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.

My most recent research report published this week.

The Eclipse of Online Advertising explores why marketers need to focus on customer-centric marketing strategies that rely more on providing valuable content and less on media buys. 

You can download the report from my research page, or from ScribbleLive and Visually, which commissioned the report.

I'd love to hear your comments and feedback.

Perhaps more than any other C-suite role, influence is the purview of the CMO. It's the CMO, after all, who oversees brand, customer experience, communications, advertising, social media, and content marketing -- in short, the lion's share of their organization's external voice, messaging, and share of voice in the marketplace.

Small wonder then that CMOs themselves would be regarded through the lens of influence, which is exactly what, for the fourth consecutive year, Forbes and ScribbleLive have done in The World's 50 Most Influential CMOs Study released this week in cooperation with LinkedIn, which supplied additional, publicly-available data for this year's report.

As the analyst who crunched the data for this most recent report (on behalf of my client, ScribbleLive), I've drawn new insights about executive influence. The top-level findings are interesting to be sure. For example, 11 of this year's most influential CMOs have been in their role for a year or less; influence is dominated by men (as is the C-suite); and no industry dominates influence. Automotive CMOs dominate this year, while apparel, No. 3 last year, has slipped out of the top five industries. Tech CMOs are still influential, but lost ground this year as the vertical slipped into second place.

Given content marketing is my core focus as an analyst, it's gratifying to see it is the undisputed No. 1 topic influential CMOs talked about this year.

Yet the biggest takeaway, for me at least, is that executive influence comes in three distinct flavors. These should cause all executives active in social media, as well as other forms of content creation and dissemination, to ask themselves, "What kind of influencer am I, and what kind of influencer do I want to be?"

Herewith, the three types of influencer.

The news-cycle influencer

Characteristics: The news cycle influencer less wields influence than is controlled by it, via circumstances that run the gamut from positive to negative. It may be that their company has made a splashy new product announcement or has been involved in a scandal. Whether positive or negative, influence is visited upon the executive in question, and is not so much controlled as in control of their reputation, as well as sphere of influence.

The best, and really only, strategy for news-cycle-induced influence is to understand real-time marketing business cases. Most desirably, news-cycle influence would be in the planned, proactive sector of the real-time marketing quadrant, but as will always be the case, this type of influence is often unplanned and unanticipated. As the saying goes, "nobody expected the French Revolution," or "United breaks guitars," or any manner of public faux pas, but plotting decision tree triage charts go far in mitigating news-cycle influence, particularly when crises or negativity are involved.

Influence wielder

Characteristics: Most of the CMOs who made the Forbes/ScribbleLive study this year are influence wielders. They are frequent contributors to social media and to publications. They're on message, have something substantive to say, and are well-respected leaders who are well regarded by their peers. Certainly there's a halo effect. They represent powerful brands that owe no small portion of that power to the stewardship of the influences. Their influence is influenced by the companies, products, and services they represent and vice versa, creating a sort of virtuous circle of influence. Wielding substantial influence among one's peers and target audience is the goal of the vast majority of social sharers and online publishers.

Super influencer

Characteristics: The super influencer shares the traits of the above two groups. They're both newsworthy and in the news, therefore owning above-average currency in shared media. At the same time, they wield influence. They create content that's widely consumed and shared across digital channels. Super influencers possess one additional trait that sets them above their peers on the influence scale, whether those peers are other CMOs or, outside of that rarefied sphere, whomever they share common ground with as influencers.

Super influencers influence not just the crowd, but also their own peers, people on their level, as well as higher-ups. Needless to say, super influencers are a rare breed. Of the top 50 influenctial CMOs, only one, GE's Beth Comstock, qualifies as a super influencer.

Does this status have anything to do with Comstock's promotion earlier this year to vice chair of the company? It would be hard to argue otherwise.

This post originally published on iMedia.

Whither social media?

Five years ago, it was all social, all the time. Social networks were the rage -- social shares and likes were the metrics du jour. Never mind that volume metrics impart little, if any business value. Social mattered for its own sake, just as "clicks" and "hits" were currency back in the Web 1.0 bubble days.

Today, social is seriously simmering down of all fronts as a focal point of attention in and of itself. Consider these trends:

• Forthcoming research I'm currently conducting using ScribbleLive's influence analytics platform [disclosure, a client] indicate that content marketing is the topic on top of CMOs' Attention Index this year. Content marketing scored 23,937 mentions, versus social media marketing as a topic with only 7,485 citations.
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• Resent research published by my former colleagues at Altimeter Group underscore this finding. C-suite involvement in social media has plunged. Only 27 percent of companies report executive engagement, close to a 20 percent drop since social media's peak back in 2012.
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• At the same time, organizations are moving to integrate social media as a discipline back into overall marketing operations. There's been a 164 percent increase in integration initiatives these past two years.
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• Increasingly, social is more about advertising than pure "social." Several recent reports indicate social ad spending has doubled over the past two years. J&J's Gail Horwood mentioned last week in a panel discussion her company's social ad spending doubled just over the past year.
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• Yet (see above) ad and media teams still aren't integrated into social media operations.
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• The social media software solutions (SMMS) technology sector is shrinking. Based on research I conducted last year, SMMS is expected to be absorbed by either the ad stack and/or the emerging content marketing software stack by the end of next year.
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Other channel-related M&A activity bear this last point out. Just last week, for example, StrongView, a legacy email marketing vendor (originally called StrongMail), merged with Selligent, a marketing automation platform. Email can no longer exist as a stand-alone channel, unintegrated with other digital initiatives. Social media is finally arriving at that party.

Content, meanwhile, is thriving. It's not just what CMOs are talking about, it's also where they're placing their bets. Content marketing positions are increasing across all verticals and industry, B2B, and B2C. Just scan the job listings. This year positions with "content" and/or "editor" in the title went from nearly zero to a frequent occurrence on job listing sites. Currently these tend to be lower-tier executive roles, manager, or director. Next year expect more of these positions to be VP or higher in rank.

If you've ready this far and think I'm dissing social media, you're wrong. Social is a channel -- just as email and search are channels. This is why we're seeing email marketing service providers and SEO agencies rebrand as content marketing platforms, and social media following suit.

Channels are niche. Content is forever.

This post originally published on iMedia