This is an election story, but not a political statement – hang with me on this. It’s profound.
For those not in the media, advertising or marketing world, let me catch you up on something.
This thing called “content marketing” came up and smacked the traditional media industry on the back of the head. This is where an organization creates an information product rather than a piece of “ad creative.” What they create is also called “branded content.”
In the media business, we responded with “native content” – which is commercially-created content that looks like the editorial environment where it appears. For most ethical media companies, that means marking content that wasn’t created by professional journalists somehow – either with the words “sponsored content” and/or placing the content in a shaded box.
Have a look at some great work from WaPo Brand Studio, NYT T Brand Studio and Guardian Labs.
Content marketing, done right is wonderful. It’s a sophisticated way of telling a story. Media companies have a responsibility to differentiate it and readers have a responsibility to understand the provenance of the content they consume.
Got it? So instead of advertising, people create content. At the moment, media companies have internal groups to help create this sort of content for clients since ad agencies are more equipped for artwork than storytelling and PR agencies aren’t quite there yet for creating this type of content. But agencies like Edelman are catching up as they retool into commercial newsrooms and companies, like Goldman, which is the most recent to announce its own internal group, are creating in-house newsrooms.
The Part About the Election
Presidential elections tend to be huge incubators for marketing ideas. With hundreds of millions of dollars to spend and the only consequence for non-performance being a lost election, these are a massive R&D activity for marketing.
This has been a content marketing election. The Clinton campaign has a sophisticated rapid response group to create and distribute social media content. The campaign does run ads, but by volume produces many, many more videos under the moniker “The Briefing.” Trump does some of the same, though he creates most of his own social content, there are web videos that emanate from the campaign and very little traditional advertising.
Surrounding all of this are fake “news” sites, which are highly-partisan like Talking Points memo or Red State. In a display of gross irresponsibility, those sites are not marked as paid content created to support a specific agenda. That’s not ethical content marketing.
Of course we know of certain sites like Breitbart, Townhall or Slate, which dress themselves up as editorial, but with a very clear partisan point of view. These are propaganda arms for the campaigns and their parties. This gives supporters a place to go for shareable articles that support exactly what they want the “news” to say.
Meanwhile, in this context there’s a lot of yelling and screaming about media bias. There is a distrust for media created with the traditional editorial guardrails to separate opinion from fact. There are wars that go on between people forwarding “branded content” articles with opposing points of view as proof that one is “right” in their opinion.
We’re looking to campaigns and their content marketing sites for news.
And we call that credible, while criticizing responsible journalism.
