If the Joe in question is Joe Pulizzi , and the topic is content marketing, then the answer is PLENTY!!! The founder and driving force behind Junta 42 , the knowledge/service provider referral portal that has encouraged and enabled countless companies to add the content marketing to their communications mix, Joe (who seems like a really, genuinely nice guy from the few emails I’ve exchanged with him) is taking content marketing to another level with the establishment of The Content Marketing Institute. Bursting with case studies, research, stats and the chance to sign up for a FREE (!) subscription to the forthcoming CCO: Chief Content Officer quarterly magazine, the CMI not only tells would-be content marketers what they should be doing; by being such a valuable source of content about content marketing, CMI shows them how it’s done…and done right. The Content Marketing Institute is both example and inspiration to marketers and communicators who agree that all companies must become media companies—and that the future of marketing is content marketing. If you’re not already one of the true believers in content marketing, download CMI’s ebook, Social Media and Content Marketing Predictions for 2011.
In 1921, the Washburn Crosby Company, which would later become part of General Mills, offered women a chance to win a flour bag-shaped pincushion for correctly completing a word puzzle available in their bags of flour. Along with the contest responses came a tidal wave of questions about food, cooking and entertaining. The time was right—the American middle class no longer had servants to depend on and the lady of the house needed to strap on an apron and get busy. From these questions, the marketing persona of Betty Crocker was born. Created by home economist and business woman Marjorie Child Husted, with a surname in honor of a recently retired Washburn Crosby director and a first name chosen for its happy, all-American sound, Betty Crocker became the American homemaker’s new best friend, dispensing advice through newspaper columns, a long running radio show and eventually television. The persona was brought to life in 1949, by Adelaide Hawley Cummings, an actress who hosted the General Foods branded entertainment ventures and did walk-on commercials on the George Burns and Gracie Allen Show. At one point, she was believed to be the most recognizable woman in America, bested only by Eleanor Roosevelt. The campaign branched out into cookbooks and other products, many of which are still available today. The visual of Betty Crocker changed eight times between 1936 and 1986, reflecting changes in how American women viewed themselves and the most recent version continues to peer at us from ads, product packaging and an aesthetically pleasing and information-packed http://www.bettycrocker.com/.
The creation of Betty Crocker also inspired other early companies to recognize the value of what we now call branded content; what they viewed as a means of reaching and connecting with customers, and providing information of value to develop loyalty. In the 1920s, women’s editorial departments sprung up in early ad agencies to give credible voices to personas like Libby’s Mary Hale Martin and Odorono’s Ruth Miller. The Lux Soap Company had two spokes-characters; Marjorie Mills for soap flakes and the chatty Dorothy Dix for toilet soap. The advice, humor and information provided by these characters and others laid a strong foundation for the value of branded content that we are only now rediscovering.
General Foods build an empire on branded content nearly 90 years ago. Just imagine what you can do with it now.
Every company must be a publisher.
This is pretty much the underlying premise of every piece of information ever written on the value of branded content. But what exactly does it mean?
Once upon a time, publishers were very powerful because they controlled the flow of information. Publishing was a very expensive business; not just anyone could publish and someone had to be the gatekeeper. So publishers (and the editors they hired) were the ones who made the decisions about what books, magazine and newspaper articles and other information made it into publication. There were vanity presses, which allowed authors to pay to be published, but they had a feeling of desperation about them. Since they had neither gatekeepers, nor access to the channels of distribution afforded real publishers, vanity books seldom got much notice or had much impact.
Back then, getting out information on your company, your products, your growth was a long, difficult and risky process. You made a list of trade magazines and had your communications department or PR company send out a press release to reporters. If you were lucky, a reporter got interested and went to his or her editor—who in turn may have had to get buy-in from the powerful publisher. If you were really lucky, the reporter got permission to do an article—and after a three-month lead-time, your story ran—right beside stories about your competitors.
Now we’re genuinely lucky. Businesses can communicate directly with their audience. That’s why in The New Rules of PR and Marketing, David Meerman Scott advises businesses to write news releases directed not at reporters, but at customers, at consumers. There’s no need for gatekeepers anymore (which may explain why the publishing industry is in trouble). Companies can shape their own messages, determine what they want to say, when they want to say it and to whom. They have the luxury of publishing branded content, online or sometimes in print, to create a loyal following of customers who feel their needs are understood and that their business is valued. Companies are beginning to realize the value (and ease) of communicating with their customers even when they aren’t trying to sell them something. Some companies get it. As time goes by, lots of others will too. That’s why all companies will need to be publishers—because their ability to control not just what information potential customers receive—but how—is going to give them a competitive advantage.
Ain’t progress grand?
