The Story of Content Marketing

If you look in your email inbox, you look at Facebook, you look at Twitter, you look at Pinterest, you look at Instagram, you look at any of that, you will see, literally adjacent, here's something from my a company and then here's something from your mom. - There's been too much content forever, you know, since Gutenberg invented (laughs) the printing press, there's been people who haven't had the time to read the Bible, right? -  Content marketing is simply, you know, it's a nice term and lots of people, consultants go around saying, "Oh look, I know what this is." - But it's been hot and important and impactful and effective for over a century now. - It's like, whoa, somebody's in the market who isn't just shouting about their products, they're actually doing some cool stuff for their customers. - Well, you might be surprised to hear that I think it's very powerful, right? I mean, (laughs) so it's one of those things that I think is really, you know, Seth Godin has said that content is really the only marketing that's left, and I absolutely believe that. It's really the only way that a business, going forward, is gonna differentiate itself in a very crazy, noisy marketplace. - But until you get to the real heart of it, which is where is the customer, what's the customer involved in and what's the customer get out of this? I think it's essentially, kind of a, eh, who cares. (old fashioned camera rolling) - [Voiceover] Right now, while we sit in this meeting, mass selling, using all the spectacular resources of sound pictures and animated cartoons in color, is helping to sell great masses of people in the way they like to be sold. - [Voiceover] Brands and branding are really an artifact of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s. That's when we had big mass media, television dominated everything. Family all gathered around in the evening, watched TV. Advertising came on and what we did is we created commonality, in other words, the family next door saw the same television commercials that I saw. - [Voiceover] That's where you found out about new products or services in the marketplace, that's where you found out about new brands that might be great for your home, or great for your car, whatever. - [Voiceover] So marketing for a long time has been about interruption. You know, I have to interrupt your day by putting on a television commercial when you're watching the game, or watching your favorite drama, or have to put in an advertisement for when you're thumbing through the magazine that will cause you to stop, or reading a newspaper that will cause you to stop, or, God forbid, call you at home with an unwanted message. - Pushing it out, pushing it out, pushing it out. And it's always been that way, I mean, that's the history of marketing. If you go back to what the four Ps of marketing: product, price, placement, promotion. All in the control of the marketing organization, we decide what product we're gonna make, how many we're gonna make, how we're gonna price them, how we're gonna sell them, where we're gonna sell them, all those things. Now I've created all that and I've got to push that out to you and I've got to convince you to buy. So it's been primarily about persuasion. - [Voiceover] It's one where we actually go out in some persuasive way to try and convince someone that our product or service is better. We describe value, basically, that's the classic marketing training. If you look at how marketers have been trained in university since really, time began, it's how do we actually describe the value of the product or service we're doing in an ever clever way? - And how do you do that, you basically have levers that you pull. One of those levers was advertising and you basically bought advertising space and you knew that for a certain amount of investment you could expect a certain amount of return. Good days, you did better, bad days, you did worse, but over time you learned the metrics that could help you achieve that. - [Voiceover] Marketers fell in love with mass media because at that time it was probably the best way to market. It was just blossoming where you had newspapers and magazines and television that could reach so many people and we weren't used to that. - [Voiceover] Somebody else owned the audience, so usually that was traditional publishing, so perhaps a newspaper or a magazine. And so to connect with those people you had to go through some intermediary. You had to figure out a way to get in front of that audience. - [Todd] The publishing industry at the time, was very much, you know, a man with two lovers, if you like. He had the audience on one side who he dearly, dearly loved but he actually really loved the advertisers just as passionately, if not more when they came calling, right? So that whole dynamic was really founded on the principle of distribution. He owned, the publisher owned the distribution power at that point. - Advertising was fabulous at getting our attention, right? This burst of disruption. And then what did it do with that attention? Absolutely nothing. It just hung there. Now that was great when you had to watch it. - Companies, corporations, media had all the power because we only had so many channels and consumers had only so many ways that they could get their