Contently Quarterly: The 2015 Issue

quarterly

The 2015 Issue

CONTENTS 46

Publisher’s Note

The Promises & Pitfalls of Content Scores

The Best Branded Content of 2014

4 News in Brief

SAM PETULLA

28

FEATURES

23 ANSWERS

3

Paid Distribution Playbook

8 17 Content Marketing Predictions for 2015

JOE LAZAUSKAS

AMANDA WALGROVE

56 Can Journalism Save Itself?

The Answers to Your 12 Biggest Content Marketing Questions

12 Content Is Social Is Content

SHANE SNOW

ERIN WARD

64

SAM SLAUGHTER

Get Smart

36 16

HANIYA RAE

5 Lessons From Publishing 1000 Pieces of Content This Year

Stacks on Stacks on Stacks

68 Best in Show

JOE LAZAUSKAS

RAY CHENG

NATALIE BURG

LET’S PLAY

18

72 Bot Hunters

Follow the Leaders

JORDAN TEICHER

40 80

Put Up or Shut Up

42

SHANE SNOW

Study: The State of Content Marketing Heading Into 2015 JORDAN TEICHER

FUN

20

RESEARCH

VOICES

50 Going Native

32

BRETT LOFGREN

JOE LAZAUSKAS

Our 2014 Predictions, Ranked

83 Content Marketing Hierarchy of Needs

Publisher’s Note What can Back to the Future II teach us about content marketing?

BY SAM SLAUGHTER

EDITORIAL

CONTENTLY IS...

Publishers

Suits

Sam Slaughter, Shane Snow

Joseph Coleman, Daniel Kim, Somya Munjal, Gavin Power, Eli Samuel, Reena Scoblionko, Rebecca Taskin, Maria Vinokurov, Alana Branston, Jack Combs, Elisa Cool, Corey Cummins, Daniel Ellis-Ferris, Ryan Galloway, Kristen Graves, Colin Grigsby, Rob Haber, John Hazard, Evan Kendall, Ali Kriegsman, Julia Kupper, Rod Kurtz, Brett Lofgren, Joseph Lopardo, “Wild” Bill Loundy, Brian Maehl, Brianna Maury, Allie Mazur, Drew Meyers, Joe Pennacchio, John Stoops, Sierra Wallizer, Amanda Weatherhead, Dylan Zucosky

Come on, brands–we were promised hoverboards!

QUARTERLY

contently.com/ strategist Subscribe online for daily content, news, and strategy.

Editor-in-Chief Joe Lazauskas

Associate Editors Jordan Teicher, Amanda Walgrove

Assistant Editors Kieran Dahl, Dillon Baker, Alyssa Hertig, Camille Padilla

Creative Direction & Design Wendy Kim, Brian Meyers, Cynthia Park

Illustrations Tara Jacoby, Brian Meyers, Cynthia Park, Kyle Fewell, Eric Hibbeler

Nerds Brian Cantrell, James Conant, Kevin Curtin, Corey Finley, Paul Fredrich, Sanjay Ginde, David Goldberg, Jesse Goodall, Lorgio Jimenez, Wendy Kim, Winter Lee, Brian Meyers, Cynthia Park, Kunal Patel, Laura Stritar, Amy Pan

Photography Cover Art by Kyle Fewell

Jacquelyne Pierson, Sam Slaughter, Jenny McCabe

Feature Writers Amanda Walgrove, Shane Snow, Natalie Burg, Sam Petulla, Haniya Rae, Erin Ward, Jordan Teicher Copyright Contently, Inc. 2014

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Propaganda Jessica Black, Ray Cheng, Kieran Dahl, Joe Lazauskas, Sam Slaughter, Shane Snow, Jordan Teicher, Amanda Walgrove, Erin Ward

Many great works of art and literature have tried to predict the future.

Fahrenheit 451, Neuromancer, 1984—all classics. And, of course, the greatest classic of them all: Back to the Future II. Back to the Future II took place in 1985 and imagined the world of 2015.

It predicted a lot of things correctly; inventions like videoconferencing, weather apps, tablets, and Google Glass are commonplace. And it got some things wrong too—mainly double ties, the Cubs winning the World Series, and, of course, hoverboards.

You're probably wondering by now what any of this has to do with content marketing.

Well, many of the innovations in B2F2 represent incremental changes to existing products—which is kind of how brands have been doing content up to now. A blog post here, a blog post there. Maybe a Tumblr or two. Almost no one has gone all-in on content marketing in the way I expected (and hoped) when branded content started getting popular a few years ago. Too often, we're seeing iterations on the past, not glimpses of the future. Come on, brands—we were promised hoverboards!

Of course, some companies that you'll read about in this issue are rocketing into the future on content-powered DeLoreans. You'll hear about how IBM is using content to humanize its technology and change

the way it interacts with its customers, and how The New York Times is helping brands create engaging advertising. And this is an end-ofyear issue, so of course there will be an overview of who killed it in 2014 as well as what to expect next year.

2014 saw brands start to grasp the ways great content can shift how they're seen by their customers—and how it can render traditional advertising as obsolete as a unicycle at a skate park. 2015 will be the year we see brands take control of their destiny with paradigm-shifting content ideas. Google famously calls its big ideas "moonshots"; I'll settle for calling them flux capacitors.

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News in Brief

BY AMANDA WALGROVE

Snapchat gets freaky with its native ads Gigaom lands in hot water after running ads for the NSA Facebook renews efforts to move publishers back within its walled garden When Facebook first launched its social reader apps in 2011, publishers like The Washington Post and the Guardian were smitten with the world's largest social network. The apps sent a flood of millions of new readers, but the auto-sharing functionality turned a lot of users off.

When Facebook decided to greatly de-emphasize the reader apps in its algorithm, publishers in turn pulled the plug and were left with a sour taste in their mouths—particularly since they barely made any ad revenue from the readers.

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But now Facebook is trying to woo publishers back into its walled garden. As David Carr reports for The New York Times, Facebook has been conducting a sort of listening tour to hear out publishers' concerns and devise better ways to collaborate with them. Why make this renewed effort? For one, Facebook supposedly wants to offer a faster alternative to many publisher sites that lag when they load (particularly on mobile) due to the workings of display ad auctions. Let us host your content, Facebook proposes, and we'll split the ad revenue.

It's an enticing offer, but some publishers are pushing back against the idea of handing over their revenue and data to Facebook. Others are intrigued, aware of the incredible traffic that the social network can drive when you're on its good side.

Carr compares Facebook to "that big dog galloping toward you in the park.

More often than not, it’s hard to tell whether he wants to play with you or eat you." It'll be interesting to see which publishers have the guts to say no to a game of fetch.

Remember The Atlantic's Scientology native ad mess-up? Well, we have a new controversy on our hands: Gigaom's native ad recruiting cloud-computing professionals for the National Security Agency (NSA).

Contently Editor-in-Chief Joe Lazauskas breaks down the post in all its absurdity, pointing to one particular sentence that proves troublesome: "NSA advertising calls its careers extraordinary, and given the importance of the agency’s mission, there’s little doubt that it’s true.” It's purely misleading, as it almost positions the article as a genuine piece of editorial, not a sponsored piece of NSA advertising.

Still, the unprofessional composition of the post is the least of Gigaom's worries. With such a self-serving piece of content, Gigaom is setting itself up for controversy if it hopes to credibly cover the NSA down the road—which will inevitably happen given the government agency's high-profile, controversial standing.

PandoDaily's David Holmes finds the post so offensive that he calls for Gigaom to remove it and sever ties with the NSA, "Because how can anybody trust a tech site that aligns itself with the most anti-journalist organization in the world?"

When Snapchat introduced ads for the first time this month, we figured that whichever brand went first would be a sort of sacrificial lamb, much like the first brands to post Instagram ads.

We were wrong.

Snapchat placed a 20-second trailer for the horror film Ouija in the app's "Recent Updates" section, giving viewers the option of watching the clip. Many opted in, and proceeded to freak out, as evidenced by many Snapchatters' horrified reactions on Twitter.

Ouija’s plot is centered on the classic Ouija board, which was created all the way back in 1894, supposedly as a way to talk to spirits. As a result, you could even argue the film itself is a piece of content marketing—The LEGO Movie for the horror crowd— making Snapchat’s first ad… an ad for an ad.

If that’s not meta enough to make your brain hurt, we're not sure what will.

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networks like Showtime and Starz might be the next to cut the cord, moving us towards the debundled, digital-first media landscape of millennials’ dreams.

HBO, CBS move to cut the cord, threatening the future of big cable Ello goes viral as the anti-brand social network nobody saw coming Many were eager to cry, "Salvation!" when Ello burst onto the scene this fall, with promises of being the messianic social network we've all been waiting for. While Ello prides itself on being ad-free and having a strict privacy policy, inevitable issues and skeletons emerged, steering many away and preventing Ello from blossoming into the next network of the people.

But since we're all about content marketing, there was one glaring aspect of the "to Ello or not to Ello"

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debate that we really cared about: Ello is not a good place for brands.

"The spirit of Ello is wrapped up in a wave of rejection of social media brand advertising," we explained.

"Clearly, it’s not a friendly place for brands to play right now."

Ello’s founders are committed to keeping an ad-free network, so Ello users will most likely look negatively towards any brand that tries to push its presence in their feeds.

HBO CEO Richard Plepler announced in October that the premium cable network, which provides award-winning favorites such as Game of Thrones and Girls, is finally going to start offering viewers Internet-only subscriptions.

It wasn't long before more networks started to follow suit, cognizant that cable customers are tired of paying over $80 a month for hundreds of channels they don't watch—while having to pay extra for the ones they do.

While HBO's new à la carte deal won't go into effect until 2015, CBS has already started selling its content online for only $5.99 a month.

Reporters are predicting that similar

So why offer online-only options and potentially spark a war with cable providers? Many reasons. The biggest is having more direct control of global licensing deals and getting access to more user data, something that web entertainment platforms like Netflix and Hulu can teach HBO a great deal about.

Next year, HBO also plans to roll out its first brand campaign in 20 years, which should set the marketing world abuzz. Who knows? Maybe they'll go the Netflix route again and place an awesome native ad in The New York Times.

29 brands try to recreate Upworthy with Collectively How do you get millennials to care about climate change? Take a page from Upworthy's book and appeal to their emotions with positive, sensational content.

That's just what Collectively is doing.

Launched in October, the media platform aims to stir up action around climate change without having to resort to arguments about impending dystopian death and doom. Instead, the project is using headlines such as “The Unexpected Father–Daughter Team Making Condoms People Will Love Having Inside Them” and “These 20-Somethings Beat a Huge Energy Corporation and Took Control of the Power Grid."

Collectively's model provides a solid example of using content to sell an idea, but there's something very fishy about the whole thing. The venture is backed by 29 brand partners—

including Nestlé, McDonald's, and Microsoft—and yet Collectively claims the site will remain editorially independent of these sponsors.

While noble in theory, this decision might just be setting up Collectively for failure. What if Collectively wants to produce editorial content that might contradict some of its sponsors' values or histories? Also, as Kieran Dahl points out, the illusion of corporate greenwashing could just turn people off from wanting to get involved.

You can't build an effective content operation without loyal readers. And you can't attract loyal readers without first gaining their trust—especially around an issue as hot-button as climate change. Collectively is going to have to work extra hard to earn that trust.

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17 C ONT E N T MA RKETING P R E DICTIONS FOR 2015 At Contently, we’re always thinking about the state and future of content marketing.

Here are 17 predictions for 2015 from around our SoHo office. Check out how we did on last year's predictions on page 76.

1 2014 is the year content subsumes marketing. Brands will realize that content is the atomic particle of every aspect of marketing and will staff and budget accordingly.

3

6

Brand publishers will finally realize they’re not competing with their competitors for their audience’s attention time, but with the entire amazing world, including The New York Times, YouTube, the Internet... If you don’t produce amazing, original, high-quality content, you stand no chance.

The native advertising backlash will intensify—but from brands, not media critics. At some point, brands are going to start wondering why they’re spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to rent an audience instead of building one of their own.

—PAUL FREDRICH, VP OF PRODUCT

—MATTHEW ROTHENBERG, CONTENT STRATEGIST

4

7

More publishers will start to sell ads based on time spent, as the Financial Times and The Economist have already begun to do. And, in turn, more advertisers will get on board with the idea.

