Digital advertising effectiveness is on the decline and marketers are turning to other forms of marketing to better engage customers during their digital journey.
Content marketing has emerged as something of a savior in the new marketing hierarchy as brands seek alternatives to display advertising that no longer produces tangible business results.
These are the top findings in new research I recently published under the auspices of ScribbleLive and Visually (free download).
The research explores how marketers can build customer-centric marketing strategies that rely more on valuable content and less on paid media buys.
Consumer Attitudes, Data Privacy, and New Digital Channels Drive Change
Though rampant advertising fraud and a lack of online engagement contribute to the shift from advertising to more content-based marketing, they aren’t the sole driving forces. Additional factors spurring the shift from advertising to content include:
Attitudinal: Consumers dislike and mistrust online ads, with 30% reporting online advertising is not effective, and 54% believe web banner ads don’t work. Adding adjectives to injury, more than half of consumers apply the terms “annoying,” “distracting,” and “invasive” to desktop and mobile web ads, according to an Adobe study.
Privacy and Safety: TrustE reports that one in four consumers worry about the security or privacy of the data collected on smart devices, and only 20% believe the benefits of smart devices outweigh these concerns. They are also concerned about malware attacks and location-specific surveillance.
Channel and Platform Proliferation: New social platforms and converged media formats, like hybrid native advertising, challenge marketers to create not only more content than ever before, but also content that can be easily adapted. It’s more challenging (and, complex) to manufacture content that fits paid, owned, earned, and converged media channels than it is to focus solely on advertising. Marketers today find it increasingly necessary to invest in multiple channels to avoid risk, as efficacy typically waxes and wanes between channels and platforms. Experimenting with new channels can pay off though, as Unilever found that buzz derived from its social content was significantly driving sales. This resulted in the company investing “tens of millions” more into its social presence.
Mobile: As mobile overtakes not only desktop computing but also television in media consumption hours spent, marketers are increasingly challenged by the decrease of advertising “real estate” on devices’ smaller screens. Mobile’s intrinsically personal nature also makes interruptive forms of advertising seem all the more invasive. Additionally, there’s an escalating cost to consumers, as mobile advertising becomes bandwidth intensive, eating into data plans more than opt-in content counterparts.
Omni-channel: There’s a growing realization among even those brands that remain satisfied with digital advertising that the ability to buy, target, and optimize banners is now “table stakes,” as Yext CMO Jeffrey Rohrs puts it, in an “increasingly complex landscape.” This complexity of multiple channels with complementary content needs raises challenges for brands as they transition from a paid, push-media mindset to creating a thriving content ecosystem. Retailers and CPG brands are expanding content outward from phones and desktop computers and into in-store kiosks and other retail experiences.
Intel has partnered with Turner and Mark Burnett to produce a reality show spawning a cosmos of content, offline and off. “A consumer seeing 10 sequential pieces of content is more valuable to us than seeing the same banner ad 10 times,” said Becky Brown, Intel’s vice president, global marketing and communications and director, Digital Marketing and Media Group.
Marriott’s David Beebee also shared (at a recent conference) that the company has repurposed content that resonates on its owned digital media channels for out-of-home billboard executions, quipping, “a multi-tiered paid model for digital content is as juicy an opportunity as a brand could hope for.”
It’s not all gloom and doom – the research contains pragmatic recommendations for shifting investment from paid to owned and earned media. Give the report a read and let me know your reactions.