On Sponsored and Scalable Brand Content

This morning I woke up to this Tweet from my friend Nick:

@heyitsnoah Interesting argument against brands producing content, somewhat relevant to Percolate in that respect https://t.co/lSRSt4PmDJ

— Nick Baum (@nickbaum) July 29, 2013

It's great to have friends who discover interesting stuff and send it my way, so I quickly clicked over at read Jeff's piece on sponsored content and media as a service. I'm going to leave the latter unturned as I find myself spending much less time thinking about the broader state of the media since starting Percolate two-and-a-half years ago. But the former, sponsored content, is clearly a place I play and was curious to see what Jarvis thought. Quickly I realized he thought something very different than me (which, of course, is why I'm writing a blog post). Mostly I started getting agitated right around here: "Confusing the audience is clearly the goal of native-sponsored-brand-content-voice-advertising. And the result has to be a dilution of the value of news brands." While that may be true in advertorial/sponsored content/native advertising space, it misses the vast majority of content being produced by brands on a day-to-day basis. That content is being created for social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the such by brands who have acquired massive audiences, frequently much larger than the media companies Jarvis is referring to. Again, I think this exists outside native advertising, but if Jarvis is going to conflate content marketing and native advertising, than it seems important to point out. To give this a sense of scale the average brand had 178 corporate social media accounts in January, 2012. Social is where they're producing content. Period. Second issue came in a paragraph about the scalability of content for brands:

Now here’s the funny part: Brands are chasing the wrong goal. Marketers shouldn’t want to make content. Don’t they know that content is a lousy business? As adman Rishad Tobaccowala said to me in an email, content is not scalable for advertisers, either. He says the future of marketing isn’t advertising but utilities and services. I say the same for news: It is a service.

Two things here: First, I agree that the current ways brands create content aren't scalable. That's because they're using methods designed for creating television commercials to create 140 character Tweets. However, to conclude that content is the lousy business is missing the point a bit. Content is a lousy business when you're selling ads around that content. The reason for this is reasonably simple: You're not in the business of creating content, you're in the business of getting people back to your website (or to buy your magazine or newspaper). The whole letting your content float around the web is great, but at the end of the day no eyeballs mean no ad dollars. But brands don't sell ads, they sell soap, or cars, or soda. Their business is somewhere completely different and, at the end of the day, they don't care where you see their content as long as you see it. What this allows them to do is outsource their entire backend and audience acquisition to the big social platforms and just focus on the day-to-day content creation. Finally, while it's nice to think that more brands will deliver utilities and services on top of the utilities and services they already sell, delivering those services will require the very audience they're building on Facebook, Twitter, and the like to begin with.