information. - [Todd] With the advent of the internet, that disappeared. And suddenly the advertiser and the audience can find each other, or rather, the publisher and the advertiser are essentially competing through the same channels to try to reach the audience. So that's really where brands have come into their own when they realize, "Well, we don't have to "go through a third party to reach this audience. "We can actually try to achieve that directly." - [Joe] Instead of having to advertise in someone else's channel, I have the opportunity to create my own valuable, relevant, and compelling content in our own channels to really create loyalty, build relationships directly with what we like to call subscribers, instead of going out and having to pay for that attention. - [Voiceover] I think we have to change the way we think about, you know, getting access to the mind of the consumer we want to have a relationship with. And one of the best ways to do that today is through content. - [Voiceover] Content marketing, I think, preceded advertising when you go back in history the first ads really were content that was connecting with people around value. At some point, I think in the '50s, we decided to dazzle and sparkle by talking all ourselves instead of in terms of what they needed. - [Voiceover] As they define content marketing, communicating with potential customers to drive behavior has been around, you know, forever, right? For millions of years, since the first caveman tried to sell a rock to another caveman, right? He was creating a rock brochure. - [Voiceover] We've always had content marketing, we just did different kind of iterations of it, where it's come from. If we look back in the 1800s there were quite a few companies that were trying to figure out how to build lasting relationships with customers by not talking about their products and services. While not the oldest example in the world, my favorite example is probably John Deere's The Furrow Magazine. (gentle music) (tractor engine running) - [Voiceover] My name's Bart, I'm 37 years old. I have lived on this farm my entire life and I can remember being five, six years old, we were dairy farmers at that time and bucket feeding calves, bottle feeding calves. That's how we started. I bought this farm from my dad, he's a second generation, about 10 years ago and we raise corn, soybeans, and wheat, and we also raise beef livestock. I'd say I've been getting The Furrow and reading The Furrow for about five years now. I will say that I think the articles in The Furrow are very neutral. I mean, to the point that I always wonder, is this a John Deere magazine or not? - [Voiceover] The Furrow came along in 1895 when our company was under the direction of John Deere's son, Charles. He recognized that need for farmers to have an accurate, unbiased source of information. Anything that we think farmers can use to improve their operations, that's something that's gonna make it into The Furrow. - [Bart] I try to key in on the soil health and soil fertility. Fertilizers have gotten very expensive through the years and how you apply them is very important, not only economically, but also for the environment. I don't know where a company like John Deere sits on soil conservation as far as no till, versus being a more conventional type. To me, I think a company like that has more to gain when people are working more ground. But, you know The Furrow doesn't just talk about that, if they do at all, I mean, it's more about the opposite of that. - [Voiceover] If you go back through the entire history of the magazine, I would be very surprised if in that editorial space, you saw the words "John Deere" mentioned more than 15 or 20 times and that's going back 120 years. That veil of secrecy has been lifted off of marketing. People know when they are being marketed to. The John Deere brand still stands for something. It stands for quality, it stands for honesty. And that's been a critical component of, not just The Furrow's success, but of John Deere's success overall. (tractor engine running) - Customers are really always faced with issues. What are my customers really concerned about? What issues do they have? What information are they looking for? What kind of problems do they have and how can I help them solve those problems? - Focus on being good to a specific audience. Most companies need to devote resources and talents toward driving a very small, very niche audience. - [Voiceover] Understand deeply, the buyer's that you're trying to reach. The people you're trying to reach. You call them buyer personas if you like, that you're trying to reach. - [Kirk] You need to somehow integrate yourself into things that are valuable and important to them and you have to deliver that to them and manifest your interest, not just with words and pretty pictures, although those are critically important but by actually doing stuff that matters as well. - [Andrew] I think the brands that really get it are focused on being part of the information you want to consume. They're focused on creating higher quality content that inspires people to buy something they didn't know they needed. - That's Procter and Gamble. I mean, they're trying to sell more soap. How are they going to do that? They said, "Well, who are we targeting? "We're