. On both fronts, journalism and advertising, the ones who understand the relationship between platform and content will win the battle for eyeballs. This isn't knowledge confined to the web-native hipster 'generetion Meh', either - the old guard are catching on.
I gave a presentation to Metro International's annual gathering of editors last week and we discussed the importance of knowing your platforms, knowing your readers and their behaviours, and knowing what to put where, and when. During that talk, we discussed how the Financial Times are going digital-first. More than simply promoting digital, the FT boss Lionel Barber is beginning to realise that you have to look at each piece of content and wonder where it is appropriate to post it, and that may not be in the pink paper, straight off. A few select quotes from Lionel's email to staff set the tone for the paper's new direction:
We need to become content editors rather than page editors.We must rethink how we publish our content, when and in what form, whether conventional news, blogs, video or social media.We need to ensure that we are serving a digital platform first, and a newspaper second
The New York Times are clearly doing something similar, although Jill Abramson's memo was a little more person-focused and a lot more vague on the details. They get that when you mix content with platform sharply, it works.Journalism, or at least part thereof, finally realises it is in the business of content marketing, competing for attention with brands that are motivated to produce great content in huge volumes. The very advertisers that used to subsidise journalism have decided that traditional advertising has a limited potential for engagement, so they're creating the editorial themselves and hanging their product loosely on it. Content is king. Red Bull know this, which is how a fizzy drink has become a global media brand. Independent beer-peddlers (with a £20m turnover) Brew Dog know this. One of their biggest brand recognition wins was to blow a conversation about a Diageo-controlled prize wide open, positioning them as the dog biting at Diageo's hefty ankles. Now, their boss has said that he would 'rather take my money and set fire to it' than invest in traditional advertising, so they're putting together a TV show about craft beer.
And that brings us neatly back to Guinness. I'm not about to claim that one of the world's best-known brands don't know what they're doing. The people behind the black stuff clearly understand the black magic of advertising, and the crowd behind the cloud have a full trophy locker. But everyone makes mistakes. Their pretty cloud and its poor fit with the platform shows that the ground under our feet is constantly shifting. As you dance from platform to platform, you must be sure your content is content in its surroundings.