“Distribution” and “audience growth” will be the biggest content marketing buzzwords of 2015. Now that brands are creating content, it’s time for them to start creating long-term relationships with people.

—AMANDA WALGROVE, SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR —JOE LAZAUSKAS, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

5

At least 10 prominent content marketers will offer real case studies showing real, measurable business results from doing great content.

Being able to successfully plug content workflow platforms (Kapost, NewsCred, Skyword) into marketing automation platforms, content management systems, and email service providers will be the most requested need by Q3 2015.

—NEIL CHASE, CONTENT STRATEGIST

—RAY CHENG, VP OF MARKETING

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Content marketers will be responsible for building engaged high-value audiences and delivering quantifiable business results = $$$. Just producing content will not cut it anymore.

—JOE LOPARDO, SALES EXECUTIVE

10 We’llWe’ll see see a large a large number number of brandof brand-owned owned publications publications launch,launch, using using budget budget thatthat once once went went to to sponsored content.

SHANE —SHANE SNOW—CHIEF SNOW, CO-FOUNDER/CCO CREATIVE OFFICER

11

The term “snackable content” will mercifully be put out of its misery.

A major agency will make a high-profile acquisition of a content marketing platform. Without the technology and talent to power content marketing at scale, agencies are like New York Jets fans—totally f*cked, and completely aware of that fact.

—SAM SLAUGHTER, VP OF CONTENT

—JOE LAZAUSKAS, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

—SHANE SNOW, CO-FOUNDER/CCO

2

9

8

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12

15

Brands will stop seeing licensed content as anything other than a diversion.

Newsjacking/news-jumping will become more top-of-mind for enterprise brands.

—SAM SLAUGHTER, VP OF CONTENT —RAY CHENG, VP OF MARKETING

13 Content marketers in B2C will increasingly borrow tactics traditionally employed by high-value B2B campaigns to target, track, and measure their return on content investment.

—ELISA COOL, VP OF SALES

16 Brands will finally embrace YouTube as a major network. Want to reach millennials? Create high-impact content with YouTube creators. It’s the biggest and most obvious opportunity brands aren’t taking advantage of.

—JOE LAZAUSKAS, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Interactive content is better.

14 Journalists, after a decade of worrying that their careers will end any day now, will take the National Truck Driving School’s phone number off the refrigerator and instead set up LinkedIn searches for leadership roles in content marketing.

17 Joe Pulizzi switches from orange to purple —SHANE SNOW, CO-FOUNDER/CCO

—NEIL CHASE, CONTENT STRATEGIST

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VOICES

Content Is Social Is Content Social campaigns without good content are doomed to failBY SAM SLAUGHTER

ILLUSTRATION BY KYLE FEWELL

The other day I was on a panel with a couple other content marketing types when, as is custom at these things, someone asked us how content fits within social media marketing. Likely because I’d had too much caffeine, I blurted out, “I think content eats social!” which a) didn’t answer the question very well, b) didn’t make a ton of sense, and c) earned me a dirty look or two from the other panelists, one of whom was from a social media management platform.

But the more I’ve thought about it, the more it makes sense. Though content marketing is the new kid on the block, it won’t be long before it eclipses social as marketers’ tool of choice.

Brands are great. They know tons of stuff, much of it super interesting and valuable, and very little of it easily compressed into a social media update.

NOTE TO BRANDS #2: YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER IS NOT A CONTENT CREATOR

But social isn’t going away, and brands who ignore its marketing potential do so at their peril. Social is where their customers are. It’s the best place to reach them with messaging. And that’s where content comes into the equation.

NOTE TO BRANDS #1: YOU ARE NOT GOING TO OUT-MEME THE INTERNET

Allow me to elaborate a little bit.

Here’s something that no one has said, ever: “I don’t know about you, but I enjoy going on social media for the witty personalities and pithy observations of my favorite brands!” Brands’ forays into social are more likely to wind up as a punchline than they are to encourage customer loyalty. I should note that social is and will remain incredibly valuable as a customer service tool—I’m talking specifically about marketing here.

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Content from a brand should not try to be overly clever or topical or “real-time.” And don’t get me started on “snackable” content, which is a phrase that makes me want to shove forks in my eyes. Trying to be more clever and timely and wittier than the 4chans and Tumblrs of the world is a sucker’s game—especially for brands.

Consumers have billions (literally billions) of places to find that kind of thing. And a brand’s status updates are never going to compete with those of someone’s friends. But as a source of information and knowledge?

So what’s the difference between content marketing and social media marketing? A couple of things. For one, social is inherently spontaneous, while content tends to be carefully crafted before it’s set loose upon the world. Social tends to be reactive; content, on the other hand, sparks conversation. And finally, content is generally made by an experienced creative professional: a writer, designer, video producer, etc.

Social? Not so much. That’s not to say managing social accounts for a brand doesn’t require experience and talent—it’s just a separate skill set.

The ultimate goal with both content and social is to create connections with potential customers. Social does it by trying to be your friend, while content is more like a trusted advisor. Which role do you think makes the most sense for a brand? Would you rather chill with Goldman Sachs or get financial advice from the brightest financial minds at the company?

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VOICES

NOTE TO BRANDS #3: CONTENT = FIRE. SOCIAL = GASOLINE Or, to put it simply, a tweet with a link to something awesome is way better than a tweet with nothing in it at all. (“Retweet if you love Fridays!”)

Say you’ve written an interesting story on your brand blog or microsite that you think would be entertaining and informative to your potential customers, and maybe even make them more likely to buy your product.

But no one goes to your brand blog because, well, it’s a brand blog.

battling vendors. Content marketing is a few years behind. We’re still in the shiny new toy stage, but rapidly moving towards must-have status.

The difference, I think, is that content works everywhere, while social only works on social. Or, put another way, content can be social, but social can hardly ever be content—despite what the snack purveyors may say. Social media remains an important tool, but smart marketers will find that investing in social without having good content behind it is a waste of time.

Luckily your brand has a Facebook page, a Twitter handle, and maybe even (but hopefully not) an account on Ello. It’s a simple thing to craft a snackable (aaargh, there’s that word again) update for each of those platforms that contains a link back to your blog. As the Altimeter Group’s Rebecca Lieb said recently, “Content is the atomic particle that drives all the rest of a brand’s marketing campaigns.”

Shit, you could pay to promote that tweet or Facebook post to an even bigger audience, sending all those people back to a piece of content that demonstrates how your brand has thoughtful and intelligent insight into their universe.

Social is where advertisers need to be if they’re going to find eyeballs. But finding those eyeballs doesn’t do you any good if you’re just going to stick forks in them.

NOTE TO BRANDS #4: CONTENT IS SOCIAL, BUT SOCIAL ISN’T CONTENT There’ve been a lot of comparisons made between social media and content marketing, partly because they’ve followed a similar trajectory. Five years ago, social was a shiny new toy, but today it’s a must-have, and its landscape is littered with failed startups and

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SAM SLAUGHTER VP of Content at Contently. @samslaughter215

Bad content is unbearable.

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VOICES

Stacks on Stacks on Stacks Where content marketing technology needs to go in 2015

BY RAY CHENG ILLUSTRATION BY KYLE FEWELL

We're coming to the point when we ritually reflect on the past year—figuring out what we did right, what we did wrong, and what we need to do differently.

Unfortunately, the reality is that companies have produced a lot of bad content in 2014, and a lot of marketing technologies didn't deliver on their promise of better ROI. It's tough being a marketer today. You're expected to be relevant, cool, and analytical to win over a global audience of fickle consumers. Fittingly, those who can conquer all three skills are called unicorns. As we head toward 2015, however, marketers who understand the tools at their disposal and create meaningful content don't have to be anomalies.

WHY IS MARKETING UNDERPERFORMING? First, let's address the problem. The majority of non-unicorn marketers are playing a dangerous zero-sum game. According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, the average attention span of a human is now less than that of a goldfish—eight seconds, to be exact. Empowered by their shiny new marketing technologies, marketers are now producing hundreds of millions of emails, ads, and tweets on a daily basis, which, in my opinion, are only contributing to the attention deficit.

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As Contently VP of Content Sam Slaughter aptly describes it: “Marketers are shouting into a hurricane.”

So how can they get back on track?

IDENTIFYING THREE VITAL MARKETING STACKS In 2015, developing three different types of stacks is going to be crucial for marketers who want to break through the noise and drive real business results.

The first is a technology stack, which is basically a club sandwich of software integration and customization that marketers and developers tinker with to create more logical and measurable campaigns—and lots of them. But even if you have all the necessary technologies, they still don't play together well enough to quickly run a full campaign end to end. The fluidity needed to take a campaign from just a concept to the point where you're calculating its final attribution of lifetime value (or even just brand lift) is simply not there yet, nor will it be in 2015. That's why you need your other stacks optimized to bridge the gap.

The next key stack is the talent stack, which most marketers would agree could use a little bolstering.

Specialists such as industry journalists, graphic designers, videographers, and website developers who can produce quality content at scale are almost as hard to find as that unicorn marketer.

Lastly, marketers need a professional services stack to help manage the madness. A unicorn can only be in one place at a time, so running world-class marketing programs at scale requires small vendor teams from agencies and consultancies that can fill in project management and knowledge gaps.

OPTIMIZE THE STACKS AND WINNING THE BATTLE 1. A smarter technology stack should help you reach a hyper-targeted audience by leveraging original con-

tent, distributing to your most effective channels, and measuring how your content is performing. Contently relies on a number of tools, including our own content technology platform, WordPress, MailChimp, Marketo, Salesforce, and a few smaller technologies to reach a targeted audience of 150,000 marketing pros.

2. A diversified talent stack should consist of fulltime marketers (including creatives) and part-time freelancers who are all committed to your company's content strategy. This talent stack should be able to compete with the biggest media publishers to create content quickly and win the battle for your audience's attention.

3. A dedicated professional services stack should go that extra mile to ensure your most important marketing programs are running effectively. Though these experienced project managers, account managers, and consultants may come with a heftier price tag, the value they generate and the time they save you and your team will make the expense well worth it.

FINAL THOUGHTS In 2015, only relying on marketing technology just isn't going to cut it, no matter how many articles or sales people tell you otherwise. To earn and retain customers long-term, you'll need to start building a fantasy team to power your stacks. You don't necessarily need a bunch of unicorns, but you do need a strong roster of engineers, marketers, and creatives working together in concert. Do that well, and you'll produce ROI figures that will leave everyone looking at you like you just sprouted wings.

RAY CHENG VP of Marketing at Contently. @ray_jing

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VOICES

Follow the Leaders If content marketing is going to take off, agencies need to lead the media spend revolution

BY BRETT LOFGREN ILLUSTRATION BY KYLE FEWELL

How will content marketing take its next leap? How will it go from an experimental, but undoubtedly effective, marketing channel to a full-fledged paradigm shift in how brands think about selling themselves? How will the trickle of media dollars currently going to content marketing become a full-on waterfall? While you’ll find a lot of different takes on these questions throughout this magazine (Measurement! Compliance! Audience growth hacking!), I believe there’s one bigger answer: Digital agencies need to lead the way.

First, some context: Digital agencies are reaching a big turning point when it comes to the way they handle campaign dollars. They've been very good at distributing display media programmatically and owning the optimization of that spend. And over the past few years, they've mastered basic social maintenance.

But display ads are very clearly not the answer, and the industry is realizing that social can't truly succeed without dynamic, longform storytelling. As Claudia Cahill, chief content officer at OMD, has said, “The

reason so many people get into content is to tell a story that traditional media can't. It gives you the flexibility to go deeper on the story, and to go directly to the consumer."

Agencies—which already own the brand relationship when it comes to media planning, buying, strategy, research, data analytics, mobile, and social—must be the ones to push brands into this next era of marketing. It makes sense for brands, and it makes sense for the digital agencies that serve them. There’s a gargantuan opportunity for everyone to connect the data across paid, owned, and earned media channels, and to empower the creation of original content in all forms.

When I first arrived as Contently’s CRO six months ago, the theme of my first essay was “Why I went all-in on content marketing.” After half a year in the trenches, it’s clear to me that great storytelling requires a lot of moving parts: If you want to scale a content marketing operation, it requires coordination from all sides. All of us in the content marketing world—from the brands, to the tech companies like Contently, to the content creators that make those stories possible—need agencies to foster that coordination. We need them to lead the charge.

