As the number of communication channels explodes and consumers are more and more empowered, companies have to take another approach to communication with customers. If you are going to interrupt them, at least make it useful!
Back in early July, I interviewed the newly appointed CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi Germany, Christian Rätsch for a blogpost. Mr Rätsch tweets a lot about Content Marketing and I’ve been reading his blog for a while. He shares a lot of articles dealing with Content Marketing. Saatchi & Saatchi being an advertising agency (founded way back in the 70s), I wondered how he could reconcile both Advertising and Content Marketing. (I have to admit, it was intended to be a rather provocative question).
When I asked him if he believed advertising is slowly dying (content marketing often being described as the contrary to traditional advertsing), he said something which is more important than it may seem at first.
I don’t see why advertising would be dying. It has begun a transformation process and reinvents itself more and more as being communication as a service.
I personally think this is too often ignored. These countless debates we’re having about native advertising being right or wrong, advertising dying or not, inbound or Content Marketing being just a buzz… consumers do not care about that. These are debates which we (marketers) might consider important, however consumers don’t.
Last week, Kevin Spacey delivered an amazingly inspiring speech which I was able to watch live (thanks Content Marketing Institute!). He completed the picture with a quote which has become one of my favorite:
The audience doesn’t care about the platform, they care about the content. – Kevin Spacey at #CMWorld
In the end the consumer doesn’t care about the details: whether or not we’re doing Content Marketing, Advertising, PR or whatever. As long as the Content (which can be pretty much anything…) delivers value by being entertaining or being helpful. We have to figure out how we make it valuable and how we deliver it.
Therefore marketers, advertisers, PR-folks and so on should definitly spend less time arguing about definitions and much more on delivering:
- the value people want
- whenever they want it (poke audiovisual industry)
- how they want it (the channel & format).
Our Job is to make that happen and understand the consumer. Too often, we tend to forget that we live in the age of the empowered consumer.
This post was first published on Linkedin.
