“Brand Safety” Means Another Step Toward Content Marketing

For some reason the entire marketing community woke up last week and realized that a lot of big brand advertising is being placed in and around objectionable content. Despite this happening something like hours after the first banner ad popped up, we have suddenly coined the term “Brand Safety” and developers at YouTube and other platforms are rapidly working on solutions.

But here’s a “revolutionary” idea: How about we stop working on new ways of interrupting people and make this the final issue that turns the tide towards useful content marketing?

Maybe Facebook and Google Aren’t Safe Bets After All

As the New York Times and others have reported, YouTube is now in the cross-hairs for allowing top-tier brand ads to go before, during, and around videos of things like neo-Nazi hate speech and pornographic acts. AT&T, Lyft, Johnson & Johnson and many others have turned off the ad dollar spigots until YouTube finds a fix.

While this risk has been around forever, things may have come to a head because of the growing dominance of Facebook+Google in the ad ecosystem. In 2016 the two grew by 43% and 60%, respectively, while the rest of the industry shrunk by 3%. One of the big reasons the two companies are coming to dominate the market is that enterprise marketers love their breadth of scale and trust their smart wizards behind the curtain to protect them from the mess of ad-tech solutions in the marketplace.

Oops.

I can almost hear the pounding on conference room tables now as CMOs demand to know how a power player like Google can’t keep its ads from appearing in front of a terrorist recruiting video. And I can definitely hear the snickers in the agency-holding company offices as they finally have a way to crowbar some power back .

Twitter isn’t any better. If the platform has any clear positioning, it is around breaking news. But most brands are not relevant in micro-moments, and it’s way too hard to tease out the “news” that is relevant. You end up getting examples like this, in which Hyundai ends up sponsoring a tweet because a competitor’s vehicle was involved in a deadly accident:

Questions for the Hyundai marketing team: Is this really what you want to do with your brand? Really, how many cars is Twitter going to sell for you? Actually all marketing teams need to start asking themselves why they continue to sponsor the long tail of consumer generated content…

The Only Guarantee of Safety is Creating the Content Yourself

It’s sad, but not surprising that mass marketers continue to try and force their historic advertising model onto the new world of digital media. They continue to look for places where they can interrupt their consumers’ content experiences with tell & sell product messages. But they should look around at the disruptions that continue to add up in our society. Why continue devoting money and people to a model that is hopeless in a world of consumer control?

If it’s getting easier and cheaper for skinheads and pornographers to create and post content, why are brands so far behind? Brands can completely eliminate the issue of “safety” by creating and promoting their own useful content, rather than interrupting someone else’s.

Recipes from Kraft, hairstyles from Pantene, road trip ideas from Hyundai, and craft projects from Jo-Ann are all ideas that people are already engaging with. Why not invest in creating this kind of content and use paid media to help people discover it at scale? To help with the creative process, an army of passionate, vetted Influencers is out there for you to keep the costs down and quality, quantity, and authenticity up.

Content Marketing Moves More Cases

Most of the B2B world figured out the power of content marketing, delivered digitally, years ago. They realized that the best way to get customers to open an email or call for a quote is to create and promote useful information. Companies such as IBM and American Express have built sophisticated content marketing platforms and have pulled way back on the interruptive model.

One of the last big industries to fully embrace content marketing is the world of Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG). These are the masters of the old TV/Print model, and they have been programmed to believe that you need to interrupt your consumer with a product benefit message six times per month so that they remember you when they reach for something at the grocery shelf.

We’ve worked with most of the world’s largest CPG companies and have convinced a minority to go as far as get a household panel research study to see whether this really “moves cases” as they like to say. While I can’t share specific results, as this kind of research is a closely-held advantage, I can tell you that the results can be phenomenal on their own, and blows away everything except Search (which is actually content marketing if you think about it). Most importantly, the creative that sells the most product is that which is more “useful content” than “product benefit.”

And if it’s too hard to measure actual sales, you can look at the cost of media, which can actually be similar or cheaper when you create your own useful content. Just as with search, the higher the quality of the content, the cheaper the impressions and views are to buy on a bidding basis. That’s because consumers are more likely to click, view, share and save useful content.

But Content Marketing Takes Discipline

Of course, we’ve also seen examples of how brands fail to get the ROI they expect from content marketing. Most often it’s because they are not bringing consumer data, specialized tools and focused expertise to the table. It’s too often a one-off using the existing content and agency model. Frankly, I’ve seen some brand managers who test like this, and sigh with relief when the results are poor. Some are happy to learn that “content marketing doesn’t work” so they can go back to old habits with a clean conscious.

Sorry, folks, but hiding your head in the sand has never been the solution for success. Whether it’s unsafe ads, the shift to ad-free subscriptions, competitive pressure, or your own falling sales and lack of growth, the world is changing before you. It’s time to start learning how to work in a new, content marketing model. Trust me, it’s a lot more fun to delight your consumers with helpful content rather than apologizing to them for misplacing your ads.

Bob Gilbreath is co-founder and CEO of Ahalogy, the Passion to Purchase Platform, and author of The Next Evolution of Marketing: Connect with your Customers by Marketing with Meaning. Follow him on Twitter.