The full circle of content and interactivity
When it comes to content, quality over quantity is still the golden rule, writes Jaywing‘s digital MD, Brian Taylor. However, if brands really want to stand out they need to offer content that also increases participation…
There’s an irony in the full circle of content and interactivity. Fifteen years ago when digital agencies first emerged, interactivity was their mantra, often at the expense of good quality content. But the philosophy of interactivity was soon hushed by the arrival of YouTube, Facebook, and then apps, which made content generation easy for marketers.
Now with all of these advances reaching maturity and requiring a constant need to evolve, the desire for new ways to engage audiences, means interactivity is back on. And these all necessitate an increasing ability to use technology. For brands today, the development of high quality content that can be engaged with and shared across multiple platforms is the winning formula.
Why is there a shift towards quality over quantity?
Right now we are seeing a flurry of interest in Ello: a social platform that promises to be ad free. This is either because people dislike advertising in principle, or because of the volume of poor quality branded content being crow-barred into their feeds. Because of this, consumers are now much harder to engage and are choosing when and where to interact with brands. Now it’s necessary not just to produce high quality branded content, but to ensure consumers also interact and engage with it.
Where the cornerstones of good content used to be ‘branded’,’memorable’ and ‘relevant’, it’s high time ‘participatory’ was permanently added too. The fact that interactive marketing and ‘doing, not viewing’ is a hot topic is hardly surprising.
BuzzFeed set the agenda when it announced a significant investment in a team capable of making whatever is topical, playable. Previous examples include the Game of Thrones name generator and Orange is the New Black tattoo generator, both of which have been a big success for the publication across social media.
This gamified and participatory approach is not just being adopted by publishers, but also by marketers looking to create good branded content.
An example is Müller’s #wordtoyourmuller campaign. In order to develop a social media strategy for the Müller Rice Bear, a brand voice simply wasn’t enough. Consumers want more than just to be spoken to. To solve the problem, Müller created an account for ‘Tasty B’ that replies to any tweet ending in #wordtoyourmuller with a personalised rap. In doing so, the brand produces ownable and unique content that helps to gain standout in the crowded digital space.
The way forward for interactivity
The full circle of content and interactivity means that marketing cannot be siloed anymore – it needs to integrate and perform across multiple channels. This versatility of content is an increasingly important topic. For example, a brand can develop a video that is well received through social media and pre-purpose it for digital out of home spaces. This integrated content provides brand consistency as well as a greater return on investment than separate executions for each channel.
A recent example is the collaborative project for PepsiMax that integrates ‘unbelievable’ vine videos into outdoor ads, which marked a shift in the brand’s focus away from traditional TV led campaigns to digital, interactive channels.
The campaign invites fans to upload their very own six second videos of something unbelievable with the hashtag #LiveForNow. The best posts are then published on screens across the UK. The campaign successfully brings together the use of participatory and interactive content, while also transcending the boundaries of social media and traditional outdoor advertising.
When it comes to content, quality over quantity is still the golden rule. However, if brands really want to stand out marketers need to offer content that also increases participation. This encourages consumers to engage and interact, as well as share that content through a wider range of channels to deliver participation at all steps of the content journey