Billed as the Future Sessions, this time we're tackling the subject of Killer Content and have some top people to share their thoughts. The event is a quick, snappy session held at the private Aubin Cinema in Shoreditch.
We now have so many more effective, creative and imaginative communication tools at our disposal: video, print, digital photography, social media... all of these tools and more can help bring your brands to life and improve engagement with your audience.
But with all of these great new tools come lots of questions:
• What’s the best way to tell a particular story?
• How can I ensure our content stays relevant to our Brand?
• How to make my content useful, authentic and engaging?
• How can I integrate my different communication channels to tell powerful stories?
Being held on the 9th May, 12-2pm each speaker has only 10 minutes to deliver their vision on the future of Killer Content, followed by an open Q&A session.
49. Having seen this advert, we would now like you to tell us how much you agree or disagree with each of the
following statements about the brand:
-1
0
1
Is Famous Is Trustworthy Is a high quality brand Is Distinctive
GBNI Tourist Boards: no image (201)
GBNI Tourist Boards: Royalty Free
(203)
GBNI Tourist Boards: Premium (200)
Agree strongly
Disagree strongly
Total Sample: 604
C
B
A
Significance Level: A,B,C = 95%
BA C
Mean score on scale of +3 (agree strongly) to -3 (disagree strongly)
So that’s the shameless self-promotion out of the way...But actually this little film illustrates how we at Designate think, and why we are hosting these Future Sessions in the first placeThe role and power of brands in a changed landscape and with massively empowered consumers is key to what we doFor Engagement, read:AttentionInterestRelevancePreferenceTrustLoyaltyIn other words, it’s about establishing a relationshipIn a very public forumWith ultimate transparency
Content Marketing is the current buzzword – and with jargon, buzzwords and hype comes mystification, confused and a lot of smoke and mirrorsSo what’s all the fuss about content?The ever-tougher battle for attention, appeal, relevance, preference, loyalty – it’s like A global online speed-dating challengeIt’s not just what you say, it’s how you say it, where you say it, and actually, what others are saying about you
Here’s a roadmap of the web – that like a London Tourist – you can get lost easilyToday is about simplifying where to start and how to go about producing, sourcing, reusing content for your brand>Content can be…highly accessible, come from many sources and it need not break your budgetBut if you are not actively providing relevant, engaging, interesting or useful content online......your brand will lose outToday is about:DemystificationAccessibilityInspirationThe power of words, pictures, videoAnd some guiding principles
We will start with Search, and that is going to be a recurring theme, and while it is not the whole story, Getting further up the rankings is hugely important.Our first speaker is NilhanJayasinghe:A digital marketer with 10 years agency-side experience working with many UK and global brands across a range of key verticals, from travel and finance to FMCG and online retail. Was Head of Search at Spannerworks/iCrossing and a Digital strategist at iCrossing in the UK.A strategic thinker and thought leader with a deep interest in the underlying mechanics of search and social interaction. A firm believer in putting the user first as the holy grail to profitable and sustainable marketing.
If search is important - so is keeping the prospective customer on your website, engaged, with content that is inspirational, reassuring, interesting, entertaining, useful or anything else you want that person to feel about your brandHere’s Dan Robb – GoogleDaniel leads the travel team in the UK for Google, whose aim is to develop and deliver ground breaking digital solutions to their Travel client portfolio. Daniel joined Google in 2005 as the first employee devoted to travel outside of the US, and has since helped build out bespoke vertical expertise teams across EMEA. Prior to Google, Daniel was Commerical manager at Teletext holidays.
I want to talk to you about three things today.Why video is important to us as peopleHow online video is changing what we consumeAnd how brands can get involved
So video is amazing, but why? It is because it is how we make sense of the world. It is the closest thing we have to real life experience. Think about the really big events in the world, we experienced them through video. Here are a bunch of clips we pulled together from YouTube, to show you what we mean.
And this is why for advertisers TV was magic. It allowed them to harness...
