‘Programmatic’, it’s the word on everybody’s lips these days, along with the phrase, ‘content marketing’. These two weapons in a marketers arsenal are proving powerful and worthy of further investment. But, can they be combined to produce a whole greater than the sum of its parts?
Some media agencies seem to think so.
StarCom Mediavest has seen the potential in both and created a new way for brands to use content marketing, with the principles of programmatic applied, Content@Scale.
However, the idea of treating something as organic as content marketing as a programmatic exercise raises quite a few questions.
Content marketing is essentially the art (and let’s be honest, it is an art form), of telling a good story to the right people, at the right time, to achieve engagement with whatever you are selling. With data fuelling a programmatic approach to content marketing, the ‘right people at the right time’ issue could be easily solved.
However, herein lays the problem.
An algorithm, no matter how advanced, cannot know how a consumer is feeling at any given time, determined simply by their accompanying data. Metadata attached to each piece of content that the programmatic system has access to can only go so far in describing what the content is and what it pertains to.
Quality of content is a key driver in content marketing. With a programmatic approach to content marketing, we face the issue of quality vs. quantity. To be really targeted we need as many bespoke executions as possible and the more executions we have to create, the less time and budget we have to make each piece of content. Having a bank of ‘evergreen’ content to serve to consumers is a tricky situation to master, as the shelf life of content plays a huge part of any successful content marketing effort.
Good content marketing is relevant, timely and engaging. Great content marketing has all these elements and is also funny, unexpected and creative.
The Volvo ‘Epic Split’ video (which has now had north of 75 million views), with Jean Claude Van Damme, was totally unexpected and spot on in terms of tone and quality. It even inspired a pastiche from fellow Hollywood heavyweight Channing Tatum, and as the old saying goes, imitation is the ultimate form of flattery.
The Volvo ‘Epic Split’ execution had everything that makes great content marketing; jeopardy, celebrity, unexpectedness, humour, quality and mass appeal. This combination produced millions of views and a truckload (pun intended) of social shares which led to consumers happily associating themselves with the brand, which, let’s be honest, was not top of most consumers list. This shareabilty is the biggest goal of any content marketing effort.
The biggest question we need to ask when looking at content marketing as programmatic is “just how good can an algorithm be?” The creativity and craft put in to content marketing, both in terms of the content and the placement, is something that is hard for any human being to master, so how can we expected a collection of ones and zeroes to perform just as well?
