CHAPTER 7
CONTENT IS KING—BUT DISTRIBUTION IS QUEEN
The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue.
—EDWARD R. MURROW, American broadcast journalist
IAN SCHAFER IS the founder and CEO of a unique agency called Deep Focus, located in New York City. I’ve known him for some time, and we regularly tweet each other. In 2011, between my stints at 360i and Ogilvy, I interviewed for a position at his agency. Ian penned a piece on Medium entitled “WTF Is Social Media Anyway?” that gets to the heart of why so many conventional marketers have lost their way in the social world: thinking only in terms of content production. Schafer wrote:
Platforms like Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and Snapchat have eclipsed most traditional publishers as the power players in today’s media landscape. More modern publishers (BuzzFeed, Mic, Popsugar, Vice) realize that the secret to their success lies not in time spent on their properties but the frequency of visits to their properties and the reach of their content, and how well they can monetize both. In fact, some of today’s biggest media companies aren’t the biggest because they own content (many don’t), but because they do the best job at distribution. As opposed to publishers like Condé Nast, or portals/networks like Yahoo! who held top spots since the dawn of the digital age, platforms are best-suited to the current environment because they shift to consumer demands and are optimized for consumer context. They are tailored to the qualities of every consumer, each and every visit. Everybody’s Facebook feed or Twitter timeline is different and uniquely theirs.
When people talk about “content marketing” or “native advertising,” the “platformification” of media is the reason, and adoption of more social media and migration to mobile devices is the root cause. Content marketing has to exist because the platformification of modern media has behaviorally changed the people that we try to reach every day. They have become the sum of their personal and popular cultures more than ever before, as platforms become the places they not only express themselves, but discover their content. Thanks to platforms, people are increasingly able to live beyond the reach of advertising, with those very platforms limiting the amount of advertising people actually see, especially on mobile devices. That puts the pressure on us to evolve beyond just placing ads within people’s social media feeds.
Schafer echoed a familiar refrain: advertising is no longer a page in a disruptive marketer’s playbook, which raises the question: “Is content for the sake of content even the right approach?”
Geoffrey Colon |
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If content is king, distribution is queen and we know how powerful the queen is in the game of chess. #disruptivefm
7:29 PM—21 Feb 2016
CONTENT CREATION AND THE NEW DELIVERY SYSTEM
The social web and app ecosystem has been our distribution network for the past several years. Soon, the Internet of Things will allow content to reach various other devices, from your bathroom mirror to your car. To maximize their reach, companies are creating content to fuel this expanding universe. But will it work? Once most of us push “publish” or “upload,” then we move on, looking for the next piece of content to produce results. Mostly, we don’t investigate—beyond vanity metrics such as likes, shares, and views—whether that content is resonating with customers.
Enter distribution science. Several publishers already employ an analyst whose sole focus is to study how content will be shared. BuzzFeed is probably the most notorious. Its publisher, Dao Nguyen, isn’t an expert in content creation; her expertise is in data science and content distribution.
I have always wanted to get to the heart of distribution science and prove to marketers that emphasizing content first and the creative process second is backward. However, to discuss this and similar questions on this emerging topic, I went to the Mecca of distribution science to learn how best to approach this new skill. On a hot and humid August afternoon, I took to the busy sidewalks of Manhattan’s Flatiron District to reach BuzzFeed’s offices in the historic Toy Building. I had scheduled a noon meeting with the vice president of business development and communications, Ashley McCollum. She’s one of the brightest rising stars in the field of communications, so there was no one better with whom to discuss the role of distribution science, particularly how content and creative are now engineered.
Walking into the BuzzFeed offices on the day of the Windows 10 release, I entered a loft the size of a football field, full of MacBook Pros; there wasn’t one Android or Windows phone to be seen. I couldn’t help but notice also that I was probably the oldest person on the floor. McCollum greeted me with a huge smile, and asked if I was hungry as we joined a line for one of the company’s chef-catered complimentary lunches. For a moment, I was transported back to the West Coast, and especially to a Silicon Valley tech company. The culture is very inviting. Everyone says hello and appears to be happy to be there. Who wouldn’t want to be in a company valued at $850 million?
