FIGARODIGITAL.CO.UK
CONTENT?
HAPPY or JUST
Owen Booth, Content Strategy Director at Realise, on creating valuable, useful content. Or: ‘Why I Hate Content Marketing’
lright, alright. I don’t actually, actively hate content marketing. If we’re talking about content
marketing as the practice of creating valuable, useful content as a way to engage a potential
audience - then what could there be to hate? I’m a content person. I believe in valuable, useful content. I like to think that making valuable, useful content is what I do. Whether it’s funny or informative or inspiring or moving, I want the things I create to be of worth to the person looking at it. Even if the work in question is something as unglamorous as, say, a guide to applying for a mortgage.
What I don’t understand, marketing
people, is why anyone would set out to create content that wasn’t valuable and useful. Because that’s what the definition of content marketing seems to be suggesting: that there are people whose job it is to create stuff that isn’t funny, informative, inspiring or moving. Stuff nobody wants or needs, but which they’re going to have shovelled at them anyway. And I think we can all agree that the people who create that sort stuff are the enemies of everything good and decent in the world, right?
CONTENT MARKETING AS ‘NOT ADVERTISING’ So imagine you’ve created or
30 issue 20 january 2014
commissioned a piece of useful, valuable content. Only, instead of a whitepaper or a blog post or an infographic, it’s a film. And as well as putting it on your website and your preferred social platforms, you also pay for it to be shown on TV. Does that mean it stops being content marketing and becomes an ad again? What about ads that are funny or
informative, or inspiring, or moving? Like that Ikea short film with the old man and that chair. I love that film. I’ll stand up and argue the case for calling it content marketing. I’ve only ever watched it on YouTube (‘owned’ rather than ‘bought’ media). I’ve shared it with friends - if it wasn’t for the final shot you wouldn’t
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