Content Has To Find The User — Solving The Marketer’s Dilemma

PwC’s Strategy& Partner Christopher Vollmer in conversation with marketing leaders at Advertising Week 2016 in New York

Do you want a drink? There are now five thousand new craft beers on the market since 2011. Eight hundred new vodkas last year alone. How can Venky Balakrishnan, Global VP of Digital Innovation at Diageo (owner of some of the world’s largest brands of spirits), engage consumers in a market cluttered by so many niche products and noisy with so many competing brands and messages that his potential customers can easily tune out?

Alexandra Shapiro, EVP of Marketing and Digital Entertainment Networks for NBCUniversal’s USA Network, has a provocative new original series to promote — a dark, edgy thrill ride through hacker culture that blurs the lines between fiction and reality like nothing else on television. Sounds like a sure winner, especially with millennials. The problem: USA has built its brand and audience on lighter “blue skies” dramas epitomized by easy-on-the-eyes programming like Burn Notice and Royal Pains.

Seventh Generation’s GM and CMO Joey Bergstein, knows his company’s “advocates” (a term Seventh Generation uses to describe its customers who share the company’s passion for natural, healthy products) understand the value of its signature eco-friendly homecare products. But how can he best communicate the company’s purpose and differentiation to women for a new line of feminine care products?

Ninety percent of consumers make a purchase within a few seconds of viewing an ad on their mobile device. How does PopSugar’s CMO, Anna Fieler, ensure that her company’s direct-to-consumer site ShopStyle targets the right user to “stop her thumb” and entice the sale?

How can a popular American snack food appeal to a new demographic in a way that is authentic, relevant, and compelling? Frito-Lay’s Senior Director of Marketing (a division of PepsiCo), Pat O’Toole, needs a trick or two (trick soccer, as it happens).

These are the real world scenarios we explored in “The Marketer’s Dilemma” and “Hacking the Future of Premium Content,” two of the five PwC-led panels at Advertising Week (September 26–30) in New York City. Our conversations took place in the context of the most exciting and challenging period that marketers, media companies, and agencies have ever faced as accelerating digital developments transform the media and marketing ecosystem. Brands find themselves operating in a quickly evolving environment in which new combinations of technology, experiences, and content are rapidly replacing traditional advertising and media. With an unprecedented proliferation of supply, as well as choice it has become harder than ever to earn the attention and engagement the user. “Content needs to find the consumer,” Marta Martinez, SVP of Advertising at AOL reminded us at the outset of our discussion.

At PwC’s Strategy& we call this conundrum “the marketer’s dilemma,” and through conversations with CMOs and senior executives across many different industries, we have identified five dominant capabilities that marketers need to navigate the marketing and media ecosystem successfully. [Our report: The Marketer’s Dilemma]. In light of the examples they shared and their distinctive experience developing new strategies to drive discovery and build fans for their brands, I asked our panelists to weigh in on these five key capabilities.

Proprietary insights — Our panelists could not agree more. Marketers must develop a rich first-party understanding of who their users are, how they behave, and what they want. PopSugar, for example, has developed a proprietary “trend rank system,” which aggregates data from the company’s 27 million social media followers to learn what they do, watch, and follow every day to help the company engage users quickly and predict purchase decisions.

Integrated brand experiences — Just how did USA Network find an audience for, and advertising partners interested in, that revolutionary wild ride of a show “Mr. Robot?” on a network known for much breezier programming? By creating a premium content experience that “never stops” [Who is Mr. Robot?] and amplifying its subversive storyline via partnerships with relevant digital platforms and marketers — from “hacking” Twitch’s livestream of E3 to promote season one with messages from the fictitious “fsociety,” to launching the second season with a 13 country takeover of theMr. Robot Facebook page that rewarded fans with a “catch it if you can” clip of the season premier.

Breakthrough content — Former SNL star, comedienne Maya Rudolph’s original YouTube video (a humorous take on the traditional jingle -Vajingle) about Seventh Generation’s feminine care products resulted in 2.5 million views. It was an unexpected and provocative way to bring customers to a new level of understanding about what the brand stands for. Our panelists agreed that creating breakthrough content for brands will become increasingly critical both for marketers and their media partners as interruptive advertising models decline in their effectiveness. Here, our view is that this undoubtedly leads to more potent partnerships among brands and media companies around content that are characterized by co-investment, as well as co-creation.

Experiments to gain ROI — “We need new models of discovery,” says Venky Balakrishnan, whose company balances a portfolio of approaches from the tried-and-true to the truly experimental. Diageo recently signed on as the charter sponsor of Thrillist’s digital publication about the spirits industry, Supercall. While only 5–10 percent ofSupercall’s content will be devoted to Diageo’s brands, the sponsorship strategy creates an innovative new avenue for user discovery and engagement.

To reach Latino families, an increasingly critical market of consumers for any growth brand, Frito-Lay capitalized on its image with products “that bring people together,” by creating a new, entertainment-focused soccer team (“Los Cheetahs” ), sponsored by the company’s popular Cheetos snack food. The team’s popularity has inspired a large and loyal fan base and the experiment has exceeded all expectations for Frito-Lay.

Verify and measure: While our panelists agree that brands sometimes need to give up control and allow publishers to borrow their editorial voice, trust third party endorsements, and work in new ways with media and agency partners, they do advise caution. Here they’re right to “trust but verify” as we note in our report, by asking their partners for transparency to ensure their marketing dollars are being efficiently spent and driving the business outcomes they expect.

It’s clear that companies face challenges and opportunities in a world where users can go from awareness to transaction in just one click or swipe of the mobile phone. As a result, there’s a growing realization that brands need the expertise and increasing push to engage and convert customers as precisely, promptly, and personally as possible. This development is profoundly changing the relationships and related requirements between all the key players in the marketing and media ecosystem.

There’s so much more to the implications of these developments, and in the spirit of extending the discussion, I invite you to check out our report, The marketer’s dilemma: the new capability agenda for marketers and their partners — The Marketer’s Dilemma. Here you will learn about the forces that are disrupting established playbooks and the new strategies that are key to winning in the future. You can also share your views on Twitter at @strategyand.