So will agencies accept this challenge? It remains to be seen. So far, they have largely limited themselves to dipping their toes into the water with native advertising, or, in other words, renting audiences for short campaigns.

After all, that’s how agencies are used to working with brands. But I believe that the smartest minds in the industry understand that content is not just another campaign.

I believe that the smartest minds in the industry understand that content is not just another campaign.

It’s an always-on listening tour that puts the customer’s needs, interests, passions, and values first. It’s more collaboration than interruption, which requires a whole new way of doing things. And that’s why the real opportunity for brands and agencies alike is to build brand-owned publications that will provide exponential returns for years to come.

BRETT LOFGREN Chief Revenue Officer at Contently. @bmlofgren

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VOICES

Put Up or Shut Up In 2015, it’s time for brands to go all-in on audience

BY SHANE SNOW ILLUSTRATION BY KYLE FEWELL

Have you ever gone swimming at the beach when the water was just a little colder than you’d expected?

Most of us ease ourselves in like the wimps we are: We wade out gingerly, cringing, second-guessing at every step whether we want to still do this. You can't actually swim or surf without eventually getting submerged, of course, but sit on any beach in late September and you'll observe this routine on repeat.

Right now, most brand publishers are at that uncomfortable point where the water is up to their thighs and the occasional cold wave is lapping at their crotch.

2015 is the year that they jump all the way in or get left behind.

Our industry talks a lot about creating content as if content itself is the goal. And while anyone who knows me knows how important I think stories are, most businesses are more interested in what telling great stories gets them: relationships with an audience that will eventually make them money.

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Statisticians estimate that 1.7 scadzillion new pieces of content show up on the web every day. Every major brand—and millions of smaller ones—is crowding the content marketing beach right now, dumping buckets of content into the crotch-deep saltwater. The noise-tomeaning ratio is getting higher. It's going to be harder and more expensive to reach quality readers through native advertising as the demand for content ad space goes up and the appetite for content advertising goes down.

The solution to this problem is to stop being a chicken and dive into the water—to become a real publisher and not just an advertiser hawking stories in place of banners. Those who focus on building audiences stand to gain outsize results over those who focus simply on reaching them.

When you own the experience, you can track your relationships with readers, as well as the conversions and brand lift your stories deliver over repeat engagements.

The world has been saying "brands are publishers" for ages now. This is the year they step up and actually do it right. Cold water is uncomfortable at first. But you acclimate quicker when you just jump in.

This means that over the next 12 months we'll be seeing an explosion of brand-owned and operated publications like American Express' OPEN Forum and BarkBox's BarkPost. We'll see a shift in focus from amassing social followings (which algorithm changes can instantly make irrelevant, as we saw this year with Facebook) to building email lists to brands marketing content on their own terms. We'll see more brand newsrooms and more ambitious stories in ambitious formats. We'll see a shift from caring about brand impressions on someone else's platform to caring about attention-time spent on a brand's own platform.

And we'll see brands actually get savvy about ROI.

SHANE SNOW Chief Creative Officer at Contently. @shanesnow

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ANSWERS

?

“WHAT’S THE BEST WAY TO MEASURE MY CONTENT?”

The Promises & Pitfalls of Content Scores

BY SAM PETTULA

Content has been battered around by bad metrics for years, the result of an advertising industry focused on maximizing impressions rather than building relationships between consumers and businesses.

ANSWERS

That's beginning to change. A new crop of “content scores” and “blended metrics,” which combine multiple data features to provide a deeper sense of how a piece of content is performing, are gaining in popularity.

For content marketers especially, this is promising. After all, when you have to play writer, editor, content strategist, social media expert, business analyst, and data scientist all at once, you really need a single metric

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that reveals how well a given piece of content is driving their brand’s business goals.

score might look like.

LINKEDIN: RANKING YOU AGAINST YOUR COMPETITORS

That's the good news.

The bad news is that while the evolution of content scores is an encouraging sign, no one has cracked the code to come up with a formula that fully and accurately measures the relationships you're building with people, as well as the concrete business results your content is driving.

In this article we'll dig into how some leading publishers are measuring content today, where they're going wrong, and what the perfect content

This spring, LinkedIn released its Content Marketing Score with the intention of improving its platform for marketers who use content and could use some extra insights into how well their efforts succeed on their platform.

LinkedIn breaks down its Content Marketing Score into three parts: 1. Quantifies your impact by measuring your engagement with your audience.

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ANSWERS

2. Benchmarks your performance versus your peer set.

MOZ: CALCULATING ENGAGEMENT

3. Provides recommendations for improvement.

Moz calls their score the “One Metric,” which they calculate by judging every piece of content against its expected performance. Readership (number of unique visits); on-site engagement (comments, thumbs up); and social performance (Facebook likes, tweets, Google +1s) are all scored relative to historical data.

LinkedIn's Marketing Solutions team explained the components of the score in a kick-off blog post: "It measures member engagement with your Sponsored Updates, Company Pages, LinkedIn Groups, employee updates, and Influencer posts (if applicable). It then gives you a single score, ranked against your competitive set. You will also get recommendations about how to improve your score based on different levers you can pull to give you more reach, frequency and engagement.

You can filter your score by region, seniority, company size, job function, and industry."

The problem, of course, is that LinkedIn is a walled garden in terms of analytics measurement. You can only use it to measure content that's on LinkedIn—try tying it to your own numbers and you're out of luck.

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The entire process is outlined in the graph below:

Once Moz has those score numbers, they apply them to a logarithmic scale, which churns out a single One Metric that's a clear two-digit score, instead of a relative percentage.

KAPOST: TYING CONTENT TO BUSINESS RESULTS Kapost’s “Content Score” is designed to measure how many Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) each piece of content produces.

Kapost gives the first and last touch in a content funnel the most weight—say, 60 percent of the total score, divided in two. The remaining 40 percent is divvied up between the middle content assets.

Essentially, Kapost is trying to see which pieces of content drive the most MQLs. Over the course of a quarter, the end result might look something like this:

Finally, Kapost calculates how much each MQL contributes to their business, so that they can tie a revenue number back to each piece of content.

The problem here is that Kapost ignores everything that's not lead generation. And while leads are important, they are only one piece of the puzzle.

SHARETHROUGH: SENTIMENT ANALYSIS Neither Sharethrough nor Google fully lifts back the curtain on their quality scores, but we are able to learn enough to know what they are looking for in ad content. Sharethrough says that, unlike Google, their score algorithm "focuses on signals like sentiment analysis and social sharing data to understand the innate value of the content itself."

Google, on the other hand, looks primarily at referral data, keyword relevancy, and the landing page for an ad.

BUZZFEED: SOCIAL LIFT AND MORE Social lift might be BuzzFeed's main squeeze, but it's not the only metric in town. In fact, in multiple interviews, including here with us at Contently, BuzzFeed has elaborated that it uses a variety of content measurements when determining success. “There’s lots of different things you can look at for different sorts of problems,” Ky Harlin, BuzzFeed's lead data scientist, said at the Contently Summit. “Using multiple [sets of data] is really the best way to understand it best.”

Moreover, Dao Nguyen, vice president of growth and data science at BuzzFeed, told the Columbia Journalism Review that BuzzFeed uses components of the engaged time metric—despite BuzzFeed eschewing time on page as a content measurement. According to Nguyen, BuzzFeed will look at “what percentage of the page the reader has attained in addition to social metrics.”

Harlin elaborated on that metric measurement in a separate interview with us, saying, "We treat each individual item in a list almost like its own article. So we’ll try to really figure out what people are engaging with and turn a list of 45 items to a list of 25

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ANSWERS

items without the duds, reordered to make it most likely to share."

Buzzfeed has basically the opposite issue as Kapost: While it's great at measuring earned media and attention, it falls way short of getting at real ROI. THE HOLY TRINITY: WHERE CONTENT SCORES NEED TO GO The problem with all these approaches is that they're too varied and too complex to be effectively used in the context of content marketing. While some scores focus on crunching traditional engagement metrics (readers, shares, comments, etc.), others ignore them completely, focusing purely on how each piece of content impacts an end business result.

So which approach is right? Ultimately, it's a Three Bears situation—you can't just score a piece of content based on vanity "engagement" metrics without measuring whether your content is ultimately driving a tangible business result. In turn, you can't simply judge content based on whether it touched the people who become your prospects without looking at engagement at all. A content score that works needs to examine and synthesize three components:

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1. Acquisition: How many readers that piece of content is drawing into your site, and what percentage of those people engage with your content by actively scrolling and reading for significant period of time (such as 15 seconds).

over a campfire their entire life. Best of all, they won't get burned.

2. Engagement: How deeply those people engage with your content based on the amount of total time spent with the piece of content, how much of the article the average person finished, total shares, and the percentage of people who went on to read another story.

3. Conversion: How many people converted in some way, whether by returning to your site at a later date, signing up for a newsletter or to talk to sales, or some other conversion event that makes sense for your business.

No one is there yet. But the content scores of the future will rate a piece of content for each of these components, and then blend it into a final score that tells a content marketer— at a quick glance—just how well that piece of content performed. It'll be a huge advantage and a huge time saver. Those who adopt an advanced content score will feel like they've just gotten a microwave after cooking

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Visit us online and subscribe today!

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“HOW DO I GET MORE EYEBALLS ON MY CONTENT?”

Paid Distribution Playbook

BY AMANDA WALGROVE

If you're a content marketer, there's a darn good chance you want more eyeballs on your content. Even more likely, you want the right eyeballs.

You can do an audience rain dance and pray for a miraculous influx of social referral traffic, as our editor-in-chief has been known to do from time to time. Or you could take advantage of one of the many paid content distribution platforms at your disposal.

While it's important to play around with each option and find the one that works best for your content distribution, there are four platforms in particular that we advocate experimenting with right away. Let's look at what these platforms have to offer and the best practices for using them.

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TWITTER Twitter is our go-to channel when we want to drive a little extra paid traffic to a post at Contently. Visitors from Twitter tend to be highly engaged and are very likely to share your content, creating an organic boost on top of your social distribution. But you can do a lot more than simply drive referral traffic using Twitter advertising—each type of Twitter campaign is great for something different.

Engagement tweets: Use engagement tweets if you want to get more eyeballs on one of your tweets, in the hopes of encouraging people to click on a link and read your content. This is the easiest type of campaign to put together. You can either compose a new tweet on the campaign page or just choose one you've already published.

Followers campaigns: These campaigns are set up for the sole purpose of gaining new Twitter followers, and are very bare-bones in composition—just text, no links or multimedia of any kind.

Website Cards: If you want to add a call-to-action (CTA) button to your promoted tweet, you can create a campaign for website clicks or conversions. It's best to use this type of campaign to promote a piece of content that has an actionable conversion, such as an e-book that can be downloaded for the price of an email address. For this campaign, you'll have to create a Website Card, which includes an image, a headline, a URL, and a CTA for your reader to click on. To track conversions from that CTA button on the Website Card, set up a website tag.

Leads campaigns: Similar to conversions campaigns, except you'll be creating a Lead Generation Card instead of a Website Card. Lead Generation Cards are optimized for gathering email addresses directly from Twitter, whereas Website Cards are best for adding a more engaging visual touch to a piece of content that readers can click on, and convert from your website.

Still, no matter which campaign you choose, there are a couple of similarities across the board. In terms of scheduling, you can start the campaign immediately and run it until

you exhaust your budget, or choose specific start and end dates. Twitter recommends using a few tweets for each campaign. This allows you to diversify your offerings and engage a wider audience, but most importantly, it allows for trial and error so you can optimize future campaigns.

When it comes to targeting your desired audience on any type of campaign, there are some key tips you should keep in mind. If you're targeting based on interests and followers, it's smart to target followers of your competitors' Twitter accounts.

Try seven to 10, and swap some in

and out for future campaigns. There is also an option to limit targeting to specific devices or platforms. Website Cards are optimized for mobile, so it's best to target users on mobile devices for these campaigns.

Setting your budget for a campaign includes three main parts: a daily minimum budget, a bid range per engagement, and total spend for that campaign. The budget and bid can be adjusted while the campaign is running. You might want to adjust the bid at different times of day or days of the week, such as when a buzz-worthy event is taking over the

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ANSWERS

conversation on Twitter. At this time, you may have to bid higher to get your content seen.

to target your own pool of users, you can narrow your audience by location, age, gender, and interests.