targeting women. "Women are trying to build their households. "What do they like, they like certain kinds of programming." - [Voiceover] They wanted to be entertained, they were busy. Most of them were women, they were working around the house. So when they were either working, or when they had an opportunity to sit down and take a break, they wanted to be entertained. We began to go ahead and realize, let's provide them story lines, entertainment, something that will be so immersive that they're gonna come back tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that. So deep characters, rich characters, stories lines that actually had meaning for these individuals, something they could relate to. And this is how we got into Soap Operas. It was nothing that was coined within the industry, this was something that consumers began to create for themselves and that's what they were calling them. What is the return on investment? You know, I'm sure that there were people in the business that were asking that. You know, you can try to sell your story or you can just simply tell your story. And so that's what we were doing and the brands were doing very well. The longest running ones that we ever produced, such as The Guiding Light and As the World Turns, they all started on the radio. And then come the 1950s, the invention of the television, they made that transition. We never really even started as a sponsor, we went all in. We went ahead and we started up our own production company. We were hiring them to hire the writers, hire the actors. And I don't think the company ever really put any directives or, you know, characters must do this or a story must do that. But I think we hired creative people and Irna Phillips was someone that we worked very closely with. She is legendary in terms of writing soap operas and she wrote for The Guiding Light for a number of years. So it's like any other business that P&G is in, we want to hire good people that know what they can do and let them loose and let them build that business. And that's exactly what Irna Phillips and others did. - I don't think there's ever been a hack for that, right? That's the bizarre part of this of this business that is more art than science. There's no way around needing to have talent. Good journalists have to have it, good screen writers have to have it. You have to know a good story when you see one. - [Ann] That's something that publishers have always done that's what they do really well. And when they think about their customers, they think audience. - [Joe] If you look at Europe, where they called it customer media, customer publishing. UK, I mean back in the day, seven of the 10 top publications on the newsstand in the UK were custom publications, were branded vehicles. (accordion music) - [Voiceover] Germany used to be a magazine country. We have so many publishing houses and people still read a lot of magazines. When you look at the newsstands at the airport or the train stations, there are still so many magazines on sports, on soccer, and things like that. With a small audience, magazines only with a circulation of 10,000 copies or so, but very, very sophisticated in editorial design and editorial content. Companies in Germany who need to have, well, content for their products, I think they recognized as well that with complex matters, complicated products and things like that, they need more content, more stories to tell about what they are doing. By 2000, 2001 we had a special term. We were talking about orchestration of different media channels with mobile channels with the internet and things like that. We, as corporate publishers, were the first ones to use tablet magazines, for example. We invented corporate blogs and podcasts and things like that. And so we were doing content marketing already. - It was called all kinds of different things. So it was called custom publishing, custom media, branded content, customer media was big in Europe. Everybody was talking about it but they were all using a different language to talk about it. - [Kirk] I think there's a lot of things that it isn't that people think that it is that are really too simple and too truncated and don't get anywhere. Lots of advertising agencies think of things as content marketing that aren't really content and a lot of content agencies think of things as content marketing that aren't really marketing (laughs). And that's where I think it gets complicated. - [Voiceover] If you go up to somebody, like say, a CEO of an organization or president, and you say to them, "Are you better at solving "people's problems than anybody else "in your space?" That's a question that'll interest them. But if you say to them, "Are you the best content marketer in your space?" They have no connection. - [Joe] If we don't start communicating this in the same way, we're never gonna grow as an industry. And sort of in 2007, you know, put the flag in the ground and said, "Look, we're gonna call it content marketing." And you just see this wave of momentum. (gentle techno music) - Obviously, content marketing has been around forever, but there's a whole new thing when content marketing collides with the internet and with digital. - [Voiceover] There's been this cataclysmic shift in how customers get their information today. - [David] I