Everyone reading this almost certainly has interacted with something created and distributed by BuzzFeed on a social platform. BuzzFeed’s growth, McCollum explained to me, has been anything but conventional. “Over the last three years, we’ve done zero paid advertising, zero acquisition programs, and no one has been singularly responsible for brand marketing. Everyone here represents the brand and marketing.”
Geoffrey Colon |
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Ignore classic marketing strategy if you ever really want to grow fast. #disruptivefm
7:37 PM—21 Feb 2016
McCollum recalled that in 2012, when she arrived at BuzzFeed, she did the opposite of what her previous employer, NBC News, had expected of her:
Often PR and marketing become so fascinated with classically trained strategy. As a result, you don’t grow as fast. My goal here was to ignore classic strategy.
We saw that social was this massive force in 2007, very early on; it was before social really was a thing. You could see how our homepage design changed as a result of social. [BuzzFeed founder] Jonah [Peretti] built a company around social. Most news was built at the time around search and homepage portals. We then asked ourselves how do we make the site better [to prepare for the coming reality of] social being the main distributor of content?
McCollum said that the people at BuzzFeed are data scientists at heart, who build content around the user experience of technology and devices. “We had a BlackBerry-optimized mobile website before the iPhone even existed.” McCollum noted that every piece of content, every type of share button and API, is tested to determine how people engage with BuzzFeed content and where they distribute that content on their social graph.
If you come to Buzzfeed from Pinterest, we’ve done tests [that show] there’s only a 7 percent chance you tweet out that story. So why have a Twitter button on those pages? It makes more sense to play to where the user’s actions will occur. So we increased the [number of] Pinterest buttons and usage increased ten times in terms of shares of content to Pinterest from that segment.
McCollum was also quick to point out that BuzzFeed helped tip the trend of many sites when it added WhatsApp share buttons to its content.
We were the first site to do a WhatsApp button. . . . We noticed—again in tests on content—that many people were using that button to share content to the messaging app. It gave us validation into user experience. Shortly after that test and [after we added] the button to more and more of our site, other media websites followed and embedded a WhatsApp button.
In terms of creativity and content, McCollum and BuzzFeed are doing the opposite of what many marketers are taught: create first, distribute second. Instead, BuzzFeed seems to invert that approach: formulate where the content will be shared, then create the content to enhance the customer’s experience. In this sense, they are one of the first customer-centric media companies in existence. McCollum opened her laptop and showed me a slide that explains the company’s distribution philosophy. It looked like what is shown in Figure 7-1.
Figure 7-1: BuzzFeed Marketing Feedback Loop
The first thing I noticed was that the word content doesn’t appear anywhere. We do see the word distribution and can infer how it plays its role with the makers of content. The general lack of thinking about distribution science has made content marketing roles ineffective. Many are hungry to create and “publish,” but most don’t want to (or don’t know how to) analyze those learnings and apply them to future cases. BuzzFeed seems to have empowered its staff with a content distribution-centric philosophy.
Although the goal of content is to capture customer mind share or persuade an individual toward action by creating contextually relevant experiences, good content never rises to the top on its own. BuzzFeed seems to understand this very well. But so do some other players.
CASE IN POINT
Building the Essential Playlist
Maybe the process by which I wrote this book, or how the music platform Spotify distributes music playlists (full disclosure: Spotify was a client of mine in 2011), will provide insight here.
Spotify approaches the art of building playlists with distribution-science acumen. Playlists are a huge part of their service; playlists are how many users find new content. And discovering content is by far one of the most difficult things to do in an overloaded world. So, building the essential playlist has become both a human and an analytical process. The data then informs Spotify what they should build more of and what they should abandon. It’s different from the way a record label’s Artists & Repertoire (A&R) person would do it, however. In the old days, they would sign an artist and then try to push that artist’s career, even if it meant wasting millions of dollars.
Spotify uses a small editorial team to create the playlists, and as soon as an editor publishes a playlist, the listener data begins to generate feedback. The staff can then change and update the playlist based on the songs people enjoy, the songs they save, the songs they skip, and the songs that make them abandon the playlist. When editors see that people love the songs on tracks twelve or fifteen, they can immediately move them to positions one and two.