Twitter allows you to view your campaign stats based on a certain range of dates, individual campaigns, platforms, locations, and demographics. The "Engagements" tag will break down campaign performance by individual tweets, impressions, clicks, retweets, replies, followers, and engagement rate. Pair this information with the offerings at Twitter Analytics to see how your sponsored tweets are performing in comparison with your regular output of Twitter content.

While a campaign is running, you can add money to it, but you cannot adjust your targeting specifications.

Once the campaign is completed, click the "See Results" button at the bottom of your post to review how your campaign performed.

FACEBOOK It's much simpler to create sponsored posts on Facebook than on any other social platform. Before or after you post a piece of content on Facebook, just click the blue "Boost Post" button below the post and customize it.

First, choose the audience you want to reach. If you choose "People who like your Page and their friends" or "People similar to people who like your Page," then the majority of the targeting is done for you. You simply have to add a price and start the campaign. However, if you choose

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In our experience, cost per click (CPC) seems to be a bit higher on Facebook than on Twitter. However, hyper-targeting by location on Facebook has proven incredibly useful. For example, it's a good place to target readers who freelance in Chicago if you want to promote a piece about the best coffee shops to work from in the city. Simply target only people in Chicago with an interest in freelancing.

OUTBRAIN Outbrain, a content discovery platform, is a great option for publishers looking for an easy and efficient way to drive readers to their site. How do you do that? By generating lots of headlines. Outbrain places these recommended links next to and below articles on high-quality news sites like Hearst and Condé Nast publications,

so they must be engaging enough for readers to click on.

To start, choose "Create New Campaign" and submit the URL of the piece of content you want to promote. Name it, put in your budget, and define your schedule. Choose your type of campaign based on the format of content you're sharing or where you want it to be placed: video, mobile, or desktop. In general, mobile CPCs do very well, especially with fashion and retail content.

The budget can be assigned on a monthly, weekly, or daily basis.

According to Amanda Weatherhead, Contently’s client services manager, you'll often see lower CPCs earlier in the week, month, or quarter, and then it becomes more competitive to get eyes on your content. So budget accordingly. For example, if you have $10,000 allocated for a quarter, spend $5,000 in the first month, $3,000 in the second, etc.

If you decide to set a daily, weekly, or monthly budget cap, Outbrain's system will divide by each day to distribute content evenly.

Now for the headlines: It's best to come up with several headline variations for each link, as well as to include different images and

subheaders. Outbrain's algorithm will optimize accordingly and show the best-performing ones more often.

When it comes to measuring the success of your content distribution, Outbrain primarily tracks clicks, but you can also track conversions through a code that you embed on your page, similar to Twitter. Outbrain recommends a CPC for each piece of content, but you go lower and beat Outbrain’s recommendation with a lower price per click, it's a good sign that you have a strong content strategy and engaging headlines. But check the visit duration and bounce rate of your Outbrain referral traffic in Google Analytics to make sure that Outbrain readers are actually sticking around once they land on your site.

LINKEDIN LinkedIn's ads program is the holy grail of hyper-targeting—particularly for B2B marketers. You can target audiences based on location (down to the city), gender, age, LinkedIn groups they might belong to, skills they list on their profiles, and even schools they attend or graduated from.

However, the most unique and useful option that LinkedIn provides is tar-

geting by company name, category, and industry size, as well as by job title and seniority. For example, if you're looking to acquire in retail, you can promote a thought leadership piece relevant to retail marketers' interests and target them directly, even going so far as to target the senior VP of a specific company.

The budgeting options are similar to those on Twitter. They offer the ability to set a total budget for the campaign, daily maximum spend, and length of time that you want the campaign to run. However, LinkedIn differs by offering the option of paying per click (every time someone clicks on your post) or per impression (every time LinkedIn shows your post, per 1,000 impressions). You can choose one and then enter a bid for the most money you want to spend when the action is completed.

go to sponsor each piece of content.

After setting up your campaign, the results will show up directly under the sponsored post on your page, with an option to further manage or adjust the campaign.

FINAL THOUGHTS Each of these platforms provides unique opportunities for your needs in terms of boosting distribution and audience growth. By testing out each one, marketers can best find the one that serves their objectives. For us, that's Twitter. For Upworthy, it's Facebook. For you, it may be Outbrain or LinkedIn. It's important to experiment with each option and double down on the ones that are most effective for your content mix.

You can also set up a few overreaching campaigns and assign multiple pieces of content to them. Continuing with the above example, say you want to target retail companies, but you have multiple pieces of content you'd like to target them with, and a budget of just $500. Set up one overarching campaign for targeting these retail companies, then simply choose that targeted campaign when you

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“TELL ME EVERYTHING I NEED TO KNOW.”

The Answers to Your 12 Biggest Content Marketing Questions

BY ERIN WARD ILLUSTRATION BY TARA JACOBY

1. Why would we created owned content rather than buy sponsored content?

It’s difficult to say with certainty whether native or owned is better.

They simply serve different purposes, and in an ideal world, they work in concert.

Having direct access to an audience is every brand’s goal, but it takes time, patience, and editorial leadership to make that happen. In the meantime, sponsored content is a way to align a brand with an already recognized and trusted platform.

Ultimately, sponsored content should be used to introduce new readers to your content so that you can grow your owned audience.

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Buying sponsored content is one way to do that; paid distribution and social advertising are two others.The bottom line is that the need to reach additional eyeballs efficiently and effectively is constant.

However, if you're running sponsored content campaigns without a strategy for developing your owned audience, you're wasting a heck of a lot of money.

2. What is the value of a long-term content strategy vs. a campaign-by-campaign approach?

The cliché is true: Content marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. You need time to develop an effective editorial strategy through trial and error and build trust with readers. That’s why

some agencies and custom-content studios run by publishers are requiring brands to commit to a content push of at least four months, if not a year or longer. In an ideal world, they’d be signing on for five-year commitments.

3. How should you develop a brand voice?

Witty, smart, sarcastic, optimistic, skeptical—whatever the tone, be consistent. From the beginning, figure out what your brand’s message is and choose a tone or angle, then consistently apply it to your content.

If you want to be instructional and serious, stick with that. It’s not so much what you say... it’s how you say it.

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4. How much content should I be creating?

The short answer: a lot. A brand needs to pump out quality content in order to establish trust with their readership. The perfect mix is different for each brand, but when starting out, look at key engagement metrics (engaged time, average finish time, shares, return visits) to see which pieces of content are compelling your audience to come back. Then, double down on what works while constantly testing and iterating new approaches.

5. What’s a good strategy for getting more people to find your content in the first place?

One of the most important pieces for building an audience is the “superconnector.” This is a person or platform who has an established audience you can borrow. Connecting to 500 people through one person is much more efficient than trying to reach people individually.

But how? You need to offer unique and valuable content. Produce content their audience is interested in, then give it away. You’ll make the superconnector happy and you’ll get exposed to a broader audience.

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Offering value leads to trust, so the audience will be more likely to follow you to your own platform. In addition, don’t be afraid to pay to jumpstart your traffic.

6. What are the benefits of outsourcing content creation?

Don’t think outsourcing—think in-sourcing, as jargony as that sounds. Bringing in freelancers adds a fresh twist to a brand’s voice. For instance, General Mills brought in outside writers, photographers, and infographic experts to write and design their successful recipe site Tablespoon. While the perspectives of freelance brand writers are often at odds with those of traditional marketers, that can actually be a good thing, breathing fresh life into a content campaign.

7. Is it really worth the investment to hire trained journalists for branded content over cheaper writers and copywriters?

Definitely. With the saturation of Internet content, brands are not only competing for attention with one another but also with established media powerhouses. Brands need the talent to compete, and that makes writers who are skilled, experienced, and

passionate about a brand’s mission invaluable. There is truth to the warning “You get what you pay for.”

8. What is a good strategy for getting people to notice your content when they mainly go to your site to buy stuff?

It depends on what you’re selling, but a smart strategy is to integrate editorial with the products themselves.

You want a balance of boosting the appeal of your product with providing value through your content. The story cannot only be about the product.

A few brands doing an awesome job of weaving amazing content into their commerce platforms are Mr. Porter, Birchbox, and Apple. Groupon is another great example of how to combine content and commerce.

It made stories an integral part of each deal and rode unprecedented conversion rates all the way to an IPO. People could connect with the company on multiple levels and kept coming back for more.

9. What’s the best way to define your content?

The best content is mission-driven.

For us, that mission is building a better media world. That’s why we cover the media and marketing world here on The Content Strategist, give freelancers the tools and knowledge they need to succeed on The Freelancer, and fund independent investigative journalism over at Contently.org. If you want a definition, start with a question: What’s my mission?

10. What metrics can help you improve your writing and performance?

Story metrics that matter most: engaged time, finish percentage, and return engagement. These three metrics lead to relationships, which directly translate to ROI when the conversion pathway is tracked correctly.

Yes, thought leadership has become a buzz phrase, but it’s here to stay.

12. What trends will impact content creation in the near future?

We’ll see more players: media companies, media agencies, creative agencies, PR firms, small shops— everyone’s selling content right now. We’ll also see an explosion in multimedia and branded web series, leveraging YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, and other emerging platforms and talent to reach millennials. And in terms of the big picture, a select few brands will finally figure out how to structure their organizations like media companies, and they'll soon find themselves with a huge advantage over the competition.

11. Is there value to being considered a thought leader?

Thought leadership is the number one goal that Contently clients list.

Really, thought leadership is about branding. If your brand is intelligent, that’s exactly how you want to portray yourself. If your brand sells Doritos-shell tacos, who cares about thought leadership? You probably care about entertaining teens and twenty-somethings.

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“WHAT CAN I LEARN FROM MY OWN CONTENT MARKETING?”

5 Lessons From Publishing 1000 Pieces of Content This Year

BY JOE LAZAUSKAS

Sometimes, when I find myself alone late at night in Contently's SoHo office working on our magazine, I try to make up motivational slogans for myself about the work I do. It's really embarrassing, I know, but it's also who I am—about 36 percent corny (Ed. note: That's on a good day)—and I learned long ago to just accept it.

The other day, I came up with one that I quite like. I'm going to share it with you now, whether you like it or not: The best way to learn about content marketing is to do content marketing.

That may sound obvious, but it's also true. Since I started as editor-in-chief of Contently a year ago, we've published over 1,000 stories, grown our audience by 100,000 readers,

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and nearly given our CEO a heart attack about half a dozen times. Most importantly, we've learned a ton of valuable lessons about content marketing.

Here are my 5 favorites: 1. Data-driven (and consistent) content creation is key Like many writers, I got into the arts partly because I didn't want to be a slave to numbers. I always dreamed that being an editor-in-chief would let me become an absolute dictator over my own creative domain—like Father Knows Best, except with a bunch of writers instead of a cheesy ’50s family.

How wrong I ended up being. For better or worse, the numbers don't lie. If you pick the right numbers to measure, they almost become prophetic. Early this year, we decided to make a concerted effort to track metrics that truly measure how we're building a relationship with our audience—things like engaged time, average finish, email sign-up conversions, and return readers. Because we were creating a lot of content, we had a lot of data. And that allowed us to quickly double down on what worked best while cutting the types of stories that weren't resonating. (For instance, when we talked about journalism ethics, nobody cared; when we talked about content measurement, our audience was hooked.)

Within a few months of starting this effort, we were rewarded with rapid audience growth by every significant metric.

2. Your sales and accounts teams are your biggest assets A big part of Contently's appeal to me has always been that we were founded by a journalist, so our internal editorial team is given a tremendous amount of freedom.

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We're truly given the space to tell the best stories possible, without meddling and interference from the business side.

But that doesn't mean that the business side of your company doesn't have a tremendous role to play. They're on the ground every day, hearing the struggles, needs, and desires of people who are either trying to become content marketers or are content marketers already. We hold regular editorial brainstorming sessions with our entire accounts and sales teams, and those meetings have yielded many of our strongest-performing stories. No matter your business, your business-side teams are a tremendous resource of information that you'd be silly not to tap.

3. Your content needs to be newsworthy—and a little controversial As my boss, Shane Snow, often says, brands shouldn't try to get in the news business. Information and entertainment are their sweet spot.

While I agree with Shane, I also believe that a brand's content needs to be newsworthy and contribute something new and unique to the content world—something that sparks conversation.

