According to multiple studies, including a report released early in 2015 by advertising insight firm ALF, ‘content’ was the area that most marketers expected to invest more in this year, with 80% putting big budgets into developing compelling content. It’s clearly an important growth area for advertisers and marketers, but how do you define ‘content’?
A number of terms are gaining traction, including custom content, native advertising, brand journalism and branded content. But however you deliver content, what it really comes down to is helping brands and businesses tell stories. Interesting, engaging and credible stories. It’s about adding insight, knowledge or entertainment, and giving some kind of value to a reader or viewer via compelling content across media platforms
As consumers become increasingly information-hungry, content is proving to be a powerful tool for brands to deliver more than just product messaging. It can allow brands to own certain stories or themes and profit from that association.
It’s not just advertisers who are seeing the value that content can bring though. Content is good for publishers too. After all, telling great stories is what we are all about. This makes us ideal partners to help brands create content-led campaigns, provide credible environments for branded content to be seen in and to deliver relevant audiences. As a result, content-led advertising creates a real opportunity for publishers to extend the value of their platforms by offering advertisers a trusted environment to talk to consumers in a way that can often resonate far longer than the viewing of a traditional ad.
The media brands that comprise the World Media Group have seen a huge increase in content-led campaigns with amazing creativity, depth and a unique ability to tell stories that resonate across international borders.
Creating great content is not easy and one of the great things stemming from this has been the forging of deeper relationships with advertisers and agencies as content excellence requires strong team work.
It is this closer working practice that has led us to take the monumental step of launching the World Media Awards – the first awards to focus solely on celebrating cross platform, cross border, content-driven advertising.
Our aim with the World Media Awards is to create a benchmark for the best in international, content-driven communications. We hope they will show advertisers and agencies how far content has come as a means to change consumer behaviour, and the efficiency and scale that can be achieved through creating campaigns that run internationally.
Central to the Awards is a fantastic panel of judges from global agencies, advertisers and publishers. Given the importance of collaboration in creating content, it was essential to reflect the points of view of these three crucial partners when judging the entries. Many of the judges are award winning in their own right and bring unrivalled expertise and creative thinking with them.
It’s important to note, though, that the World Media Awards are totally independent so campaigns do not need to have run on any of the World Media Group titles – which as well as The Wall Street Journal incorporates Bloomberg Businessweek, Bloomberg Markets, The Economist, Forbes, Fortune, National Geographic, Newsweek, Quartz, The New York Times and TIME.
As international advertising campaigns tend to target a more influential consumer with a global perspective, we have been careful to create award categories that reflect the type of brands that target this influential audience. Hence we are looking for entries from advertisers (and their agencies) from financial services, travel and tourism, foreign direct investment, technology and telecoms, luxury brands, automotive as well as corporate brands. Each of these sectors contains brands large and small that have been pushing the boundaries in using content-led marketing and we hope that many of these will put their campaigns forward.
For consideration, these should have run across multiple media channels in at least four countries, with 75% of the campaign running in 2015. The jury will be looking for successful, innovative campaigns that demonstrate an understanding of the power of great content in reaching international audiences.
For print-based campaigns, this can mean using content to create a more focused and in-depth engagement from consumers. For digital, mobile and video it’s likely to be more about creating highly personalised communications that people will want to share. For live events or broadcast campaigns, we’ll be assessing the additional impact that content has injected. For all campaigns, the crux will be how well content has been used to tell a great story that will draw in the consumer, hold their interest and be remembered.
Of course our industry has always focused on innovation so the judges will also be on the lookout for campaigns that have used new platforms and new executions to deliver content in innovative forms, leveraging mobile, social, apps or interactive platforms to drive new kinds of user engagement and storytelling.
As this is the inaugural year for the World Media Awards, the most exciting thing is that we just don’t know what we will see. There are excellent international content campaigns out there, and we can’t wait to see which ones are entered, and to understand the thinking behind them and the results that they achieved. Now is the time for any advertisers or agencies out there to start planning their entries as the deadline is 21st January 2016.
We hope the awards will help educate more brands about the power and versatility of content to engage consumers and deliver amazing results.
Entry to the awards is absolutely free so if you have a great international, content-driven campaign you would like to enter then please visit http://www.wm-awards.com.
Contributor
Aaron Robinson, Director of Sales Development & Custom Content EMEA, The Wall Street Journal.