The Spotify team has published just about every shape and size of music playlist, providing every kind of music for every mood and situation. They have thought a lot about distribution based on the user’s mood. But it’s highly unlikely that marketers trying to push cloud services to potential buyers think this way when they’re going to market with a content strategy.
Ex-Googler Shiva Rajaraman is the person behind the Spotify playlist distribution plan. Rajaraman understands that people don’t build mega libraries of music around artists the way they did when iTunes was launched. Instead, they build playlists, which are rooted in the DJ mixtape culture. These playlists are inspired by key moments in people’s lives—what they are feeling at a particular time. So the best way, Rajaraman realized, to connect people with music is through the heart, not the head.
As a music aficionado, I recognized that the overwhelming issue with Spotify was that you had to know what music you were searching for. For instance, if I was in the mood to hear Steely Dan, I could search for that artist. But what if I wasn’t in the mood for a particular artist or genre when I logged into Spotify? What if I had no idea which artists I wanted to listen to? Today, the playlist culture that pervades the service enables discovery based on one’s mood.
THE “DISTRIBUTION-FIRST” EDGE
Spotify is now built around moments in people’s lives—and that’s where the entire web is slowly heading. This is an approach whereby distribution data is handier than content data alone. What is the user’s location? What time of day is she on a certain platform? What actions does he perform on that platform, and when?
Spotify has redesigned the entire distribution platform, bringing music recommendations via playlists to the forefront of the listener experience. This is a push/pull experience that the best distribution scientists understand better with each passing day. People want to find content, but sometimes they stumble on something they like and listen to it or share it; the experience feels serendipitous—but, in fact, it was designed with that intent in mind. It was designed to be at a given place, at a given moment.
Good content alone can’t do this, of course. Distribution is the yin to content’s yang. That’s why more and more companies are trying to be the go-to resource when the time comes for specifics. Spotify wants to be that go-to resource when a person needs to listen to something. This “distribution is queen” attitude pervades other apps and services, as well.
CASE IN POINT
Find the Words, Create the Content
When I think of marketing resources, I am reminded of something called “Think with Google.” Google realized that knowing how to use a product wasn’t enough, so it created a tool to help advertisers gain the insights they needed to be effective. Through search engine marketing, Google Adwords helps customers using Google to find stores, services, and solutions via a wide array of direct and indirect education sources, among them practitioners, videos, and blog posts. It’s what advertisers do strategically with the Adwords product as the world and customer behavior changes around them, however, that makes them effective.
The Think with Google education content hub was set up as a resource to inspire a niche audience of advertisers to take actions via strategic education and guidance. By creating a destination content hub, Google’s product marketing team can direct traffic from the content resources they’ve created to specific product features provided by their business to track feature usage or adoption. For example, if Google is giving guidance on how to use “call extensions” (a feature that places a phone number in search results so customers can click to call) they explain the most strategic ways to utilize that feature. Click to call, for example, is used heavily by physical retailers who are trying to drive physical customer traffic and allows the retailer to track the phone calls that result in store visits. From Think with Google’s thought leadership efforts, Google creates customers that invest and reinvest in their services.
Calling the Content Bluff: Why Distribution Is Essential
When I think of note-taking apps, I think of OneNote. You may be thinking of Evernote. The point is that there are only a few of these tools, and those that have succeeded have thought about distribution prior to creating content or a product.
Meerkat is a real-time video app that Twitter followers can view live. Of course, Meerkat was built on the back of the Twitter API so as to be discovered by the wide audience of Twitter users. Zynga became Facebook’s go-to games solution because it had the best distribution. Catch my drift here?
A content guru will tell you that content is all you need to be successful in marketing. Disruptive marketers will call that bluff and explain how every successful entity became that way via distribution.
CONTENT CREATION AND PRODUCERISM
I’ve had the pleasure of working with many intelligent people. One of the brightest is Nicole Steinbok, senior program manager at Microsoft, where she worked on the OneNote product and now is involved with Surface devices. Steinbok was one of the creatives who, in 2014, helped launch the unconventional OneNote videos on Mac.