This year, we released two studies on important issues for our industries.

The results weren't exactly positive for the industry we're in at Contently.

One revealed that 90 percent of marketers aren't confident in how they're measuring their content. The other found that most readers have felt deceived by sponsored content.

But both were covered widely by other media outlets, introducing our content to an entirely new readership. And, more importantly, we sparked conversations about two key issues.

4. You need to test, test, test The idea of A/B testing every aspect of your content isn't new. It's a key reason that Upworthy, Vox Media, and BuzzFeed have all built giant audiences in an unprecedentedly short time over the past few years.

I won't pretend that we're as advanced as those publishers, which employ large data teams and some of the smartest editors on earth. But we do A/B test every headline on our site, as well as every email subject line and social media post. The result has been small gains in performance that, over time, have paid huge dividends.

5. Print isn't dead As a 21st century media-tech startup, it might seem strange for us to publish the print magazine you're reading right now. After all, print is time-consuming. It's relatively expensive. It makes you spend Friday night obsessively checking for typos over and over until you feel insane.

It’s 10 P.M. Do you know what your audience wants?

But as a brand trying to establish our thought leadership in the content marketing world, it's paid off in spades. Maybe it's the novelty of print in a digital world; maybe it's the quirky illustrations of bears and conquistadors; maybe it's even the actual stories. But it's helped us build relationships with freelancers, media types, and future clients. Our sales reps always tell us about how instead of bringing a one-sheeter to meetings with potential clients, they plop down a stack of our quarterly magazine instead. Indeed, what you're holding in your hands right now is destined to drive millions of dollars in revenue in 2015. (Personally, I'm going to attribute most of it to the bear ad on page 15.)

INSIGHTS Content analytics made for brands.

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RESEARCH

Study: The State of Content Marketing Heading Into 2015

RESULTS & ANALYSIS HOW MANY PIECES OF CONTENT DO YOU CREATE EACH WEEK (EXCLUDING SOCIAL MEDIA POSTS)?

11-20 WHAT PERCENTAGE OF YOUR MARKETING BUDGET IS DEVOTED TO CONTENT?

We surveyed 600 content marketers, and here’s what they told us about 0-25%

their goals, challenges, and hopes for 2015

26-50%

51-75%

76+%

BY JORDAN TEICHER

There's a good chance we will look back at 2014 as the year brands first seriously plunged into the content marketing waters. Terms like native content, brand publishing, and owned media are set to evolve from buzzwords into crucial staples of marketing success. Marketers are looking to invest in longform storytelling, both in print and online.

And instead of relying on disruptive banner ads, brands are starting to get smart about targeting customers with original content.

But content marketing is still in its infancy, and marketers have a number of challenges to overcome.

As we discovered earlier this year, measurement remains a challenge. Our summer 2014 content measurement survey found that over 90 percent of marketers were not confident that their key content metrics were effective in measuring business results. For the year's end, we wanted to broaden our scope and ask our audience of content marketers some important questions related to their triumphs, failures, and future goals: What types of content led to the most ROI? What resources were in short supply? What are some of the biggest challenges marketers face on a daily basis?

What follows is a crucial snapshot of the content marketing landscape as we get ready to transition into 2015.

METHODOLOGY Between November 5 and November 17, we surveyed 601 marketers with an 18-question online survey.

As the survey was answered by nearly our entire population target, the calculated margin of error was approximately 1 percent.

Publishing quality content over time requires a healthy investment when you account for the talent and tools required. Here, we see a huge range in the level of resources being committed to content marketing.

While 52 percent of marketers are devoting 25 percent or less of their marketing budget to content, a significant group—23 percent—has shifted over half of its marketing budget to content.

2-5

0-1

KEY FINDINGS In the next section we'll unpack the noteworthy results in detail, but at first glance, a few striking data points stand out:

69%

57%

BACK ORIGINAL CONTNET

HAVE 2 OR MORE PEOPLE

OVER LICENSED CONTENT

DEDICATED TO CONTENT MARKETING

52%

23%

DEVOTE 25% OR LESS OF

ARE NOW DEVOTING OVER

THEIR BUDGET TO CONTENT

HALF THEIR BUDGET

50%

74%

ARE LOOKING AT ROI & LTV AS

BELIEVE THAT THEY COULD

MOST VALUABLE GOALS TO

DRIVE +2.5X ROI, BRAND

MEASURE

LIFT OR LTV IF THEY HAD AN

2-4

1

0

5-9

10+

Over the past few years, it's been common to see content marketing treated as an experimental marketing practice, often put in the hands of a single employee who's juggling other responsibilities. While that's still the case for 43 percent of respondents, it's promising that more than half of all brands have at least two employees dedicated full-time to content marketing.

Companies like Coca-Cola have succeeded with a balanced model that teams a few full-time employees with dozens of freelancers working remotely.

20+

Given the small teams dedicated to content marketing, it's not a big surprise that approximately two-thirds of respondents are creating fewer than five pieces of content per week. Finding the right balance of quality and quantity is one of the biggest challenges marketers face today, but it's one that needs to be tackled if brands want to compete with traditional media companies for audience attention.

WHAT PERCENTAGE OF YOUR MARKETING BUDGET IS DEVOTED TO CONTENT?

LONGFORM HOW MANY EMPLOYEES DO YOU HAVE DEDICATED TO CONTENT MARKETING?

6-10

IDK SHORTFORM

VIDEO

SOCIAL INFOGRAPHICS

Considering most marketers only publish a few times per week, filling those slots with the right content becomes even more important. Interestingly, respondents didn't overwhelmingly favor or disfavor one medium over another—save for infographics.

Longform, shortform, video, and social media posts were all deemed the most effective medium by between 16 and 23 percent of respondents.

Of note: Almost one-fifth of respondents picked "I don't know." Perhaps the popularity of that answer choice echoes the idea that marketers are still feeling out the best way to link their content to business results.

A marketer is only as good as his or her tools, and those tools include time, money, and analytics.

EXPERT CONTENT TEAM

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RESEARCH

WHAT PERCENTAGE OF YOUR MARKETING BUDGET IS DEVOTED TO CONTENT?

TECH LACK OF BUDGET

LACK OF TIME

CAN’T MEASURE BUS. RESULTS

LACK OF IDEAS

OTHER COMPLIANCE

Fittingly, our respondents identified budget (34 percent), the inability to measure business results (22 percent), and lack of time (11 percent) as their biggest challenges.

Ostensibly, these aren't several disparate challenges. They're all connected. A larger budget can open access to the necessary analytic tools and resources, and the right analytics help content marketers devote their time and money to the most effective tactics.

WHICH IS MORE EFFECTIVE BETWEEN LICENSED CONTENT AND ORIGINAL CONTENT?

ORIGINAL IS MORE EFFECTIVE

IDK

EQUAL LICENSED

When it comes to publishing original content versus licensing content from other publishers—also known as syndication—the results are clear: More than two-thirds of those surveyed favor original content.

That answer shouldn't come as too much of a surprise.

If readers can get your content elsewhere, what would make them come to you specifically?

As Cyrus Shepherd, director of content and SEO at Moz, told Contently co-founder Shane Snow: "Syndicated content is like giving popcorn to children. It will keep them busy for a while, but that's it."

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Moz, a robust content creator in its own right and a leader in search engine optimization, doesn't syndicate any content in either direction. "I think all the value is having something original," Shepherd said.

Licensed content from other publishers rose in popularity in the early days of content marketing as a one-click solution to populating corporate blogs and as a hack for boosting search rankings. But its clear from these findings that marketers see limited value in it.

IDK 2-5X MORE LTV

What if marketers could create content under ideal conditions? The responses here show how optimistic marketers are about the maximum benefits of their content marketing operations. Notably, a majority of respondents seem to think they could increase ROI or brand lift by 2x–5x with the right team producing high-quality content.

WHAT PERCENTAGE OF YOUR MARKETING BUDGET IS DEVOTED TO CONTENT? SHARE OF VOICE ROI

TRAFFIC & AUDIENCE

LTV

However, the results suggest marketers are embracing a nuanced approach when figuring out how content can impact their bottom lines. Cultivating a loyal audience takes time, but the benefits are long-lasting. Once you have a relationship with your consumers, the ROI should follow.

CONCLUSION

managers and designers producing content every day. And according to the Columbia Journalism Review, Coca-Cola "now reportedly spends more money creating its own content than it does on television advertising."

(Full disclosure: Coca-Cola, GE, and American Express are Contently clients.)

In 2014, many brands tested the waters, and a few dove in headfirst. In 2015, we'll see how many follow.

Though many still treat content marketing as an experimental trend, brands are quickly learning that there’s a science to creating content—and spending their sacred budget.

WITH MORE RESOURCES, WHAT CONTENT MARKETING RESULTS COULD YOU DELIVER?

2-5X MORE BRAND LIFT 2-5X MORE ROI

LTV, and audience growth all intersecting at various points.

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP SOC. GROWTH

Interestingly, even though a plurality of marketers selected ROI as their most important marketing goal, lifetime customer value and audience growth were very close behind. When it comes to content, measuring success can be a complex endeavor, with ROI,

Clearly, there's plenty of room for growth. According to a recent study by the Content Marketing Institute, only 23 percent of B2C marketers are successful at tracking ROI. Everyone points to Red Bull, GE, and American Express as the all-stars of content marketing, but aspiring content marketers likely need some of the resources afforded to those bestin-class brands—a stable supply of time, money, and analytics that take the guesswork out of their jobs.

Ultimately, the fate of content marketing isn't in the hands of the marketers pushing for creativity on a daily basis. In reality, it depends on a dedicated investment from the executive level. For example, American Express President Ed Gilligan fully supported Open Forum's initiative to publish small business content, and Marriott International Chairman Bill Marriott, who doesn't use computers, still saw the value of telling his company's story directly to consumers and has invested heavily in content.

Thanks to an early commitment from the executive level, Red Bull now employs approximately 135 people just for their media house, and Nestlé's digital editorial team consists of almost 20 community

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BY JOE LAZAUKSAS

ENHANCE YOUR LIGHTING When we look back on content marketing in 2014, there's a good chance the first thing that pops into our heads will be Jeff Goldblum in ’70s loungewear, shilling for light bulbs.

In September, GE hired comedy duo Tim & Eric to produce a masterpiece starring Goldblum as he pitches the

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incredible value of the long-lasting Link light bulb. The clip has nearly 2 million views on YouTube, and is one of the rare pieces of content marketing with serious rewatch value.

But this one might top them all.

Come for the light bulbs, stay for a half-naked Jeff Goldblum playing a grand piano.

‘DEAR KITTEN’ SERIES

Purina's robust content team creates upwards of 1,500 pieces of content per day, but the most impressive pieces are undoubtedly from the hilarious "Dear Kitten" series, created in partnership with BuzzFeed. I’m pretty sure every brand publisher on Earth wishes that they had the liberty to just say, “Screw it,” and focus their content strategy on cats. Considering the current state of the Internet, it's almost an unfair advantage. But when you have that kind of advantage, you've got to milk it for all its worth.

Purina has done that with the six video series, which has collectively been viewed over 35 million times on YouTube so far this year.

INBOUND HUB

PORTER MAGAZINE

LEGO MOVIE

With over 1.5 million monthly readers eating up six to eight posts a day, HubSpot is the premiere example of thought-leadership content marketing. Simply put, HubSpot's Inbound Hub is the best inbound marketing magazine in the world—an invaluable resource to marketers around the world and a big reason the software company IPO'd with a $1.3 billion valuation this year.

What can content marketing do?

Well, it can give us a photo essay on Martha Stewart as shot by Terry Richardson in a glossy magazine that's distributed in over 40 countries. I'm not sure if that's necessarily a good thing, but it's significant nonetheless.

New rule: If your content marketing makes over $450 million, you get an automatic spot on the “Best Branded Content of the Year” roundup.

In addition to Inbound Hub, HubSpot partnered with Moz to create Inbound.org, a 30,000-member community for inbound marketers.

Yes, luxury retailer Net-a-Porter’s Porter magazine is one of the most ambitious pieces of content marketing we've seen in some time. It launched in February with supermodel Gisele Bündchen on the cover and spreads featuring Angela Ahrendts and Uma Thurman. From an editorial standpoint, however, the masthead may be even more impressive: Lucy Yeomans, former editor of Harper’s Bazaar UK, serves as Porter’s editor-in-chief.

