If you’re an owner of content, you are faced with the rock-and-a-hard-place discussed below: content is plentiful and plenty of it is free, so how are you going to make money?
Yes, you can make your content the absolute best in class, and you will find a fraction of your audience that will pay because your content is just so damn good, but on a grand scale you can’t really add value to content. You need to come at the problem from the other side and add value to the consumer.
Social media, the tools we have now to learn about people, and the new way we build relationships between people and brands- these are the ways you’ll make each and every consumer more valuable. Display ads are nowhere – they’re a megaphone to an undifferentiated and indifferent world. But if you tell me you can reach Northwest dads in their 50s who rock climb and recently quit smoking (which you easily can, by mining plentifully available data) – and if you are a modern brand that’s built direct and personal relationships with those consumers- suddenly you’ve added value to those consumers, who, in turn, add value to you.

Great piece by Felix Salmon in his Reuters blog, which jumps off from News Corp and its proposed paywall and includes a quote from Group M characterizing non-paying readers of online news as “useless tourists”. Salmon says (I couldn’t possibly phrase it better):

Millions of people are willing to pay for a physical object — a newspaper — but are not willing to pay to read that same newspaper online. It doesn’t make sense that those millions of people are hugely desirable readers when they’re reading a physical newspaper, and hugely desirable readers if they pay to read content online, but are just “useless tourists” if they don’t pay to read content online.

Here we go again with the challenge we’ve faced since “content wants to be free” and “content is king” both came into being: how do you make the consumer of free content valuable?
Seems to me you’d better find a different means of valuation. If you can’t value the consumer by ad dollars because they’re not worth enough to advertisers, and you can’t value the consumer by the subscription dollars you so dearly WISH they’d pay…guess what?

It is up to you to make your consumer – your customer- your audience -more valuable.
More on that next post.

Following upon the really interesting coverage Marc Gobe did in São Paulo – where no outdoor advertising of any kind is allowed, presenting both a challenge and an opportunity for marketers- The Artvertiser is a brilliant next step in public spaces, blurring the lines between public advertising and public art. From the site:

The Artvertiser considers Puerta del Sol Madrid, Times Square New York, Shibuya Tokyo and other sites dense with advertisements as potential exhibition space. The Artvertiser is an instrument of conversion and reclamation, taking imagery seen by millions and re-purposing it as a surface for presentation of art.
The Artvertiser software is trained to recognise individual advertisements, each of which become a virtual ‘canvas’ on which an artist can exhibit images or video when viewed through the hand-held device.
After training, where ever the advertisement appears, the chosen art will appear instead when viewed live through the hand-held device. It doesn’t matter whether the advertisement is on a building, in a magazine or on the side of a vehicle.

Right now you need the Artvertiser’s own binoculars or webcams to see the substituted art, although an Android port is in the works.

Cool, yes? Everywhere a particular brand or campaign appears, it is replaced with a new image.

We live in a time when not only does advertising constantly use art to its own ends, but art subverts advertising.

image courtesy of the artvertiser

From Paul Carr’s TechCrunch piece on integrated advertising, especially on Twitter (the piece is wonderfully entitled NSFW: Give Me Ad-Free Conversation or Give Me Death (Please RT):

A tweet isn’t a “piece of content”. It isn’t editorial. No matter whether we’re talking about what we’re having for lunch or suggesting a new movie or sharing a piece of news, what we’re really doing is having a good old-fashioned conversation. Following people on Twitter is like organising the world’s largest cocktail party – we’ve decided who’s opinions we trust, and we’ve invited them to come into our homes and talk to us about things they are genuinely interested in. The moment people start screwing around with that principle, the whole system collapses.

Couldn’t define the current and/or idealized nature of Twitter any better. As marketers (Carr: “What I do is Good and Pure; what they do is Bad and Dirty.” So true) we are faced with a world where any traditional notion of advertising is easily avoided by all smart people and most not-so-smart. So we leverage ourselves into content and “conversations” because people like those. At which point, like an airborne contaminant, we risk ruining that content/conversation experience by rendering it no longer genuine (the word “authentic” is currently in my “social media cuss jar” via which folks in our meetings are fined for egregious buzzword use*).

One answer to this is to leave the conversations alone in order to maintain their authentic real and genuine nature, thus retaining what is currently a quite effective marketing tool.

Over/under on that happening? Thought so.

* Social media cuss jar is combined with Internet jargon cuss jar and includes such words and phrases as “100,000 foot level”, “drill down”, and the execrable “best practices”. You get the picture.