In a recent conversation about where marketing is headed, Steinbok and I touched on the topic of production. In an email thread, Steinbok added:
Marketing is going to be fully integrated in content we consume. At least I hope so. I hate ads. I cancelled Hulu because there are ads. I would pay more not to have ads interrupt my content, and I am not the only one. “Menutainment” is a term I saw at a Microsoft café. It reminds me of Benihana, where the chef cooks your food in front of you. Creating . . . food is also entertainment. I want to . . . see advertising/marketing itself be more entertaining or just completely integrated in[to] what I consume. I am sure others would detest [this] idea . . . because you feel even more manipulated. But I am fully aware that marketing/messaging manipulates me, I might as well enjoy it.
The main advance that I would predict with R&D is [that we will continue] to shorten the time window between R&D and the time it takes to go from idea to product to users’ hands. I also . . . really enjoy being involved with Kickstarter. I am a customer, but I also feel involved with the development of the products I back through the updates I receive from the creators. I like that. I want more of that.
Making stuff is becoming easier and easier and requires less . . . scale. However I buy a lot of things, I don’t have time or the motivation to make almost all of those things. But for people who are motivated to make stuff, so many hurdles are being removed or lowered. If I can contribute to making something by providing money up front (Kickstarter) or ideas or feedback I can see customers “making” more. . . . There are these machines in some of the Microsoft cafés where you can “make” your own type of beverage[. The café] provides tons of choices—what base flavor, what added flavor . . . diet, lite, zero, regular, etc. So although the user didn’t make the machine, they are [given] a method [that] enables a type of making.
Steinbok was talking about what disruptive marketers call producerism, or the ability of anyone to create anything as long as he or she has the creativity and willingness to do so.
Lower Barriers Equal Ease of Entry
Producing things, Nicole Steinbok said, is becoming easier owing to lower barriers to entry. Chris Anderson touched on this in his 2006 book, The Long Tail:
The traditional line between producers and consumers has blurred. Consumers are also producers. Some create from scratch; others modify the works of others, literally or figuratively remixing it. In the blog world, we talk about the “former audience”—readers who have shifted from passive consumers to active producers, commenting and blogging right back at the mainstream media. Others contribute to the process nothing more than their Internet-amplified word of mouth, doing what was once the work of radio DJs, music magazine reviewers, and marketers.
Some people have dubbed this the “Architecture of Participation.” Figure 7-2 shows how it works.
Figure 7-2: The Architecture of Participation
This model is one of the reasons podcasting is now so massive.
When the Walls Came Tumbling Down
From 1990 until 1996, I produced a weekly radio show called “Furthur” on 91.3 WLVR-FM in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. I loved it. Every week for four hours, I played tunes from around the globe for a small audience of around two hundred listeners. This was at a time when the producerist tools lay in the hands of big companies who could afford the technology.
Fast-forward to 2006. While working for a startup in New York City, I discovered a company out of San Francisco, called Podsafe Music Network. It was a podcast hosting and discovery network before podcasts were mainstreamed on iTunes. Podsafe hosted and promoted hundreds of podcasts that were similar to the radio shows I had produced in the 1990s. At the time, however, the tools needed to produce a podcast were not simple—there was a high barrier to entry.
I loved listening to some of those early podcasts, but I didn’t have all the technology required to get back into the broadcast booth. Then in 2012, a startup called Spreaker emerged, which allowed anyone to use its tools and technology to create and distribute podcasts. So I did what anyone who loves broadcasting would do: I began recording a podcast called “Disruptive FM.” Spreaker gave me (and millions of others) the creation tools. As a result, podcasting—a form of producerist culture—is exploding.
Universal Access: Now Anyone Can Be a Producer
In 2014, Edison Research found that 39 million Americans had listened to a podcast in the previous month. That’s a decent number of listeners, but consumption isn’t the whole story. Based on a scan of podcast directories, it appears that on any given day a person can access an average of fifteen thousand shows.
In the past, if you or I didn’t have access to media-creation tools, we couldn’t take action. We couldn’t produce anything. We simply had to consume the content that the outlets pushed on us. But that situation has changed in the past decade. By 2020, it will tip even further.