remember when I was first doing content marketing, I would see stats that said, "There was 20 million people on the internet." I'm like, "20 million people on the internet, "that's nothing," when you figure today there's billions of people on the internet. - [Joe] So if I'm trying to get their attention, I'd better be creating some pretty fantastic information on an ongoing basis to get their attention. I can't just rely on the very few channels that we had in the '90s, now we've got hundreds of channels. So how are we going to get our audience's attention? - [David] One of the times I really thought, "Wow, this is pretty cool stuff," was the old Will it Blend YouTube videos and YouTube had just started. YouTube had been around, I don't know, months or something like that and Blendtec, this very smart company said, "Well shoot, we can use this new media "to market our blenders." So they created this Will it Blend series. - I'm going to place, approximately, 50 marbles in a jar (marbles clinking in jar) and I'm gonna run the ice cream cycle, which is the slowest cycle we have. (blender whirring) This is glass dust, don't breathe this. (jazzy music) I had no idea that this would turn into such a monster. A good monster. I've always wanted to have the fastest, the most powerful thing I could have. So for a wedding present in 1968 I got a blender. And I thought, "Man, I can make this thing better." So for years we've had the opportunity to build a blender that would not fail. We're an engineering company, so we have 40 engineers. No other blender company has 40 engineers. I'm an engineer, which was a real problem because we didn't have any marketing and sales. I thought that if we had the best blender in the world that people would beat a path to our door. I thought if people go into a scoop shop or a smoothie shop or a coffee shop, and then people would go in, they'd get these fabulous drinks and they'd think, "Wow, I gotta get one of these blenders. "I just can't wait. "Hey, would you tell me what that name is?" And people would, literally, write it down. And I thought that's the way to sell, someone buys something from you and then demonstrates it in a commercial setting, that's the best way to sell it. Not so. We finally decided that we needed to hire a real sales person, a marketing person. He saw a pile of sawdust one day and he asked someone, "What is that on the floor?" And they said, "Oh, that's just Tom, you know, "blending two by twos." And (laughs) he said, "Really?" "Yeah, sure." So he buys a rotisserie chicken at Costco and he buys a six pack of Coke and some marbles and rake handles and a bunch of other goodies, came to me and said, "Here, blend this stuff." And so I said, "Okay." And so we filmed blending this. And he came to me five days later and he said, "Tom, we hit a homerun! "We have six million views on YouTube!" And I said, "WhoTube?" (blender whirring) - [Voiceover] My name's Holly Jackman. My husband and I own four Roxberry Smoothie stores. Carrots, celery, cucumbers, beets, ginger, lemon, limes, make them taste incredible. Nutrition never tasted so delicious. Well, we did a lot of researching and looking around. I'd had a lot of home blenders that I wasn't as happy with so we were very excited when we found out about the Blendtec. We watched all the commercials, Will You Blend It? We saw them throw in iPods and all kinds of crazy golf balls and things in and we were very impressed. - [Tom] We've done, on YouTube, we have, I think 145 that are up. So in all total, not just YouTube, but other views, around a half a billion views, 500 million views. I thought, "Wow, this is great." What an opportunity to sell a product and not have to spend any money (laughs), you know. It was wonderful. So in short order, our sales were up 1,000%. And we just kept doing videos. At this point we used to say, "Hey, check out this video, "you know, I'm blending an iPhone." And, "Whoa, really, you can blend an iPhone "in a blender?" That's how it used to be. The way it is now is people come to us and say, "Hey, no question in our mind, "we're hooked on your videos," you know. "We want a Blendtec blender." - Our job is to now take that trust and not abuse it. We don't have to try to get into our customers, they're already letting us in. - [Julie] And that's a big difference. That's really that direct connection opens up a whole new world of relationship with consumers and content is the fuel that creates that opportunity. And because we've got that connection with them around something that they value, we don't have to pay to find them because they're coming to us. They sign up for our emails, they follow us on Facebook. - [Voiceover] Content at this point is a form of currency that brands, that brands that storytellers use to have a conversation with somebody. - [Doug] If marketers are gonna use that new direct channel, just to do what they always did before. - Like us, share this, click here, follow us, watch our video. - And just push their product messages, it's an abuse of the channel and, in truth, they lose the channel. They're now denied it because the consumer doesn't want to hear anymore. - This is the same problem that was posed when the introduction of a new technology was introduced in the 1920s, and that was the radio. How do people want to