Content Marketing: The Fermented Truth.

The world of marketing is tricky to say the least. Often times readers of blog sharing websites will actually employ methods that may deceive the reader, or of course, inform them on a new product. Welcome to the world of content marketing, whereby the two worlds of commercial interest meet the cash strapped writers of our era. The industry has been quick to grow and that is because of the boom in accessibility to technology.

Destinations like The Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, Reddit, Imgur, theChive, TMZ, and a host of other news outlets emulating them are becoming the source of the information we consume. Newspaper sales are most obviously on the close end of a decades long down swing, as with magazines, but at the same time readership is as high as ever.

The numbers show an irreversible trend among print media revenue displaying negative growth and online media displaying positive. A study published by Pew Research Center in May 2013, shows this related trend:

With this in mind, marketers and advertisers need to find a way to reach a broad market for exposure. As it turns out this whole newspaper crisis a very good thing for them, because newspapers cannot provide an instant feed of demographics, time, and audience information to them, which is ironic, because they are newspapers.

The following will try to coalesce the elements of content marketing, but in a way that is privy to small businesses and those who have trouble understanding the wikipedia entry on ‘Content Marketing.’

The Content

Content marketing is by no means new. As you may have read in the wikipedia entry, it is over a century old. It does not go into great detail about how it is done. So we are going to use a hilarious example of Hooked on Phonics, which was an addiction suffered by countless children but was also a brilliant business model to ensure sales were kept up by current clients.

Hooked on Phonics, as many millennials can recall, had this stupendous commercial that ran during children’s programming, or daytime programming: Hooked on Phonics commercial.

Thier phone number was just as brilliant: call 1-800-ABCDEFG, which admittedly would have been very hard for someone who was in need of phonetic improvement. What’s the point here though? Hooked on Phonics built a business model which depended on sales that were based on previous sales. How so? Well, if a parent or for that matter, an unlearned adult, ordered first grade, it would be suggested they purchase a higher grade and so on. It was smart to ensure sales.

One problem though, unlike other nefarious substances, phonics is hard to get hooked on. Despite pouring millions of dollars into advertising, and obtaining strategic partnerships with companies like KinderCare, the product was not necessarily effective as, you know, public education which in any case is also not the best.

Other forms of content marketing are designed to educate a potential customer base before they use your product. Often times this comes in the form of e-books, or even something called the advertorial, which is an advertisement portrayed as an editorial. These are your run of the mill infomercials, which can be wildly successful, but wildly deceptive, but we’ll get to that soon.

The Quality

Quite a bit of content marketing occurs as a sponsorship, but the content is solely related to the sponsorship. This happens when Nabisco’s Oreo purchases and fills an article on BuzzFeed about the best type of sugary sandwich cookies. Any company can do this, and do it quick too, consider this piece out of BuzzFeed, “The Definitive Ranking of Car Names.” First off, you’re thinking these are going to be the names of manufactured vehicles, cool names like: Mecialgo, Maybach, Enzo, Aventador… whatever, because those are names. No, that is not what the reader receives, instead it is a list of generic NICKNAMES: Ole’ Faithful, Plain Jane, Greased Lighting… crap no one cares about. That’s not all either, each rank has an image attached which is not particularly interesting as well as a GIF that is barely amusing. Each rank then has a one sentence description which means nothing because the reader gets the point.

The reader may discover that it was written and sponsored by Safe Auto insurance. This garbage is an advertisement, but it was, in this writers opinion, pieced together to resemble the tenets of what ‘content’ ought to be. It is a list, with headers, images, text, and information (regardless of utility) that sells rather than informs.

This piece was featured on the front page of BuzzFeed, which on a daily basis receives thousands of hits. This means a great amount of exposure for Safe Auto and it also means that Safe Auto would rather work with BuzzFeed to track viewership than an actual newspaper, which would not allow this kind of tomfoolery to occur.

The central issue around websites like this and content marketing is virality, which has nothing to do with quality. Quality is expensive and quality content marketing is even more expensive and laborious. For instance, this piece is being written for ParadigmNext, and as such the reader needs to be on their website to read this (welcome by the way, stay a while and check out our other posts!). This is technically content marketing, but to sell themselves, which they invest in and out comes (hopefully) quality content.

The lesson here is, if one is going to engage in creating content marketing OR ingesting it, skepticism regarding its quality is a crucial aspect of building legitimacy and credibility.

The Speed

In a day in age where the refresh button is now a feature of a website that happens automatically, speed is certainly an issue in content creation and marketing. Speed is a variable in quality production as well. In the above mentioned BuzzFeed piece it may have taken all but 15 minutes to write that, or it could have been longer depending on how hard it was to research (insert sarcasm).

Speed is a reason content marketing never really took off in print media the same way it has online. Data would take a while to compile, necessary edits take time, and providing more content means waiting until the next day. The move to digital media was an evolutionary one, it is as if content marketing was made for the digital age.