None of this “producing” requires professional equipment anymore. Just like the rise of self-publishing and video creation, audio creation is now universally available. With an iPhone and apps like iPadio and Spreaker, my four-year-old can produce a podcast. As Chris Anderson so eloquently forecasted over a decade ago, none of us is simply a consumer anymore. We are also the producers.
THE IMPACT OF PRODUCERISM ON DISRUPTIVE MARKETING
If we are producers, we can also be marketers. Disruptive marketers understand this and use it to their advantage. For instance, what if I could influence a few of those creators to advocate on my behalf, based on whatever it is they are interested in?
Today, productivity technology exists in many shapes and sizes. There are no barriers to entry as there were when only a small percentage of people owned the tools of manufacturing and creation. Now, individuals have the same access to those tools. This new era of widespread productivity can be a pitfall, though, for particular brands and the legacy companies. Corporate-created content, goods, or services aren’t enough anymore. The ability of anyone to create is the new manufacturing and marketing world. Creation, no longer confined to the few, is now open to us all.
I spoke to Anthony De Rosa, former editor at Circa and Reuters, now with The Daily Show, about how news startups are cropping up daily using producerism as their marketing vehicle.
Merely existing and not having to lean on big capital to survive is in itself a disruptive form of marketing. De Rosa thinks because you don’t need to produce things en masse but can find a target audience, it is leading to an explosion of niche news sites.
“Traffic right now seems limitless on the web. If you’re starting out now, if your focus is niche, you do things small and do things at a certain scale, you can do some really innovative things in news media. You can find an audience and that audience can help spread the word. Covering a subject of interest from a niche angle becomes your marketing.”
De Rosa thinks that in every part of media, sites that focus on niche are driving the producerism aesthetic.
There are a lot of really great examples of small and niche projects within media right now that can succeed. The Marshall Project is a perfect example. They’ve found a topic, the criminal justice system, and they can own that topic. So if anything does come up in the news around this subject . . . , they’re the center point. Because they’re niche focused they’ll grab attention on that topic if and when it becomes front and center within the context of larger news. It’s hard to go after and build some things without serious venture capital, but if you can be seen as an expert in an area and produce and host your own content, you can do well when the audience distributes that news for you.
Geoffrey Colon |
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Everyone can produce any content now. Brand content looks mediocre to some UGC content now. #disruptivefm
7:58 PM—21 Feb 2016
What Comes Next: Producerist Trends
In addition to niche content sites, we will see some additional trends as a result of producerism:
Product experiences for customers that crop up in a matter of days, not months, owing to cloud computing
Short-form videos and commercials produced by people, not professionals or agencies
Fashion design from people in their bedroom “studios” that is replicated via 3D printing and spread throughout the world, with zero need for a Fashion Week or for mainstream press coverage
New food-sourcing opportunities that tap into desires for natural ingredients, not chemicals
Broadcasts created and distributed by anyone who has something creative to showcase
Self-published books that incorporate embedded Vines, Instagrams, or Snapchats
The first mobile social network that goes beyond “sharing” and gives people the tools for “creating”
Ability to access the president of the United States’ State of the Union address on Medium
Instagram, one of the fastest-growing social networks, is more than a distribution platform. It is also a creative platform.
What Disruptive Marketers Create
What if I told you everything? Seems like a pretty broad objective, right? However, what if I told you nothing? You might feel differently about that.
In a brave new world where the customer base will do the creating for a marketer, with your inspiration as their guide, why do you have to create anything at all? Well, you still need to inspire people to produce that content for you, based on the brand’s authenticity. Here’s how you do that: stop thinking about platforms and forms of content—images, videos, etc.—and start thinking about human behavior.
As I noted earlier, in 2012, IBM tasked my team at Ogilvy & Mather with creating a plan that would illustrate how people “share.” In essence, we learned instead why the most disruptive marketing attempts produce inspiration and create emotional resonance. Disruptive marketers don’t create content and they don’t produce viral videos. They strike the match that gets everyone else to ignite. (Our findings were eventually reported in a white paper, “The Science of Sharing,” which was based on research done by the New York Times.)
