No blood will be shed, because there is no battle happening here. Choose a side and your brand will ultimately lose. What would flabbergast me is if you even believed there was a choice to be made in the first place when you read the title of this essay.
The combination of art and science has always given us the power to create “magic”. Remember the days when need-based attitudinal studies were the greatest gifts to marketers when it came to understanding consumers? Let’s also not forget the cost implications, which would inevitably add up to gain these tools.
In today’s marketing arena, marketers have cost-efficient access to billions of real-time data points. The volume of data isn’t significant. It’s what you derive and apply from that data into your content marketing strategies that really matters. It’s the ability to gather and analyse meaningful consumer behaviour from layers of raw data and deeply understand a consumer’s intent and sentiment towards your brands and products.
Yet some brands are continuing to focus on the physical output of the content piece, rather than the actual impact it can have on an audience. In today’s reality, it is imperative that our content marketing strategies and practices are defined by the synergetic balance of creativity and data. There is a need to start infusing holistic data-driven content insights and strategies right from the time we are contemplating even creating a piece of content. The initiation of a marriage between art and science.
The fundamental question we should begin by asking is not only “Who are my real consumers?” but also “How can I identify their needs, create content that they want, and build a truly interactive relationship between my brand and my consumers?”
The phenomenal growth in data capturing allows us to be very specific on who exactly are we targeting, but also who we aren’t targeting, and why we are eliminating them from our content journey.
Let’s also try to get out of the rut of producing and distributing content across single-channel distribution platforms. We proudly boast of producing “different” pieces of content for different digital placements. What we should really be thinking about is how to scale our content creation process for every stage of our consumer’s buying journey within the complex multi-channel world that they live and breathe in.
Initiate a process of understanding how your consumer behaves and interacts with your brand’s properties and social channels. See how that same consumer engages with content on a publisher’s website and social channels, and start to dive deeper into their lives. The topics that they are passionate about, behaviours with certain pieces of content, time spent actively seeking information, buying intentions, etc. You will begin to see a beautiful kaleidoscopic formation of data patterns and will start experiencing the world through your consumers’ eyes.
And let’s not forget our new favourite data word of the day: “retargeting”. By using attribution models, we can orchestrate breakthroughs in content creation as we collect data on which portal, platform, ad placement, content piece and content placement are rich media and creative executions working for the brand. We start to contextually target consumers as we gain behavioural insights on how they have interacted and engaged with our ads and content pieces. We can start to distribute in real time to drive relevancy, immediacy and commercial experiences, encouraging our consumers to enter the purchase cycle. What we have to be really careful of is not to “retarget” consumers after they have purchased, as this leads to frustration and anger.
But for truly effective campaigns, it has to start getting personal.
One of my favourite campaigns, especially because I am an avid traveller, is from Vacation Matchmaker in Tennessee. They created and served over 2,000 pre-roll video combinations, edited and targeted in real-time, personalising vacation experiences without consumers having to do anything. They analysed millions of data points about a user’s online behaviour and activity, scanned through hundreds of video clips of things a user can do in Tennessee, and ultimately served an edit of a commercial perfectly matched to their interests and passions. They went a step further, where users can interact with the
pre-roll content piece itself, get to know more about the attractions proposed and socially share the content piece/attractions.
So rather than a typical tourism ad trying to attract anyone and everyone, proposing what they would like us to see and visit, we get this stunning customised piece of content appealing just to one person individually. The results were phenomenal, with 93 per cent of people surveyed saying that they were planning to take a vacation to Tennessee in the next one year. Very impressive for a local tourism board. And this is actually possible to execute in our region as well.
What frustrates me, however, is that data has been driving the advertising industry and shaping marketing campaigns for years. Historically, what we had called “brand and consumer insights” led to some of the most innovative work being produced. Yet today, creative agencies are reluctant to embrace data and take on board its significance to the creative thinking process, especially when it comes to creating digital content.
Respectfully, my personal and humble view is that data is the ying to creativity’s yang. Together, these two can help brands remember and preserve their humanity.
Leena Kewlani, Branded content director, DMS, a member of Choueiri Group