interact? How are companies supposed to get their messages across to their consumers? - The challenge in today's marketing landscape is differentiating from your competitors. What's usually happening is the production of that product or the production of that service, you know, think of off shoring for services and you think of 3D printing for products. It's become commoditized and it's being, it's getting very, very difficult for product companies and services companies to differentiate against all of the other competition that's out there. Content allows you to do that. That is the biggest opportunity. - [Jay] Search, by definition, doesn't create demand, right? It just fulfills demand. Nobody goes to Google and says, "Hey, I'd like to buy something. "I don't really care what, just surprise me," right? Of, socks, okay, a hamster, whatever you think is appropriate. - But nobody cares about your product, they're trying to solve a problem. - [Voiceover] What are my audience's pain points? What's keeping them up at night? What's important to them? - So market Marcus Sheridan is a great example of the power of content marketing. A couple of years ago, Marcus was the co-owner of a pool company and it wasn't doing so well. So what Marcus decided to do was to launch a blog, very simply, and answer questions that his customers had based on the searches that they did as well as conversations that he had with customers. So a couple times a week, he would just come up with a blog post that would be very specific to a question. And he talked about things that a lot of pool companies don't like to talk about. - [Voiceover] In 2008, as most people know, the market crashed and for pool guys, this was a terrible time. We went through a period of three straight weeks, we were overdrawing our bank account. I didn't know what we were gonna do. I thought, every consultant that I talked to said you need to close your business and that was when I discovered what today I know to be content marketing. All right, so this is the beginning of the next chapter off River Pools and that big, red, shiny thing you see behind me is what is considered a mold. And a mold is what is used to produce a fiberglass pool. We always felt that we were gonna move in this direction of manufacturing and, of course, that's what you're seeing now. When we started River Pools and we had two really nice stores, one in Richmond, Virginia, one in Warsaw, Virginia. And they were nice and they had tanning beds and hot tubs and pool tables and all these things, they weren't generating revenue. And I said, "Okay, what can we be the best in the world at?" Well, we know we can teach about fiberglass pools better than anybody else. That's our thing. Let's just focus only on fiberglass pools. Let's forget the whole, we got to have a building to feel like we've accomplished things, the Edifice complex. And so we got rid of those retail stores. We got out of the leases early, we paid the, you know, we paid the fees and all those things because we said, "Now, we have a focus." So we moved into this big warehouse. And today, the way people view your building is the information they see and it's what they feel on a computer screen. - When he saw that we could actually bring people to the site for free by doing what he likes to do best, which is really is teach. - Let's get everybody on board, let's get everyone involved, everyone in this company is a teacher, now let's do it. - [Jason] We learned to think like the consumer. And in doing that, we saw their questions. We asked the questions ourselves. We would be on an appointment and a question would come up and the first thing we would think of is, "Wow, we haven't written about that yet." Or, "Wow, that would make a great video." It forced me to kind of have to step up and learn how to write, learn how to, learn this whole new skill set. - [Marcus] We were on to something within about six months of producing content on the River Pools site. - We've developed a nationwide brand. So we're contacted by people from all around the world and all around the country on a daily basis. - I knew the consumer wanted to learn about pools. Fine, fine, why not give it to them? Why not become the Wikipedia of fiberglass swimming pools, which is what we became. People are gonna be vetting you, they're gonna be vetting me, they're gonna be coming to your website, they're gonna be coming there and saying, "I want to feel good about my decision. "I want answers to my questions. "I want to get a sense for this company." That's gonna happen as long as we have this thing called the internet. The moment we stopped saying, "We're pool builders," and started saying, "We are the best teachers in the world "about fiberglass pools and we happen to "install them as well," that was one of the most prosperous days of our lives. - The consumer has incredible amounts of information. Marketers are not accustomed to that. Marketers are accustomed to control. Controlling the system, controlling the activities. And that's, I think, what creates the problem. Marketers can't give up control. They don't want to give up control. They don't want to give it away. - [Andrew] I think marketing is broken, to be honest. I think, you know, if you're a marketer today, you're stuck in what I call a CMO pizza. You