What happens a lot of the time – and those in the industry will openly admit this – is that previously written blogs, content, or advertorials will be “updated.” This is to say there is an addition based on new information or need to fill space in an infinite environment. Other times a piece of content will be a reorganized piece of content form someone else. This often occurs when an individual writes a list, which is easy to reorder. Whether or not this can be considered plagiarism is hard to tell, particularly because often times the piece of content a writer is reorganizing can possibly be a piece of plagiarized content too. It is not a ‘vicious cycle,’ per se, rather, a slow acting fermentation, and instead of producing wine it produces methane.

The Profitability

Exact figures are not available on the industry as a whole, so the profitability is often derived from the possible exposure a firm or its product receive, which is measurable online. Now, in other mediums like ‘As Seen on TV,’ there is a much likelier chance it receives exposure, that is, for now. A 2013 study out of eMarketer projects viewing television programs will occur less by cable providers than internet sources:

In the past television was an excellent medium for content marketing. You may remember an individual named Kevin Trudeau, who, despite his methodology, made quite the pretty penny using content marketing. For all intents and purposes, it is vital that people understand this man is con artist and as of March 17, 2014, a convicted felon.

As you can see, this man markets himself as a genius. He has discovered, or at least compiled, over sixty “cures,” for certain diseases he calls “specific.” These cures were intentionally concealed by “them,” in that “they don’t want you to know about…” these cures. Unfortunately many Americans, and for that matter, English speakers across the world, do not exercise adequate skepticism. What this man knows is human psyche, and he knows that people want a simple answer to their impossibly complex lives. Oh, you’re overweight? Why not cure yourself of it, you have to purchase a book, but then hey, you’ll be skinny. He purposely victimized himself, by insinuating the government, big pharma, and the medical research community were hiding something. This is easy to believe, because lets face it, two of those institutions are guilty of corruption in the past. The problem is when you individualize one of these institutions. Each of them is made up of hundreds of thousands of personnel, the institutions cannot make decisions as a whole body to deliberately withhold life saving information because its simply too hard. This is known as a conspiracy theory, and it only takes one person to expose a conspiracy. Consider conspiracies of the past: Watergate took two men to expose it, Linda Tripp exposed the president, and most recently, one staffer in Governor Chris Christie’s staff exposed him with Bridgegate. You think an entire industry, much less three, are capable of holding back secrets that Trudeau claims they are? No.

Trudeau, and his ghastly smug look, took advantage of countless readers by promising them something if they purchase this book, the marketing was more important than the content. His profitability was also through the roof, In 2010 the Federal Trade Commision fined him $37.6 million, which may be a reflection of his earnings through his obscene infomercials. Which will lead us to sustainability in a bit.

The way to measure exposure is straight up statistical. The amount of information that any analytic software uses, be it from your website provider, Google, Yahoo, or whatever, is tremendous. Lets take the above mentioned BuzzFeed piece, the editors and sales people can see how many people read the Safe Auto piece, the source of a linked landing page, the geographical location of those reading the page and how long they read the page for. There is probably a lot more too that specific companies will want to see.

BuzzFeed can then say this many people read about Safe Auto, and Safe Auto can go to their board of directors and say that they managed to achieve a very specific and exact unit of exposure. More money is invested in that effort then, and BuzzFeed gets a piece of the pie and the fermentation continues.

The Sustainability

Clearly some nefarious examples have been provided. Hooked on Phonics, and Kevin Trudeau are both out of business. BuzzFeed is still in business, and seems to be one of the content kings of our day (despite its quality). Newspapers and its content marketing stuck around for 200 years, and it is hard to make a projection of digital content marketing. One could say that the evolution of journalism will produce paid stories on products disguised as news. This is already happening. Check out any small business news section of major online news providers. This is how they market their products, businesses, and people to the their peers. The goal is to hit it big, and then content marketing being less about the marketing and more about the content.

What does it all mean, man?

Content marketing is making an impact on what and how people read. Those who read news, are increasingly being bombarded with content that looks like news, but is really trying to sell something, or is not news at all and just a list of nothing. If you look at any front page of a news outlet, it is complied with snippets of real news, minutia, and disguised content marketing. Content marketing is not always bad, in fact, often times it is really informative, but the bad side of it really smells of a distasteful odor. Exercise suspicion when reading anything, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is, unless of course one just did a little research on the issue.

By: ParadigmNext https://paradigmnext.com.com

Google+: https://plus.google.com/+ParadigmNextChicago

ParadigmNEXT, Inc. is a digital agency headquartered in Chicagoland. We provide branding, identity, integrated marketing, social media strategy, art direction, web-design & development, startup incubation, commercial video production, product development, and commercial storefront development services to a wide array of clients ranging from bootstrapped startups to successful longstanding companies.