Much of the debate during last week's Cannes Lions has been around brand content and how the traditional consumer path from awareness to transaction is now filled with junctions, seeing shoppers spend an increasing amount of time exploring reviews and peer-to-peer recommendations, reading blogs, Googling product keywords, searching for videos and engaging with myriad social conversations before finally reaching the point of purchase.
For brands to interact with consumers more often on this newly paved road, they need to redefine their approach to content so that it has a broader, more impactful reach, can be served in more accessible formats and has a more native feel.
With more than three billion pieces of content being shared everyday online, and as platforms such as Facebook and Apple focus on editorialising content and the personalisation of messaging, brands are having to embrace their new role as publishers.
As agencies, we need to understand where individual brands have got to on this content journey.
This can start with ensuring that a brand’s website has the right amount of editorial and video to appeal to a target audience and progress into fully-fledged campaigns, in which brands achieve earned media and high levels of conversion through native content generation.
The advanced stages of this content journey sees the increasing need for brands to stand out further from the crowd.
As more brands mature to this point, we will see a growth in intellectual property actually being fully owned by brands, allowing clients to build greater loyalty and longevity with content that boasts multiple layers.
For example, let’s say a brand is trying to reach 20 to 30-year-old men with golf-related content. An agency strategy team might suggest an insight such as working around the "urban golf" territory.
They may define an activation land point that could result in a one-off stunt which sees golfers playing off the top of a mountain or from a city skyscraper.
The content generated by such a stunt would feature amazing video, shot from helicopters, which may get shared around the world. But once the KPIs have been met and the videos, tweets, images and word of mouth fade into the social ether, the long-term effect will be minimal.
If we head back to the insight stage and alter the land point so we’re not just creating a stunt but creating, say, an urban golf competition, you are then starting to build real intellectual property, with a much longer life-cycle.
This competition full-owned buy the brand could be repeated annually and take-over cities around the world. It’s producing the same KPI outcomes but on a much bigger scale, with ever-lasting layers of stories, experiences, videos, images and conversations that really last.
Lego is a perfect example of a brand that uses content to drive intellectual property value. The Lego Movie reinvented how an entire generation views the plastic brick by introducing content that would spawn a franchise of film, new Lego characters, TV and associated merchandise.
The content landscape is evolving but all roads will eventually lead to IP-inspired brand strategies, at any budget levels.
These brands that mature quickest and travel the furthest along this new road, will reap the biggest rewards.
Damien Marchi is global head of content at Havas Media Group