Content: never mind the quality, think about the platform

The idea that brands should try to be ‘news platforms’ is nonsense, argues Dominic Mills – and risks breaking the trust that is the ultimate foundation of their success.

We all know that adland has gone content crazy. Now it’s adding a new twist to it – ‘platformisation’ – a neologism so ugly it can only have been dreamt up by techno geeks.

Two deals last week encapsulate this new trend. The first saw Havas Media enter into a partnership with NewsCred, which allows brands to create their own content or licence it from publishers, and pump it out to their own media channels or elsewhere and then (and this is where they’re stretching it a bit) measure its effect.

You can read the details of the Havas deal here.

The second involves Publicis buying Relaxnews, which creates content and has its own distribution platform, and folding it into ZenithOptimedia.

The principles behind both deals look identical, the main difference being that Publicis has gone for ownership at a cost of about £11m, while Havas has gone into partnership.

In fact, while both Havas and Publicis talk as though they are breaking entirely new ground, they’re not: one of the big media networks already owns a platform called Content@Scale that does pretty much the same stuff.

The funny thing is that Content@Scale is actually owned by another part of the Publicis empire, Starcom MediaVest Group. Quite why they’re doubling up in this way is a puzzle to me. I can only suppose that it is because Zenith last year made a big play for the owned media space and without its own shiny ‘platformisation’ toy can only talk the talk.

One of the interesting things to me about this is the way the big holding companies are aligning content ‘platformisation’ with their media agencies, rather than with creative or digital networks. I suppose, since ‘platformisation’ is tech-driven, and the media agencies are the ones most comfortable with ad tech, they are the natural place.

But aligning these deals with media agencies also suggests to me that the big holding companies are trying to get ahead of the curve on the next big issue: the use of programmatic trading for native advertising. Native is nothing more than a subset of content marketing, and it is inevitable at some point that it too will become fully automated.

When that happens, the media agencies will want to have all their ducks lined up.

So, what is ‘platformisation’ all about? Essentially, the driving force is the realisation that there’s no point in going content mad if nobody can see it. So, in this digital world, you need platforms to get it out everywhere, at speed.

So far, so good. But you also need content – and yards of the stuff.

But good, relevant, content is hard to produce at quantity, especially if you’re a media agency like Havas Media or Zenith.

Which is where NewsCred and Relaxnews come in: as well as the platforms, they can produce their own content – although to what standard is hard to say – and, through licensing arrangements, access professionally produced publisher content.

Thus Relaxnews has a deal with Agence France Presse (AFP), a Reuters-type news agency; NewsCred claims access to 5,000 publisher sources, including the Economist, the Evening Standard, Forbes, and Associated Press.

It also lists the Daily Telegraph as a supplier which, after last week’s furore involving HSBC and Peter Oborne, should make the paper the go-to guys for advertiser-friendly content.

And of course cash-strapped publishers like this because it is another way of generating revenue – even if the rates are as miserly as Spotify’s payments to music artists.

It’s not hard to understand the dynamic here. My issue, however, is that all this points to the commoditisation of content. It is selected and pumped out, if not indiscriminately, at a speed and scale that makes little allowance for context or the reader’s mood state.

Plus – and this is a big negative – the content sourced from publishers is not original and not likely to be timely. It’s been used before – that’s why the publishers make it available to the likes of Newscred.

The claim that these platforms can measure the ROI of content marketing needs challenging. Yes, they can produce lots of data – reach, frequency, engagement, likes, shares and all that. But these are media metrics, and thus offer only a limited view of ROI.

The real challenge for content marketing is to measure its long-term impact, separated out from TV advertising and so on, on broader brand, and ultimately, business metrics: brand favourability, trust, incremental sales, margin etc.

To suggest that these platforms can do this is specious.

I also find myself increasingly irked by the nonsense the ‘platformisers’ spout. Here’s Jerome Doncieux, co-founder of Relaxnews, blathering on: “If brands want to be strong on the content battlefield, they have to move from being traditional news agencies to being news platforms.”

WTF is he on about? Brands as ‘news agencies’…no. Brands as ‘news platforms’…rubbish. Mr Doncieux is suffering from a nasty dose of hubris.

Imagine HSBC as a ‘news platform’…”all your up-to-date tax avoidance news here.”

Brands are products and services that can add value by providing consumers with entertainment or utility, some of which, within a narrow definition, may be news. The moment they step beyond that, they’ll break the trust that is the ultimate foundation of their success.