Make no mistake, The LEGO Movie was a savvy piece of branded content. Although LEGO put out a manifesto declaring, “We are not making a commercial for the toys,” the brand was an integral part of the filmmaking process, reports Fast Company, and exerted extensive approval over the content.

The result was arguably the most successful piece of branded content of all time, or, as director Phil Lord described it, “a soulful cash grab.”

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THE OTHER SIDE

When my superstar intern Kieran came across Honda's "The Other Side" video, he sent it to me with a simple note: "This is the coolest shit I’ve ever seen in my whole damn life."

He wasn't being hyperbolic.

Created by Wieden+Kennedy London, "The Other Side" is a "double-sided story" on YouTube—when you hold down the R key, the film flips between two parallel storylines about a dad living a double life on Halloween.

It's masterfully crafted and completely trippy. What's even more amazing is how strongly it connects back to the product—the two sides of the story cleverly relate to the Civic and its sporty counterpart, the Civic Type R. Go to Honda's YouTube page and watch it right now.

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THE WHITE RUSSIAN

The Big Lebowski was pretty much the greatest commercial for Kahlua ever made, as Jeff Bridges’ iconic character, “The Dude,” saunters through the film sipping on White Russians and just being generally awesome.

Sixteen years later, Bridges has finally starred in an actual commercial for Kahlua, except he’s not playing The Dude, and it’s not really a commercial. Instead, it’s a bonkers four-minute film noir.

In the film, a present-day Bridges— sipping a White Russian in a smoky jazz club—narrates the tale of his younger self finding a valuable briefcase in the Mexican desert before being saved from the bad guys by an astronaut who falls from the sky. It’s an incredibly weird piece of content, but Bridges’ narration is entrancing.

In the end, it fits the Kahlua tagline: “Mixing things up since 1936.”

FARMED AND DANGEROUS

MICROSOFT STORIES

Forget the soap opera—it’s all about the burrito opera (I’ll take mine with sour cream and a sense of regret!).

Chipotle aired a four-episode web series on Hulu beginning in February, and though it wasn’t Breaking Bad, it was quality entertainment, scoring an 8/10 rating on IMDB.

Microsoft isn't exactly known as an edgy, innovative brand, but its content marketing certainly is. Quite possibly no company is better at telling stories about the unique projects its own employees are taking on.

The series is a jabbing satire of the agriculture industry and capitalizes on Chipotle’s unique place in the fast food industry. The company was the first American restaurant chain to reject antibiotic-raised meat. It’s now in the process of banning genetically modified foods and fully committing instead to locally grown produce.

Though those efforts may be overstated, “Farmed and Dangerous” brilliantly promotes Chipotle’s unique value proposition to consumers in an—ahem—organic manner. The press that the web series generated was worth well more than its $1 million production budget.

This year, Microsoft has been covering its own fascinating work with a deft touch on Microsoft Stories, a sleek and splendid new site filled with longform stories about incredible and little-known projects at the company. The homepage features big, vibrant images, and the article pages echo Medium’s design, with some “Snow Fall” thrown in for tasteful measure. Expect a lot of other tech companies to copy this approach in 2015.

THE NEXT BLACK

The single best piece of content marketing about fashion in 2014 didn't come from a fashion brand.

Instead, it came from an appliance company.

Unexpectedly, Electrolux—a company that primarily manufactures household appliances like washing machines—made a stunning 46-minute documentary about the future of fashion. The film focuses on technological innovations like wearable technology, eco-friendly materials, and even clothing grown from living organisms.

“The washing machine industry isn’t exactly sexy, so they decided to focus on the clothes that people put into their machines rather than the machines themselves,” explained Philip Marthinsen, head of business and strategy at digital agency House of Radon, which helped create the film.

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Going Native How The New York Times learned to stop worrying and love sponsored content

BY JOE LAZAUSKAS PHOTOGRAPHY BY JENNY MCCABE, SHANNON STURGIS

Whatever the company did with native advertising would be expected to set a new standard— and would face extreme scrutiny.

Last September, The New York Times hired Sebastian Tomich and gave him a critical task: Help introduce the most controversial advertising product in the 165-year existence of the Gray Lady.

BrandVoice, was introduced by Chief Product Officer Lewis Dvorkin after Forbes had acquired his blogging platform, True/Slant, in 2010, along with its brand-publishing product, Ad/ Slant.

Just six years out of college, Tomich was making the career leap those in the media business dream about. As the newly minted vice president of advertising at the Times, he’d be reunited with his former boss at Forbes Media, Meredith Levien, who’d been named the Times’ executive vice president of advertising just two months prior. Hiring the duo wasn’t without risk. Though Forbes’ native advertising platform had been financially successful, it had also come under some media scrutiny—from the Times and elsewhere.

(Full disclosure: Forbes is a Contently client, and we power much of the Forbes BrandVoice product.)

Though the Times wouldn’t announce they were introducing native advertising until December, preparation was already underway. There wasn’t much time to spare. The new offering needed to be released in concert with the redesign of NYTimes.com at the beginning of 2014.

Tomich and Levien had been through this before at Forbes. They were both at the company in 2010 when it became an early adopter of native advertising, launching new sections of the site where brands like SAP could publish their own content for the Forbes audience. The product,

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Sales had started slowly, but when Forbes started creating content on behalf of brands, it became easier for Tomich and the rest of Levien’s team to sell marketers on the idea of publishing thought-leadership posts. By the time Tomich left Forbes in September 2013, BrandVoice was generating 20 percent of the publication’s revenue. And the overall market for native advertising was growing as well. That month, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) reported that 66 percent of American agencies and 64 percent of marketers said they planned to spend on native in the next six months.

But despite the success at Forbes, Tomich and Levien didn’t think that model would work for the Times.

“We wanted to do something different,” Tomich said. “We looked at it like, Okay, we can get into this, and there are a couple of ways to differentiate, but we cannot just go on and build BrandVoice on the Times.”

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And there was added pressure of working without a net, since for many media types the Times represents the paragon of capital-J Journalism.

Whatever the company did with native advertising would be expected to set a new standard—and would face extreme scrutiny.

“Our feeling is that the world is not necessarily asking for more content.

There’s enough content out there,” Tomich explained. “If you want to make this work, you have got to compete with editorial.”

The Times didn’t want to simply enable brands to publish large amounts of content at will, à la BrandVoice. “[We said] it’s going to be well-edited

profiles,” said Tomich, “similar to ‘Snow Fall’ and ‘Shark and Minnow’ and many of the articles that we are famous for.”

On January 8, the Times introduced their redesigned website with their first paid posts, which were sponsored by Dell. Four posts were published that day, and they were met with a neutral response.

The content was acceptable but unremarkable. “Will Millennials Ever Completely Shun the Office?” was the type of boilerplate story about the millennial workforce that nearly every brand was writing. So was “Reaching Across the Office From Marketing to IT,” a story about how CMOs and CIOs need to work

together in an evolving marketing environment. The New York Times tapped content agency Group SJR to create the stories, but the Times soon moved to bring the creative work closer to home.

young writer just one year removed from Syracuse’s Arts Journalism master’s program, who had spent the previous five months as a social media strategist for the Huffington Post’s native advertising arm.

studio scored another big success by creating “An Interactive Guide to Capital Markets” for Goldman Sachs, which provided a visually engaging lesson on what capital markets are and how they work.

Levien and Tomich knew that if they wanted to follow through on their promise of “Snow Fall”-esque native ads, they’d have to build a team of elite storytellers. In April, after an exhaustive search, Levien hired Adam Aston, a former editor of Businessweek, as editorial director of the newly formed T Brand Studio. Aston’s arrival reportedly helped ease the newsroom’s reservations about running sponsored content. Soon after, Levien hired Melanie Deziel, a

“Melanie is sort of the edgy, cool kid,” Tomich said. “Adam is leather patches and pipes. They counteract each other very well.”

According to Amanda Rubin, global head of brand and content strategy at Goldman Sachs, T Brand Studio’s capacity for using data to tell a story was a critical selling point. “One thing when we talked to The New York Times that we were impressed with was your data-business [reporting] capabilities,” Rubin told Tomich at OPA Content All-Stars in mid-September.

Deziel began working on a longform narrative about the lack of necessary infrastructure in the female penal system, which was a paid post for Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black.

The piece required extensive research and reporting, and it was gorgeously constructed. Moving images, infographics, video, and audio clips synchronized with the text to tell a rich story. Best of all, the only mention of Orange Is the New Black is a passing reference to Piper Kerman’s memoir, which inspired the show.

For Tomich, the story was a turning point.

“ If you want to make this work, you have got to compete with editorial.”

“Netflix was the first one where I felt like we had complete buy-in to let the story unfold,” he said. “I could show you the original pitch—it is absolutely nothing like the final product. It required a lot of trust.”

Simultaneously, T Brand Studio grew its staff to 16 and realized they had found a sweet spot creating engaging data visualization projects on behalf of brands. In February, the

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As was the case with Netflix, T Brand Studio didn’t have a specific idea in place when the project with Goldman Sachs began. “We didn’t know what we were going to do,” Rubin said.

“Our relationship is based on a brainstorming situation.”

A week after the Goldman Sachs guide was published, T Brand Studio scored a second data-driven hit with another interactive graphic, produced in partnership with United Airlines, that showed how far athletes traveled to compete at the Sochi Olympics.

Impressively, it was viewed nearly 200,000 times.

Despite those successes, speculation was growing in the media industry that native advertising wasn’t working. Chartbeat revealed that the vast majority of readers don’t scroll and engage with native ads, and our

own Contently study suggested that most readers have felt deceived by native ads.

However, in May, Levien was touting the success of T Brand Studio’s premium sponsored content, announcing that readers were, on average, spending as much time engaging with paid posts as with editorial content. ”Brands are storytellers, and they’re going to tell stories that are tied to what’s happening in the news,” she said.

“ Brands are storytellers, and they’re going to tell stories that are tied to what’s happening in the news.”

For that opportunity, T Brand Studio charges a premium—between $25,000 and $200,000 for the paid posts, according to Capital New York. That figure doesn’t include paid social amplification of paid posts, which Tomich said the studio buys on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. In August, T Brand Studio began to face some criticism. John Oliver devoted a hilarious 11-minute segment on his HBO show Last Week Tonight to lambasting the practice of native advertising, and Levien and T Brand Studio were key targets.

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“ Believe it or not, our brand content studio actually has editorial guidelines. There are lines that we will not cross.”

Oliver briefly praised their piece for Netflix, saying it was “as good as [native advertising] gets.” Then he delivered the punchline: “It’s like hearing the one Katy Perry song that you like. You think, ‘Sure, this is the best possible iteration of Katy Perry, but it still feels wrong to be listening to.’”

Oliver then cut to a video of Levien at the IAB’s Marketing 2020 Conference debunking the idea that native advertising corrupts the editorial side of the business.

“Let me vigorously refute the notion that native advertising has to erode consumer trust or compromise the wall that exists between editorial and advertising. Good native advertising is not meant to be trickery,” Levien said. “It’s meant to be a publisher sharing its storytelling tools with a marketer.”

“Exactly!” Oliver responded. “It’s not trickery. It’s sharing storytelling tools.

And that’s not bullshit—it’s repurposed bovine waste.”

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The video quickly went viral, and as Capital New York reported in an excellent profile of Levien, it quickly led to an onslaught of online attacks.

The Times’ chairman, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., encouraged her to “have a good laugh at it,” and she did.

“I think John Oliver is hilarious, and I think he did the most clever take one could have on the risks and downsides of native,” Levien told Capital New York. “It was my first experience with random people tweeting negative things at me.”

The experience didn’t shake her belief in the power of native advertising.

“The best way to preserve editorially independent, high-quality journalism is to preserve the business model,” she said. “And I think the idea of branded content that shares a form factor with editorial is a great first step.”

T Brand Studio has been criticized more recently for the visual design of the paid posts. The borders that marked the posts as sponsored have shrunk, as has the sponsoring company’s logo. Some have gone as far as to accuse the Times of violating FTC standards.

Tomich, however, argued that the new design was more transparent, since it added a “sticky” border that remained constantly in view as you scrolled through any sponsored post. “One, it looks better, and two, now if you were to scroll halfway

through on the old model, you would have no idea it was a paid article,” he said. “Believe it or not, our brand content studio actually has editorial guidelines. There are lines that we will not cross.”