essentially have a fixed budget that is your pizza every single year and you just keep slicing it in more and more ways, right? You've got your SEO budget, your PPC budget, your, I don't know, even the acronyms to add, right? You end up with this giant pizza sliced a million different ways, hoping to have a bigger impact than you did last year. - [Robert] The idea of the marketer as knowledge worker where being busy isn't the same as being successful. Which is he way we've really equated jobs for so long. And this traditional organization of the marketing department is as new technologies and as new channels come along, what we do is we throw a team at it. We throw a new process at it in the same old hierarchy. - You can approach content marketing as a program, or you can approach it as a culture. Programs, they live and then they die. They're forced, they're not enjoyed, typically, typically. But a culture becomes who you are. - We're seeing this transformation of marketing departments that were set up long ago in those mass media days, they've transformed into publishing departments. And we've really seen that and it's a big struggle for large enterprises because you have to dismantle what we built over the past 30, 40, 50 years. - The brands who get it have transformed the brand. They've become something else. And part of it is from letting go of this idea of, you know, we own everything about the brand, and trusting that if you engage a whole lot and give some of these brand values to your customers something good happens. And something good that you can't even predict. (loud techno music) - Yes, Red Bull's an amazing brand. - Well, certainly, there's the Red Bull example. And they're the poster child of content marketing these days. - [Voiceover] I think from the very beginning, Red Bull was a storytelling brand. I spent six years at Red Bull and we were a marketing team and actually, I guess, most of the content and activities came from the communications function within the marketing team. We used content as a tool to tell our stories and to show people the amazing things that we were doing and the great athletes we worked with. A lot of the things that we did at Red Bull were in the action sports realm, so that was super visual and spectacular and it just made sense to capture that, and share that with the world. Perhaps, a little arrogantly, we felt that the mainstream media weren't particularly good at filming and photographing the kind of sports and things that we were involved in, so we took ownership of that. At Red Bull, we were always told to focus on the audience and what was important to them and what made them passionate about their scene, about their sport, about their favorite athletes, and really think about them as individuals and not really worry too much about how they all crossed over. So I think that sort of single-mindedness and focus on quite a few audiences was one of the things that put us ahead. That we were able to say, "What would a "BMXer think is awesome about this BMX event?" rather than trying to think about, "What would a youth, "aged 16 to 22 think about this BMXer event?" They target people through their passions. Whether it's music or sports or culture, these areas have rules, they have stories, they have stars and Red Bull pays a huge amount of respect to those scenes and those audiences. And they don't treat them like demographics, they treat them like the passionate people that they are and they give them what they want. At Red Bull we felt like we had an actual role to play and something that we could contribute to these scenes. And we were always looking for ways to help progress, create new things, help facilitate collaboration. And it felt really good to be adding something into these scenes rather than just taking out. And I think that was core to the way that people felt about us as a brand operating in these spaces. When I started at Red Bull, there was a huge amount of scope and free range. We were in each of the markets, absolutely entitled to do whatever we wanted to do, of course with a huge commitment to quality. As the Red Bull media house took shape, the whole company began to professionalize its media operations from legals and contracts and licensing, through to production, quality, frame rights, and delivery. So there was a massive undertaking to get ready to become a global media company, rather than a brand that was producing a lot of great content. - [Todd] When you first start getting serious about content marketing then it really starts with appointing someone or understanding there needs to be a custodian of the audience's view point within the organization. - You've got to have tremendous buy-in top to bottom, that's key. You've got to have a central organizer, that Chief Content Officer, whatever you want to call that person, the Content Manager, and you've got to start off on the same page. - They need to make a lifestyle change and they have to swear off spending money on the stuff that doesn't work. And they have to say to themselves every single day, "I'm gonna create content." Every single day for an hour or two or an entire day. Or, if I'm a big company, 10 people's entire days have to create content, full time. - [Voiceover] You ever look around at all the incredible technology in our