…the power of sight, sound and motion. It allowed them to make an emotional connection with their audiences.
What we are finding now though, that it doesn’t matter what screen people watch this content on. We did some research on tablet and mobile usage, and found that they are adding 23% incremental video views to TV and Laptop. People don’t mind what device they are on, they just want to watch video - they’ll do it on whatever device is most convenient to them.
So people love video and they watch a lot of video. But what is it that people watch? What gets their attention and evokes emotion? Well you'll be surprised to see that great content really can come from everywhere! We are seeing a trend of what might be considered niche content in mainstream broadcasting, getting huge numbers of views.
I’d like to tell you a story about a guy called Michael. He started his career as a stage actor and director. Then in 2007 he saw a mashup of the trailer for the Shining on YouTube (reworking it as a comedy) and saw that it was getting millions of views. He thought to himself - ‘Hey, I shouldn’t be wasting my time making theatre for 20 people a week, I should be making video’ for Millions of people!He started making videos about science and technology. Just answering questions people are always wondering about, like “What would happen if everyone jumped at once?”. He is not a scientist, he doesn’t know the answer. He simply looks up the answer online (Wikipedia), and talk over it in his video. For visuals he uses screenshots from the documents he found or google images, no sophisticated animation whatsoever.Have a look for yourself. Here is an excerpt from a video he made about the colour of a mirror.
Another couple of guys that I love are the SlowMo guys. These guys bought a slow motion camera set up and just film stuff and put it on YouTube.
This is all great, but what should brands do about it? We have three ideas!
Firstly make great content.
Do you know who this is? She is a singer called Carly Rae Jepsen.
If you didn’t know who she was, I bet you have seen some of these. Abercrombie and Fitch did, and they decided to utilise the huge buzz around this video and remake it.Lego VideoIn only 4 weeks this 17 minute video received 2.3M views and is currently No 7 in the UK viral charts. When we were looking at it in the office, a group of about 10 people surrounded a screen and watched it from start to finish mesmorised - we at least get paid to do that kind of thing!But you don’t even need your own content. Target contacted a bunch of people who uploaded videos to YouTube of a moment in their lives and asked to use it in an advert. Here is the result.
Sometimes you can be more authentic by letting others do the talking for you. We can help you find the right producers to sponsor, and to get your message out. They already have a following, they know how to do this and you can bask in the reflected glory.
Mascara drawer? How many mascaras does a girl need, I just have my daytime one and my evening one.Now it is all very well producing great content, but we want you to get it in front of as many people as possible. We have a bunch of formats that you can use on YouTube, the masthead on the homepage, pre rolls, and the trueview family, where you only pay when someone wants to watch your content, built in targeting to your consumers.One of those is called skippables, it is a standard pre-roll that you can skip if you don’t want to watch it. What I am really excited about is that people are starting to use this format in really interesting ways, for performance and brand. But it is when great creative is used with the specific moment that it get’s really interesting.
So, I have covered three things.Video is how we see the world,People want to watch great content on any screen and they don’t care who made it if it is interesting, useful or funAnd brands can easily get involved, cheaply and effectively.
They say a picture paints a thousand words – but not just any picture will do as Rebecca from Getty Images is going to demonstrate:Rebecca joined the photography industry nearly 20 years ago. She is a creative planner responsible for building the global photography, video and illustration collections at Getty Images and is a visual consultant to companies large and small who are building visual brands.Rebecca runs global research projects looking at the future of visual communications and has published many trend reports, presenting findings all over the world.Rebecca lectures widely at conferences and seminars and has been a visiting lecturer at University of the Arts and UCLAN. She has sat on the judging panel for most of the significant European photography, design and advertising awards.She is currently researching a PhD into visual trends in UK advertising imagery over the last 30 years.
Thank you all for coming – hope you’ve found some of this useful – interesting and authentic – there are some Designate people here should you wish to discuss your content strategy.It remains for me to tell you – we will email a link to you with the slides and video of today’s presentation. Please feel free to amplify and share this!