We need to talk about Content… and how.

In a  worthy post from my old colleague Cynthia Heyd on the travails and challenges of video content production – or what she calls 'motion content' (love that term) – Cynthia, in highlighting  the production side of the content conundrum, underlines a larger disconnect that is haunting content marketing in this country… and that is that 'content' is being treated as an afterthought in the development of larger communication architectures.

We've made this mistake before. We did it in the 90s as digital started to play a role in marketing communications. Clients continually asked us to reverse engineer a digital solution once the main advertising idea had been sold as they valiantly tried to keep up with a quickly changing media landscape, "Oh and can you do some online stuff as well" they would plead. Rather than lead the industry with a new approach that included digital from the beginning, we stayed with what we knew and acquiesced to client requests. We did eventually learn and the result was the creation of a myriad of digital agencies and accompanying specialized expertise. However, we did not learn well enough to not make the same mistake again with content.

As someone who has been a practitioner of Branded Content for over 10 years, I can tell you it is its own discipline. It requires more than just a fresh look at its video production model as Cynthia rightly points out. The development of branded content requires its own strategic approach, its own creative skill sets, it s own production model (print, digital and video), its own project management best practices and most importantly for the purveyors of branded content, its own monetization model. Creating content that helps a brand achieve a marketing objective is not the same as creating advertising to achieve the same objective. Creating content uses a different 'set of muscles', strategically, and creatively. I must admit, we are starting to see recognition of this reality and soon the question will be become, who owns these new disciplines? Ad Agencies, PR Agencies, Media Agencies? Or will we see stand alone Content Agencies start to make noise. Time alone will tell.