world and think to yourself, "How in the name of science does all this work?" Me too. I'm Baratunde Thurston, and this is GE Masterclass. - [Katrina] When we, certainly when we started producing a lot of this content, it meant that we had to get into our factory floors and if meant that we had to get into our labs. And they're doing, you know, they're doing very important stuff in there and so a lot of the culture change and the kind of learning and evolving came at those points. Used to be that it could be very tricky to get onto a factory floor or to get to a customer site and now our customers call us sometimes and say we have this great new story, we'd love to do another production with you. - [Robert] I do believe that it is a practice, it is a skill that brands are gonna have to get good at. It is something that, whether they outsource the execution of it, you know, whether they actually develop the talent within to actually shoot video, create imagery, I think is not as important as the business getting good at managing a marketing process that is at its heart, a media company-like process. It's interesting what some of these large brands are doing now around content marketing. If you look at Marriott and their creation of their content studio is they're putting a flag in the ground and saying, "Look, we are a media company "and our goal is to be the leading informational provider "in the travel industry." They've said it and now they're putting the construct together to make that happen. - [Voiceover] I have a presentation that I give here and globally, called Publish or Perish. All right, the idea if we don't start publishing, we're not gonna be around and not be relevant. It's the idea that today, as a brand, we're all really media companies, it goes back to all of us are media companies. So the Marriott Global Creative and Content Studio is focused on developing content. Digital projects, we've got TV projects, we've got film projects. We've got stuff in animation. Great story telling comes from people who know how to tell stories and the creative community, right? So we partner directly with, mainly, influencers across Youtube, Instagram, and other channels, but also traditional talent in Hollywood, producers, directors, writers, to create content for us. (upbeat music) - Look around, look at these people. They come in, they go out and we make that flow. - [David Beebe] So the biggest project we've done today is Two Bellmen, it's a short film. We partnered with a group in Los Angeles called Substance Over Hype. They are a Parkour group, they do music, dance, motion, music, it's all their thing. Created a 15 minute film where the set is the hotel. It's just naturally a part of the story. It's never an integration, it's not about, "Here's your key card, thank you for checking in." All right, that does not exist. You just naturally see it in its environment. Whey you let creators, give them parameters and let them do what they do best, storytelling, they'll figure out in an authentic way. It's when it becomes ugly programming is when a brand says, "Well, can you put my logo "in there four times and stop it on the screen "for three seconds." Content marketing is not overnight. You know, it's a marathon. And so you have to really educate folks, that, you know, it's not gonna happen overnight, you have to scale this and you have to really have that whole content ecosystem built and how you're using social channels and everything else to drive back to wherever you want that center of your universe to be. - Like a halfway decent human being, brands have to be about more than themselves. - [Voiceover] It's humans dealing with humans, we forget that, right? Instead of trying to be real time, you got to be real. - [Christie] That single-minded focus on your audience and what they love and what they really care about and trying to offer value in that space is something that anybody, any brand can do. - And the rules by which we play by are human behavior, right? Every organization, I don't care what you sell, it's P to P, it's person to person, people to people. It's not stinking B to B, B to C, B to G, which is business to government, but the philosophies of becoming incredibly helpful, being a great teacher, listener, communicator, they don't change. I don't care what it is that you're on, what it is that you're doing. So it's not about size, it's not about what you do. It's about a mentality and a culture. (car engines running) - [Joe] Jyske Bank is one of the largest banks in Denmark and for years they were paying a lot of money for sponsorships. And they didn't want to do that anymore. They didn't know if that was a good use of their resources. So they created Jyskebanktv, targeting to financial consumers, and they started to answer questions on this video channel about how consumers can save for retirement, how they can get checking accounts, savings accounts, do things with their lives financially. And they were starting to share information like a media company would. - We say that if you can't rely on the media, you have to become the media. And that's, basically, what we think. - [Voiceover] My name is Rasmus Nielsen. I work as a host and journalist at Jyske Bank. Well, since it started in 2006, we started doing internal communication on TV and then