Open Letter to CMOs of the Future
Or, why all signs point to a need for changing the way you think of structuring a marketing department
Video isn’t just a trend, and I think I can make the case for it being the first and maybe most important thing a consumer brand must master from here on out.
Firstly, you should totally go have a read of “The Enterprise is in Transition” from the guys at Percolate which, among other things, broadly outlines the preceding phases of marketing and how we need to re-evaluate the entire framework of marketing itself. Which is something I’ve also been mulling over for the past year. This snippet in particular stood out:
The Content
This is slightly more challenging. Because these channels are made up of endless streams, brands need to shift from strictly stock content to a mix of stock and flow, a few big things and many small hits.The Audience
It’s not just the content that changes with the move to social/mobile streams. It’s also the very framework of marketing.
To me, “endless streams” means that there is always content, good or bad, and it is being consumed constantly. Whether that content is communication, social, editorial or branded.
When television commercials were introduced in the 1940s, they reshaped marketing departments and processes in their image. Since that time you can make a decent argument that most, if not all, of the innovation in advertising has been linear improvement…
…these channels, while slightly different, offered what was effectively the same opportunity for marketers to reach a moderately targeted audience with the hope that they were paying attention at the moment your message was displayed.
With the rise of the digital content marketing practice, brands are beginning to go beyond the video platforms and interruptive advertising. They are starting to use native advertising companies like Outbrain and Sharethrough which make it easier than ever to reach incremental audiences for your content, in context, more efficiently and effectively than ever before. And that makes it much cheaper to start, and easier to scale.
This is the first signal that we might need to re-evaluate our marketing frameworks:
The cost to put content in front of your desired audience can be cheaper, yet effective by putting it into their “endless streams” thru native ads.
Now step back and look at the macro trends in tech, web, platforms and mobile. I should grab a lot more Mary Meeker slides to make this point but its summarized like this:
- Cheap broadband adoption, plus
- Social web, plus
- Mobile takeover, plus
- Companies like Netflix / Hulu / Youtube / Snapchat / Vine, and
- eCommerce becoming led by video
I look at the confluence of all these threads and see video content as the common denominator.
TV and televised live events are as popular as ever. The web didn’t disrupt this channel like it did so much of the other traditional media channels. We keep consuming many hours of video content on a weekly basis. And now we spend a lot of our mobile time consuming or communicating with video. Instagram videos are creating two-times more engagement than Instagram photos. Five tweets per second contain a Vine link.
Quite simply, video is what we consume. And if thats not already general principle, it will be very soon.
Two-thirds of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video by 2017. (Neomobile)
Mobile makes up more than 25 percent of YouTube’s global watch time. (YouTube)
That’s the other signal; it has always been about video and will always be about video. And for brands, non-video content is basically the stuff you create between the videos (celebrating + anticipating) or as we commonly believe — the stuff you do when you can’t afford to do video content. But what happens when making and spreading video is becoming cheaper and more effective?
Time to wrap up. I’ll use one more blurb from the Percolate blog post, because it actually frames the original question I’m trying to tackle:
Most marketing departments were built to support a very different pace. How would a CMO design a department in the age we’ve described so far (stock and flow, sustained communication, social/mobile, global)? Probably not how it exists now.
My belief is that video creation should be at the heart of the marketing function and I want to see what happens when that is scaled.
Let’s say you start a marketing department from scratch, how does it generally get built out? After leadership, normally there is a communications / PR role filled, maybe even a search / DM position immediately. After that one might expect social media comes next. Maybe some influencer seeding (if you are in lifestyle categories for instance). Sort of like building out from the bottom of the funnel on up. All of this and more might happen before any truly integrated campaign might happen, digital or traditional. I would propose that putting video creation at the heart changes that build-out. Keep in mind that:
the core components of what makes a great brand (consistency, relevance, clarity) are timeless. However, the scale, pace, and pattern of both the audience and the content have shifted dramatically
Applying those core components to video creation whilst understanding the new and emergent context described above means that the marketing department start with a basic video production facility. An engine for regular content creation. The starter department could look like this:
Video: concepting, filming, audio, editing
Communications: PR, basic social media & native ad serving
Tech: front-end developer
Leadership: CMO + creative director
Before a brand can even afford to do advertising it could conceivably build an effective video content marketing operation. A video a week on youtube (as stock), with social posts promoting the next video and discussing the previous one (as flow). Regularity both grows viewership and helps refine focus and voice. Important videos such as those launching new product, brand extensions, promotions, etc would be served to any desired audience through native ads all over the web and in apps that the audience uses. All before you pay for eyeballs in pre-roll, promoted youtube, or connected devices.
Its cheap, its effective, it spans most of the funnel and the costs of production are dropping nearly as fast as the costs of bandwidth and storage. And here is the best part: more and more people have the skills to create videos with decent to high production quality by the time they enter the workforce.
Like I said, not only is video not simply a trend, I think it could essentially be the thing a brand does and operationalizes first. And I hope my harebrained discussion has at least made you consider rethinking the role of video content from merely one of many outputs to an organizing principle of marketing that matches the world we actually live in.
