Content, Creative, Narrative – The Marriage

The topic itself says a lot, however, there are other parts to this and in the next few minutes, my attempt will be to bring in my perspectives on how to approach the same. Content in itself is powerful, however it is also important to look at what enables it today. That is technology. Over the past few years, technology, algorithms have been evolving with the creator economy gradually taking over. Where one of the most important thing is how differently are we bringing a narrative to the audience in yet a simplistic way. 

Whenever I am thinking through a campaign and its purpose, I usually start with 7 questions –  

Step 1 

(1) where is my audience, (2) what their most likely interests, (3) what are they likely to shop for, (4) which platforms we could most likely find them on and what are the core competitors of the brand or the product (as it is mostly a Red Ocean), (5) What is the Customer Value Proposition for the brand / product, (6) chances of reaching the TG in the best of moments in the strategy that we are building (7) how will be the success measured 

Step 2 

Then thinking through and making an attempt co-relating this to 2 facts – the journey today is non-linear with minimum 6 to 7 touchpoints, attention span in ‘seconds’, unless it is powerful long format film that we are crafting for a specific purpose. As we say in a fancy way …Ephemeral Content which is nothing but content that disappears and takes advantage of one’s Fear of Missing Out. 

Step 3  

Research about the brand and its immediate competition. That will lead to the strategy, and step number 3 will be our ability to visualise how will the content and creative be looking, how is the narrative resonating with the overall purpose and ethos of the brand. And use as much relevant and actionable insights from data points to understand better execution time and again. 

Step 4  

This step is focusing on the treatment of content and creative. 

Creative content is different from creative treatment of branded content. First of all, the creative element is usually a treatment that sell a brand, whereas, creative content is a product in its own right. So, creative content is the story, film or video, but branded creative content is when you take that story out of promoted video to be implemented or marketed as a product and also to be repurposed in certain ways. 

Another important point is how we project a particular creative for a particular set of audience keeping in mind an individual view of the consumer today. So, as a broad example, if the TG is 18 to 34, are we using the same creative digitally across the digital media mix or are we looking at smaller cohorts of age groups to bring in the narrative in a slightly different manner. Just to add, creative and messaging plays an important role. One creative (unless topical) may not work for the complete TG. Also, for example, how to leverage data points such as -  if we speak about video, reaching audiences that TV can’t: YouTube’s incremental reach in India is about 65 per cent. 

Step 5 

How to make Brands more accessible and discoverable by Gen Z (in case this is a potential part of the target audience).  

I did say that it is also time to pay attention the Gen Alpha – born around 2010.  I say this because when I look at my 3-year-old daughter, knows how to check history on YouTube, play what she wants. Probably the level of curiosity is higher, I don’t know, but these are behaviours that I see that today a 10 to 15-year-old will know how to discover what. Gen Z – mid to late 1990s, their behaviour towards consumption of information may be different from Millennials to Alpha folks. And for that, it is important to start with product-market fitment, keeping pace with evolving audience, studying data on say, for e.g. is a Gen Z is on Spotify and we want to target that person, then what kind of content does he or she listens to. To cut the long story short- it is not one thing that enables brands being more accessible or discoverable.  

(a) Product level discovery and navigation (in case of an app)    

(b) experimenting with the message and the nature of the message that resonates with TG cohorts. That’s because one creative will have lesser chance of resonating with all TG groups. Hence technologies such as DCA  

(c) Going for BOF without addressing the TOF is like jumping into The Mariana Trench without even know how will you do a kilometre below the ocean. There was a time without Instagram and Influencer marketing had not hit the creator economy bolt. Now, we have lot of options, it is about how we build our strategy framework at a Venn diagram level where Content, Creative and Technology will need to work together so as to compliment each part of the project. 

Step 6 

Finally, having the right KPIs in place to measuring the increase or decrease in the audience appreciation of the message. Too many KPIs spoil the broth, hence may be top 2 KPIs and the other as supporting KPIs that enable translating the data into further action. And, not to forget, it is imperative that we work in teams and in silos. Social should be aware of what impact they are looking at with the creative, creative needs to have best possible understanding of the campaign objective so as to bring in the marriage of content, creative and the narrative where the right creative for right platform happens and technology is the pivot that glues the execution. Hence, cohesiveness is pivotal. 

To wrap up, social media platforms are becoming increasingly shoppable, with Instagram, TikTok leading the way with them in-app shopping capabilities. Even Twitter recently debuted its own commerce feature (Shop Module) in July this year, with Walmart being the first retail brand to use ‘Live Shopping’ on the platform. Twitter generates a whopping 86 percent of its billion-dollar revenue through advertising services alone. Today more than ever, Twitter is in an excellent position to capitalise on the one thing it does even better than Facebook – foster real time brand interaction between companies and consumers. 

Google is updating some of its ecommerce features through a new feature: The Deals feed. The Deals feed is a new feed added to the Shopping tab on Google search results, categorising items related to the search query with promotions, sales, price drops, and other running promos.  And all this is loads of data, however, the most important thing is ‘what data to look at’ and what are the actionable insights from a data cohort.  

Consistency is data study is important as the data that we are studied 2 years back could help in revisiting what we look at then and what we are looking at now, what helped then, and what could help now. All this tells me one thing, that it is important to bring in hybrid experiences to compliment the changing audience habits and consumption of media that will propel this growth trajectory.