in 2008, we started also sending to our customers. (speaking in foreign language) - [Lasse] The hard part is not to produce the content, it's to get the right idea for the content and then to get the big "yes" from the CEO in the company, so you get in there. - [Rasmus] We have had our CEO call us and say, "Hmm, that wasn't my kind of story, "but that's all right, I'm still here." But you need to have that kind of CEO that thinks, "All right, I give you some freedom "and I won't intervene." But, of course, you have an opinion, but he believes that if you tell it as a journalist, people will believe it and people will, they will like it. It's been a long process about getting where we are now because people are very skeptic about this. But every time we do a story where people say, "Oh, that's actually what we were talking about "in the canteen. "So great that you guys are talking about it also, "even though it's kinds of bad story for us." But people are talking about it anyway, so if we don't talk about it, it will just, you know, grow bigger and bigger in the organization. - You earn the respect from the audience. You have to get good stories that go into people hearts. And when you reach people heart's, they will do the right things for the brain. Think like a publisher, produce content that is relevant for your audience. You have to believe that this is the right way to go. And I don't think it's just the right way to go, it's they way you have to go. (bells echoing) - [Christie] Having that real respect for content as a thing unto itself, it will reward you if you invest in it. But it's not something that can be done cheaply or easily or quickly. - [Kirk] The content business is the only part of this business that I can see credibly leading the new practice of advertising. And I'm moderately upset because not enough of us are trying to do it. - [Marcus] I don't get tired of it. If you have the right mindset and if you believe that just because it was done that way doesn't mean it's necessarily the right way, if you're willing to create and make the rules in your own industry, you can do exceptional things. - [Robert] The real future is, I think expansive. And what I mean by that is I think content marketing itself is going to expand beyond what it is considered now. - [Julie] When we looked at what we had in terms of a relationship with 100 million, you know, uniques a year and the kinds of information that they give us based on the way they connect with our content, we realized that that was going to be the fuel that would drive our future. - [Joe] The number of companies that are creating new products because they have a content marketing platform that's working for them and they're seeing new opportunities, is just amazing. - [Christie] Storytelling helps cut through, it helps us make sense of the world. Content that has a storytelling backbone to it is just easier to consume, it's easier to remember, it's more engaging. I think it's an essential part of everything that we do. - [Todd] And I think we're heading in this direction longer term. It's much more about the personality of the organization being able to come out and connect and emotionally engage with individuals rather than thinking the tactics of how we're going about things. It's actually putting a flag in the sand and saying, "We represent this, come with us." - [Kirk] What brands have to be in this new era, is they've got to be a coherent, core narrative. Because that's the only thing that's gonna remain consistent and distinguishable and differentiating across all kinds of channels. The only way (laughs), the only right way to do content marketing is to be a story. (fireworks booming) - Or they can just assume that everything's already understood, right? But you know what they say about assuming (laughs). It doesn't always work out very well. (upbeat music) - You cannot consume more information (stutters), sorry, let me, (video rewinding). - And take two. - Brant, clear these guys out, quick. Chase them all out. Yell at 'em. (child screaming) (laughing) Get these guys, they're too close. - [Voiceover] Oh, they saw you coming. - Chuck Norris was fun because, what a wonderful guy and I had an action figure of Chuck Norris and then a bunch of these bad guys with guns and beards and all this stuff. And so I put it in a blender-- - My dad drives a Ford truck, I drive a Chevy but we both agree on John Deere. - Don't giggle, this is serious. - Chuck, it looks like, um-- - [Voiceover] Total Gym. - Total Gym. I said, I said, "Oh," I said, "I guess that, Chuck, I guess that Total Gym "really works." - It's really pretty and it dresses nicely. (laughing) That's what I think the future of content marketing is. And it's gonna grow up and marry a really nice boy. (sighs) And have a family. - [Voiceover] That's good. (laughing) - I don't know, does anybody know this (beep) really? See more here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnpr3pkFlk
If you look in your email inbox, you look at Facebook, you look at Twitter, you look at Pinterest, you look at Instagram, you look at any of that, you will see, literally adjacent, here's something from my a company and then here's something from your mom. - There's been too much content forever, you know, since Gutenberg invented (laughs) the pr...