Those lines don’t just impact design, but also which projects the Times decides to take on. They’ll turn down projects with brands if the fit isn’t right. And Tomich believes this pushback is one of the major factors that helps potential clients differentiate the Times from other native providers. “There is a healthy tension,” he explained. “I think brands are working with us because they want our POV, and sometimes we pass on some work.”

Addressing the criticism of native advertising as a practice, Tomich believes it is a beneficial part of the publishing ecosystem. “We can all pretend like brands are journalists, but they are not,” he said. “Their role is different. I think that they have a role to play in providing information if they have expertise in a certain topic, but at the end of the day, there is always going to be a limit to how much they’re willing to cover.”

Despite that inherent limit, Tomich believes brands will get “even more sophisticated” with how they approach content, particularly on their owned channels. He pointed to the “Interactive Guide to Capital Markets,” which Goldman Sachs

“ The dream that all these brands want to achieve is rather than getting their content to an audience, have an audience seek it.”

decided to house on their own site in addition to on the Times.

“The dream that all these brands want to achieve is rather than getting their content to an audience, have an audience seek it,” he said. “The only way to do that is if you have some sort of domain or destination with every campaign that they execute has built more and more equity.”

In early October, T Brand Studio released what might have been their

best piece of work yet: “Grit and Grace,” a captivating story of the struggles and successes of three ballerinas told through a beautiful essay and stunning short videos.

In a memo to Times staff at the beginning of October, Chairman Sulzberger and CEO Mark Thompson reported the company’s digital advertising revenue had grown 16 percent in Q3, the biggest jump since 2010, directly attributing paid posts as a key factor. Indeed, the future of

native advertising at The New York Times appears strong—as long as they keep differentiating themselves with quality.

“We’ve proven that we can do this,” Tomich said. “It’s new. It’s exciting. It’s cool. We have this gut feeling. We’ve got to prove it.”

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I’m not worried about the death of content.

The Internet is made of the stuff. Nothing captures the human mind and attention like a great story, and I believe nothing ever will. It’s in our biology.

But the journalism business is an old man on life support.

The Business Models that will decide the future

That’s what we keep hearing, at least. The shaded area of the Venn diagram between “Effective Journalist” and “Effective Businessperson” is like an NYC nightclub at 8 p.m.—nearly empty. Creative brains are naturally great at providing value without managing to capture it. But I don’t think that means we journalists need to give up—we just need to help the suits find a business model that works.

Journalism vs. content: A vital distinction

Critics of the news business and of the recent flourish in brand publishing tend to conflate two things that are very, very different: Journalism with a capital “J,” and stuff that we call journalism but actually isn’t.

Fact is, most of what we read in magazines or watch on television or browse on the Internet is not journalism. It’s information, education, entertainment. But not journalism.

When I read my monthly issue of Details magazine, it’s not journalism. I’m under no illusion that the story about topcoats for beating fall cold, or the feature on Rick’s epic beard on The Walking Dead, are making me a better voter or keeping the government accountable or democracy alive. Nor are Details’ editors. They’re giving me entertaining, sometimes uplifting, nearly always educating content, but they’re not giving me journalism.

So what is the business model that will save journalism? Well, before we get to it, I think it’s important to discuss the problem with every argument I’ve heard about the future of journalism: Content is not journalism.

Similarly, when a photographer shoots a wedding on the weekend, or a commercial for Mountain Dew in her spare time, she’s not yelled at by her photo editor at The Wall Street Journal when she comes in on Monday to photograph a campaign speech. When GE writes about a DJ making music from industrial machines, or about the Nobel-winning former GE scientists who invented the LED, GE wants the reader to like its company, to advocate for the brand, and to perhaps eventually buy GE products.

That’s fine too.

And that’s fine.

written by shane snow illustration by tara jacoby

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What can “save” journalism

Journalism with a capital J has always been subsidized by the fun stuff— the sports section has always paid for the war reporting on page one.

For the first couple years of Contently, back when people were calling branded content “brand journalism,” I worried about the questions we got about how brands could possibly “do journalism” when one of the core tenets of journalism is to “act independently.” I felt better after interviewing ethicists and standards editors for our code of ethics, but then Bob Steele of DePauw University admonished me, “Accept the fact that it’s not journalism. It’s a very different animal.”

I realized the key is in transparency, and in not fronting like what you’re doing is journalism when it’s not.

As media entrepreneur Brian Alvey once told me, nobody wants to advertise next to the story about the orphanage fire.

This distinction between journalism and content is crucial to the discussion of business models because the former has never been independently profitable. Journalism with a capital “J” has always been subsidized by the fun stuff— the sports section has always paid for the war reporting on page one.

By ignoring this fact, and by ignoring the difference between whatto-wear entertainment and keep-the-government-honest journalism, we distract ourselves from the actual challenge at hand.

In my book, I write about how “lateral thinking”—or the questioning of our most basic assumptions—has helped innovators and revolutionaries throughout history to make breakthrough change. One of the problems with the news business is that we don’t use much lateral thinking; the models we construct are logical, linear, and built on centuries of assumptions. When we strip away those assumptions and analogs and “best practices,” we’re left with the principles that I believe can lead to real ways forward.

A most fundamental principle, when you tear everything down, is that there are at the crudest level two models for funding journalism: subsidizing it, or getting people to directly pay for it.

I think we can still find profits in both categories: DIRECT Two and a half years ago, I predicted that crowds could directly pay for journalism. Sites like Beacon do this now in the Kickstarter method: People pitch in to fund a story idea, then a reporter makes the story. Conversely, companies like The Atavist act much like book publishers, funding stories out of their own pocket with the hopes that consumers will essentially crowdfund back the advance in $1.99 increments. We’re seeing a little, but not much, traction in this field. Paywalls, like the one The New York Times employs, do essentially this: They pool readers’ money for content.

In the future, the paywall/crowdfunding/subscription model will only work, I believe, in the presence of two, if not all three, of the following variables:

SUBSIDIZED I think one of the most important ideas for the future of the business of journalism is this: Instead of chasing new technologies and shoehorning them into old business models, we should step back and ask, Can the fundamental assets that news orgs accrue be used to generate subsidies for journalism? If they can, this is good news. If news orgs can maintain market leadership with products that can also subsidize Journalism, those subsidies will be hard to siphon away.

Here are the core assets that effective journalistic organizations accrue over time: • Audience relationships • Expertise in publishing • Deep institutional knowledge of an industry • Sometimes: proprietary publishing tools

• P remium content, of a high caliber • A niche audience • A top, respected news brand

I think the “business model that saves journalism” is a cocktail of subsidies generated by the smart monetization of the above assets. Here’s my current thinking on each:

Again, the math is tricky. It takes something like 4 million subscribers at $10 a month to pay for a 500-person newspaper staff’s salaries. That’s more than the current subscriber count of the 1,300-person NYT staff. So subscriptions are not enough to keep Big Journalism’s nose above water on their own.

Audience relationships: Access to an audience is what media companies typically sell advertisers. Now that we have Google and Twitter and Facebook and every other website to compete with, selling online reach to a targeted audience is a tough business to win. But one advantage media

When you tear everything down, is that there are at the crudest level two models for funding journalism: subsidizing it, or getting people to directly pay for it.

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companies do have with their audiences is immense trust built on telling stories.

And they can make money off those relationships! For one, there’s the events business— getting the audience pay for live access to content, speakers, and talent (e.g., anchors and writers).

We’ve seen many smart media companies start to take advantage of this in earnest.

Second point on this front: Media brands can use their audience to lower costs by creating “minor leagues” wherein the most enthusiastic (and talented) members of that audience create their own content—and the good stuff bubbles up to the main brand.

Examples include Gawker’s Kinja, BuzzFeed’s blogs, Forbes’ contributor network, and Medium. Sure, a lot of of low-class content gets created by the audience itself at these secondary tiers, but the exceptional stuff periodically gets brought to the main brands.

This approach doesn’t solve the model question, but it does help with one of the inputs of the model. It also carries the advantage of infusing news organizations with new blood and points of view.

Finally, though the world is full of content, good publishers are in a position to engage audiences with better content than alternative sources of entertainment on the web. As

If I ran a big ad agency, I would be nervous that Fast Company or Vogue could step in and steal clients.

more of advertising turns to the attention-based model that Upworthy and Chartbeat and others (including Contently) advocate, the incentive for those who make money from advertising is to engage people longer. News organizations, with their expertise in building and maintaining relationships with audiences, can win at this game.

Publishing expertise: Many commercial brands now aim to become publishers and build audiences of their own.

They’re turning to agencies for content strategy and solution providers (like Contently) for the tools, talent, and expertise to execute. Every variety of agency, in fact, from PR to creative to media to digital, is now pitching “content marketing services.” News brands are in a unique position, given their expertise in publishing, to compete against agencies for these emerging seven-figure contracts.

If I ran a big ad agency, I would be nervous that Fast Company or Vogue could step in and steal clients, helping them build big publications with legitimate audiences—and rendering

my (very expensive) services useless. News organizations with deep publishing expertise are in a unique position to gobble market share as service providers for brands-turned-publishers, whether the brand is doing sponsored content or building its own publication.

Deep industry knowledge: There’s a scadzillion “publishers” out there dumping content into the Internet’s maw every day. But journalistic organizations with good reputations and top talent are in a position to provide deeper information for businesses and researchers— as B2B publishers.

The product: premium educational (not journalistic) content.

On subscription or on demand.

Think academic studies, books, industry reports, and market research. This is the model that the Harvard Business Review pulls off well with its books, industry reports, and market research. 99U, the publishing arm of Adobe’s Behance, makes money publishing books and other products based on its reputation and expertise, as do magazines like Men’s Health with its house-made books.

The B2B research and educational publishing markets are massive and growing, and journalistic publishers have an opportunity to win share in these areas.

Proprietary publishing tools: Many of the fast-growing new media companies of the last decade have developed their own technologies for better publishing. The Huffington Post used its headline-testing tech to grow its business.

Vox and BuzzFeed tout their content management systems as competitive advantages.

Circa blames its mobile content atomization tech for its success so far. And Medium’s clean publishing experience is both the envy of the publishing world and a big reason for the company’s growth.

Regular ol’ software companies like Adobe and Sitecore and

A new model: Corporate responsibility

We started Contently with a vision of what we call “a better media world,” where content is awesome and interruptive

Automattic make billions of dollars off of technologies like these. Any tool that a publisher develops to make publishing better could possibly be licensed as SaaS (software as a service) on a four- to five-figure monthly subscription per client. This would require resources to support and maintain, but it’s a great business with high margins.

This is essentially what we realized that Contently had done not long ago. We built a marketplace for hiring freelance journalists, and in the natural course of business developed project management and publishing technology to help brands—and

advertising doesn’t exist, where storytellers get paid what they’re worth to do what they love, and where consumers get content they want without feeling betrayed.

As our business grew, we kept asking the question, What happens to the kind of journalism that newspapers can’t afford? We were helping brands publish information and entertainment, and therefore journalists make a living, but we weren’t doing journalism.

ourselves—manage this talent and content more effectively.

We used this platform to build our own industry publication, The Content Strategist, to a point where it has hundreds of thousands of readers. That publication pulls in customers for our publishing tools, which we charge for on a monthly subscription. The content attracts the audience, which proves the value of the publishing platform that creates the content, which pulls in clients and profits for the business, which fund more content.

And that brings me to the journalism business model that I’m perhaps most excited for:

Until we realized that our brand revenues could subsidize journalism just like they always had, but in this case as a form of corporate responsibility.

If we think about real journalism as a public service, we ought to be able to ask corporations to do the same.

Q UARTER LY 61

Most corporations have initiatives for giving back to their communities—planting trees and cleaning up highways.

As a company that cares about journalism, we decided to put some of our profits toward funding investigative reporting in the public interest. So we formed a nonprofit called The Contently Foundation and started commissioning stories about gun trafficking and illegal surveillance and sex slavery—real journalism that gives voice to the voiceless and has nothing to do with our brand marketing goals.

If we think about real journalism as a public service, we ought to be able to ask corporations to do the same: to donate to nonprofit journalism as part of their responsibility to their communities. I think Starbucks and Zappos and Whole Foods and other brands that like to show that they care about community ought to put some of their profits toward funding public interest journalism—and do it without expectation of influence on the coverage that ensues. There are plenty of ethical guidelines to be created and enforced around the model,

but essentially we’d be asking corporations to fund a slew of ProPublicas and Texas Tribunes.

