B2B
Marketers, Media Partners Must Start Telling Better Stories
Daly, Editorial Director of Edutopia, a print and digital publication from the George Lucas Educational Foundation, was one of the more enlightened panelists at last month’s Mediabistro Circus in New York City. “Today it’s all about reader engagement,” agreed fellow panelist, Paul Rossi, Publisher of the Economist. “It’s not about using cheap clickatorial ploys to get people to respond. Anyone can do that on the Web. Readers and advertisers come to you, the publisher, ‘for a lens, a view that they trust.’” “An engaged community is more than just cheap content,” concurred panelist, Paul Cloutier, CEO of 8020 Publishing, which specializes in reader-generated magazines such as JPG and Everywhere. Each medium has its unique strengths, said Cloutier. Print, especially the magazine, is still the best vehicle “for telling aspirational stories with beautiful compelling images and allowing for leisurely reader serendipity.” The Web is more effective for fact-finding, for telling stories requiring data, timeliness, interactivity. “That’s very hard to do in print.” Cloutier said marketers and their media partners have to do a better job of utilizing each medium’s strengths and acknowledging each medium’s weaknesses. Print media’s days “are far from over,” he said, but the days of one-size-fits-all journalism and one-size-fits-all advertising are pretty much over. When it comes to new ways of story telling, we’ve been getting a lot of great feedback on our new CPA Insider™ Video Snacks. The video snacks are a form of podcast designed to supplement columns from Rick Telberg and other popular AICPA e-newsletter columnists. Rick’s podcasts draw from the hundreds of reader comments and online survey responses he receives each week. Like Edutopia’s James Daly, Rick says the videos are shifting his role from “preacher to trusted listener.” What’s more, in today’s age of impersonal voice-mail and e-mail, they’re putting a “badly needed human element” back into the business-communication mix. Or as Paul Rossi notes, “our editors feel they can have a real and intelligent conversation with our readers at any time. This shows engagement.”
If your organization is not producing or sponsoring videos, you might want to take notice. Prospects who listen to podcasts are 73 percent more likely to buy or use a product or service advertised during a broadcast, according to Internet Marketing Report (IMR). IMR says when it comes to podcasts, the shorter the better. Podcasts are particularly effective when prospects can listen to them while exercising, commuting, having coffee or dressing for the day. “Online
video is rewriting the rules of appointment TV,” said Jim
Louderback, CEO of Revision 3, an Internet television network, who
presented at the Mediabistro Circus. You don’t have to look much past YouTube to realize that online video is booming. David Hallerman, a senior analyst at eMarketer, a research firm, said marketers spent $925 million on online video advertising in 2007 — a small percentage of the $25.9 billion overall ad spend online. But video is the biggest growth area, he said, and will reach $5.5 billion by 2012—or about 10 percent of the total amount of advertising dollars spent on the Internet. “For a lot of marketers, video is seen as experimental,” Hallerman said, noting that the top 100 advertisers are already spending over 3.1 percent of their total advertising budgets on video, up from next to nothing a few years ago. “Video may not always be something you’ll directly make money from, but will help increase traffic and brand awareness.” Online Video Viewing Surges
And while the average video viewed is less than three minutes, don’t think online videos are for the hyperactive, low-attention span generation. Tammy Haddad, a video producer for Newsweek and member of the 2008 FOLIO: 40 List of Leading Media Professionals said more than seven million people watched Obama’s speech on race on YouTube—“and that was 37 minutes long.” That audience nearly matched the average number of viewers who tuned into the NBC’s Nightly News program, she said. So whether you’re a B2B marketer, a media buyer, an account executive or a publisher, why don’t you join us under the big tent of ideas? There’s plenty of room to tell your story. And as Revision 3’s Jim Louderback quipped with this Nike-ism: “Don’t over-think it. Just do it and have fun.” Isn’t that why most of us got into this business? |
For
media pro, James Daly, the biggest recent change he’s seen
on his job is the shift from “one-way messaging to two-way
participation.” Both editors and marketers can no longer sit
back and preach, he said. “We’re getting active feedback
from our readers. We don’t pretend to know everything. We’re
just hosting a big tent full of ideas. There are so many new ways
to tell a story.”