This is why every year, platforms like YouTube see more than three hundred remixes of songs that were not commissioned by the artist or the artist’s label. It isn’t YouTube that’s inspiring this behavior. It’s that those up-and-coming laptop producers want to be famous themselves. They realize that producing original music, while it is important for any creative person to do, isn’t going to get them discovered by “influencers.” They believe it’s better if they remix a song by a major artist—even if doing so means breaking copyright law.
HOW TO BE A PRODUCERIST
Customers have changed. Audiences are now more likely also to be producers. They want to have complete control over what they see and share. Think about the last video you searched for and watched on a platform like YouTube. Who produced it? Did it look professional? If so, did it look as if it was made to live for only a short time? Do you think the producers understood that they had limited time to spend on that piece before they would create and distribute their next conversation piece?
Focus on Platforms, Not PowerPoint
The best way to be a marketing producerist, then, is to ditch the PowerPoint and create your strategy live, on digital platforms, in real time. Doing everything on a platform lets you learn the user experience right away and gives you agility. It also allows you to feel the dynamic experience of how customers behave on that platform. That is, a traditional PowerPoint strategy is 2D and linear. Yet, the way people act and behave, how they share and retweet, and the extent to which they engage and produce UGC (user-generated content) isn’t in any way flat. Explaining a web strategy using PowerPoint is like trying to explain 3D using a regular pair of glasses.
Platforms are your canvas, your wilderness. You leave a digital trail that allows you to see what works and what doesn’t, and lets you adapt to the changes on that platform that occur on a weekly basis.
At one time, Facebook was the place to build a community. In 2009, I spent too much agency time trying to persuade companies that they should build a community on Facebook. But those slides are more “tell” than “show.” The best way to demonstrate how a platform works is to get on it. That’s a much more immersive step than a PowerPoint deck. As Frank Rose noted earlier, marketers want to use a conspiratorial whisper, not only with our customer audience but also with the clients, partners, and coworkers we are trying to convince should adopt a disruptive marketing approach.
Today, if someone was to ask me what to do on Facebook, I would open up Facebook ads and show them all the rich data targeting they can use to reach audiences. Facebook has pivoted from a social community to an ads network, but no amount of PowerPoint slides will show this better than simply logging in and experiencing the service itself. There’s a reason visual education is increasingly popular; it resonates in ways that text knowledge transfer does not.
Learn from the Early Adopters: Hire Young People
I had the good fortune of having great mentors. I now understand why they hired me when I was in my twenties and kept me on their teams. I enjoyed telling them what was coming next in the industry. This is an important marketing function, because it allows companies to pivot their brand strategy before their consumers do—so the brand stays at the top of their minds and relevant wherever they go. The best way for a firm to stay relevant is to hire young people; young people like to find the future via a combination of search, social data, and netnography (the study of human behavior on the Internet). This is especially a role most suited to a young data punk.
The other reason firms want young people is that young people pay attention to trends, and that helps you determine where the producerism is taking place, who is doing the creating, and what they are using to do so. In 2006, while in the agency world, my interns told me to ditch MySpace for Facebook; and in 2011, they told me to adopt Instagram. None of this would have happened if I didn’t have younger team members to mentor me.
How the world has changed. As a result of technology, mentorship needs to be inverted. Traditionally, a marketer wanted a seasoned veteran as mentor. But a veteran may be bogged down in the day-to-day—too busy managing to create things—whereas it is unlikely that young people are managing a team; they have more time to be enthusiastically inefficient. For this reason alone, seek them out for your team. Along with their other skills, they can add value to your emerging media marketing plans.
During a visit to a startup office in San Francisco in 2015, I noticed some young data punks (ages twenty-two to twenty-five) spending the majority of their time working on their smartphones. In the near future, it’s highly unlikely that many of us will be producing user-generated content on a MacBook Pro, or even using Windows 10. More likely, the primary tools of future generations will be smartphone apps (and some of those apps might not be created exclusively in a digital ecosystem;(I’ll touch on the post-digital movement in chapter 8).
Young adults on the social web are much like young followers of pop culture. They are early adopters, they are participatory, they enjoy creating and not simply observing, and whatever they adopt will probably be used by all of us in due time. Ignore the “snake people” articles you’ve read and hire one now.