The exciting part about this is that American companies spend $15 billion dollars a year on corporate responsibility. A small percentage of that could fund a lot of journalism for a long time.

When I was a kid, I was terrified of the part in All Dogs Go to Heaven when Annabelle tells Charlie, over and over, “You can never come back.”

We in journalism can never go back to the way that things used to be.

But we can stop being so scared about what comes next.

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BY HANIYA RAE PHOTOGRAPHY BY JENNY MCCABE

Global technology and consulting company IBM builds a lot of neat things: supercomputers, game console microprocessors, artificial intelligence.

Few of its brilliant inventions are easily explained to non-technological folks, yet for the 103-year-old company, that’s okay. The tech giant has found a way to be extremely innovative even when its inventions and services are perplexing.

H OW I B M I S US I N G

TO B UI L D A

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IBM’s content marketing has spanned genres, continents, and art forms. With each iteration of its story, IBM never misses a beat in delighting consumers. It doesn’t try to game SEO. It doesn’t trick consumers into buying its products or following its brand on Facebook. Most importantly, it doesn’t only talk about itself.

Together, IBM employees run at least 45 self-driven blogs that the company promotes and wants you to follow. The company has nearly 400,000 Facebook fans, more than 130,000 Twitter followers, more than a few regularly updated Tumblrs, and a YouTube channel with more than 40,000 subscribers. IBM has published at least 120 videos since the start of this year, or three videos a week.

In May, the company launched a series of commercials profiling its clients. Called “Made With IBM,” the series detailed the success of each company—and smartly ignored their connection to IBM. It wasn’t a product endorsement; it was a storytelling collaboration. As a result, several of the videos reached six-digit views on YouTube.

This same content strategy, of course, helped IBM do the impossible: Get its branded publication, Midsize Insider, onto Google News as a reputable source.

On top of this, the company enables all of its social followers, which it dubs “IBMers,” to share and promote its content as a learning resource by running multiple training sessions, live e-sessions with experts, and self-help guides. The company teaches its employees to be engaged and builds them into thought leaders. And once an employee has started to blog for the company, IBM doesn’t require a legal team to go through every piece of

Q UARTER LY 65

“Everything we do, whether it’s a TV spot or a landing spot—we always give people a path into our technology,” said Rubin.

Rubin gave the now-famous example of the IBM supercomputer Watson playing Jeopardy! against two of the show’s all-time greatest champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.

A LT HO U G H WHAT W E SELL IS

writing, imagery, or video that the employee creates.

Instead, IBM lets employees have their own voice while establishing that the company doesn’t endorse everything that’s written. On social, IBM simply makes sure its team is well versed in how to handle each channel; it built an internal website that employees could access at any time for its guidelines.

Sure, IBM is organized and thoughtful in its approach to content marketing. But how does IBM repeatedly take its complicated innovations and make viral hits out of them? Perhaps it all comes down to how IBM thinks about its brand.

“We don’t try to manage the IBM brand and we never define IBM by what we are selling,” said John Iwata, IBM’s senior VP of marketing and communications, in a company branding strategy video. “We’ve learned that at some point you have to take out that definition. IBM defines themselves by their belief system.”

Rather, the company prides itself on keeping things as uncomplicated as possible.

“We want people engaging with the IBM brand,”

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On YouTube alone, the video earned more than 1 million views and led to an adjacent “path” that explained how the supercomputer mastered the game.

At IBM, “paths” are pieces of explanatory or behindthe-scenes content. They’re exactly how the brand connects the dots and builds consumer understanding and admiration in a way that technical language simply cannot.

WE T RY TO TA LK A B O U T IT IN A

Ann Rubin, IBM’s VP of branded content and global creative, said at OPA Content All-Stars in mid-September. “We know IBM is a very complex and technical company. Although what we sell is complicated, we try to talk about it in a very simple way.”

Rubin explained that IBM built its content strategy around deciding who it serves, how they primarily experience the brand, and creating enduring ideas that those it serves can take with them elsewhere.

In layman’s terms, that means IBM knows its target, knows what information the target is looking for, and gives the target content that is both thought-provoking and is aligned with the target’s values.

“Everything we do, whether it’s a TV spot or a landing spot—we always give people a path into our technology,” said Rubin. “We had a film, but then we showed our researchers explaining how everything works.”

At South by Southwest this year, IBM used Watson again to further prove how the supercomputer was different than just a mere search engine. The approach, Rubin said, was meant to be experiential and to reach people through something they could easily understand and appreciate: food.

“We knew we had something to say about food, so we created the #IBMfoodtruck,” Rubin said. “We talked and created content around cognitive cooking, and Watson helped the chefs come up with never-before-tasted recipes.”

Together with chefs from the Institute of Culinary Education, Watson came up with crazy recipes like Baltic apple pie, Austrian chocolate burrito, and Vietnamese apple kebab. Using specific parameters and input from the chefs, Watson would find an appealing ingredient and offer it up as part of the recipe. In order to include its Twitter followers in the insanity, IBM began asking them to tweet which ingredient they wanted to see used. The company then reused the recipes and event content on its Tumblr and created several close-up videos with the chefs showing how the final recipe

decisions were made.

In a more recent campaign, IBM demonstrated the power of its cloud services at the 2014 U.S. Open by using social data and leveraging predictive modeling to manage the servers on which USOpen.org runs.

This same data generated by the cloud propelled the company to create “U.S. Open Sessions,” a series of experimental music tracks showcasing what the cloudbased processing could do.

The final two tracks, created in partnership with electronic musician James Murphy, were uploaded to SoundCloud. Both received more than 40,000 plays.

As with the Jeopardy! video, IBM used the opportunity to publish a behind-the-scenes piece on how Murphy used the collected sounds to create music. That piece of content has received nearly 500,000 views on YouTube.

Rubin mentioned that there are a lot of challenges for large companies looking to move quickly and innovate—but keeping the story clear and straightforward makes all the difference.

“IBM isn’t a nimble company,” she said. “But if we tell our story very simply and are relevant and timely about it, we can create a lot of value.”

IBM IS N’T A NIMBL E COMPANY, BUT IF WE

AND BE REL EVANT AND TIME LY ABOUT IT

A LOT OF

Q UARTER LY 67

BY NATALIE BURG

How a pet food delivery site grew to 50 million readers in 10 months Alex Zhardanovsky knows that those who believe that cats rule the Internet are barking up the wrong tree.

“You might get 80 percent of cat people clicking on a cat video, but the sheer number of dog people will outweigh the cat people five to one,” says the co-founder of the online pet product retailer PetFlow.

Though a self-professed dog person, Zhardanovsky can back up his claim. He says that the PetFlow blog is seeing between 2 and 4 million pageviews a day, and that number occasionally rises to 10 million.

The idea of a content marketing operation claiming to draw millions of pageviews a day may make you call B.S., but SiteWorthTraffic.com and SimilarWeb.com back up Zhardanovsky’s claims. They place PetFlow’s daily traffic at an estimated 1.7 million pageviews, with over 90 percent of that traffic coming from social. And a recent Alexa report identified an average of 50 million unique visitors to PetFlow.com each month. Zhardanovsky says that 98 percent of those visitors are coming to the PetFlow blog.

In addition, PageData ranked the four-year-old company as the most talked-about retail and consumer brand on Facebook—more than PetSmart, Amazon, Nike, Target, and any other brand you love. It’s also the most trafficked online pet property in North America.

Even more impressive? The current iteration of the PetFlow blog is just 10 months old.

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Q UARTER LY 69

A strong social pack

The science of sniffing out content

Content that works for its kibble

A year ago, the PetFlow blog was a typical business blog, with posts about company activity and local animal rescue events. PetFlow’s jump from unknown to big dog in the pet retail world was driven in no small part by the huge following they’d built on Facebook by posting pet photos and memes.

But when Facebook changed their algorithm to allow brands to get more distribution for posting links and less for text and photo updates, and added more robust paid audience targeting, it just made good sense for PetFlow to become a publisher.

But PetFlow is like the data-obsessed Upworthy in more than one way.

Following Upworthy’s lead, PetFlow’s content curation is pure science.

That may be a lot of steps for curating pet posts, but the effort makes the blog, in turn, work like a dog for PetFlow. Like any content site, both brand awareness and increasing product sales are underlying goals.

With millions of visitors each day, one would think that using the blog to advertise their own products would be a no-brainer for PetFlow.

But Zhardanovsky found a much more valuable thing to do with that real estate: Sell it to someone else.

“We were one of the early adopters of this new change,” Zhardanovsky says.

“The nice thing for us is that the type of content we produce is the kind everybody loves to consume.”

Primarily, that means YouTube videos unearthed from the depths of the Internet by his team of eight content curators, who then package the videos with backstories and irresistible headlines. And then their audience of 3 million Facebook followers bat each piece of content around the Internet like digital catnip. In other words, it’s the Upworthy model.

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“First, it’s really knowing what your core audience enjoys,” Zhardanovsky says.

That means crafting 90 to 100 stories a day directed at women over 45, who make up 70 percent of the PetFlow’s audience. You know, dog moms and cat ladies. The right photos, videos, and stories must be, in Zhardanovsky’s words, “something my mom would laugh or cry at.” Think headlines like “Rescue Pit Bull Protects 6-Year-Old Girl With Severe Autism. This Is Phenomenal,” “Adorable Owl Gets His First Bath and Blowdry! ADORABLE!!” and even “What This Little Boy Sings to Grandma Will Melt Your Heart!“ Of those 100 or so fully composed daily stories, only about 15 will make it to the blog. The curators gnaw the contender list down by testing each with unpublished paid posts on Facebook.

Rather than simply posting a link to their audience, PetFlow pays to distribute them to a certain segment of Facebook

users who aren’t fans. If a post meets a certain criteria—a classified combo of likes, clicks, shares, or comments—it graduates to the blog and is shared with the PetFlow Facebook pack.

“There are a lot of videos out there,” Zhardanovsky says. “Just because it’s a cute kitten doesn’t mean a lot of people are going to be clicking on it. We need to make sure that the content that we post is going to appeal to as wide an audience as possible.”

“Just because you’re watching a video about cats doesn’t means you’re in the market for cat food,” he says. “So if I can show you an ad from a third-party advertiser and then use those funds to find customers that are more likely to purchase pet food or run another email campaign, it’s a better use of that capital.”

That’s because the amount of revenue PetFlow makes from advertisers is greater than what they’d spend to acquire the same amount of customers elsewhere.

“It’s like arbitraging your own inventory,” says Zhardanovsky.

Those are some pretty savvy marketing maneuvers, but if PetFlow is relying on buying customers and luring traffic from Facebook with Upworthy-like clickability, is the model sustainable?

They’re working on new tricks to make sure it is. Zhardanovsky plans to build more of a community around their content, rather than rely on social traffic, by creating membership profiles for visitors and giving readers a reason to visit the site directly and spend time there once they arrive. Zhardanovsky envisions, for example, the site as a go-to destination for parents with kids in their laps for click after click of reliable entertainment. They’ve already started that process with the development of a very similar content site called LittleThings.com, which is intended to grow into such a community.

Will it work? PetFlow’s growth from zero to 50 million monthly visitors in only a few years suggests that Zhardanovsky just might possess the digital wizardry to pull it off— one adorable pet video at a time.

Great content drives revenue.

Q UARTER LY 7 1

If you’re buying or selling ads online, there’s a good chance you’re being robbed little by little without even knowing it.

In the dark corners of the Internet, bot fraud—in this case, the use of malware to generate non-human web traffic—has become such a problem for advertisers that Solve Media estimates bots will waste $11.6 billion in ad spend in 2014, according to a study published last January. Those buying ads are scammed out of spend by cyber criminals controlling fake traffic, and those selling legitimate ad space are forced to deal with a market plagued by artificially low rates.

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However, White Ops—an enterprise cyber-security company that launched in October 2013—is on a mission to protect advertisers and publishers from bot fraud. Their software relies on side-channel analysis to track digital behavior that differentiates humans from bots, which helps provide accurate data for those buying and selling ads. Or, as the company explains in the bio of their Twitter account: “Bots are bad for business. We’re bad for bots.”

“We’re in a long-term arms race with the bad guys,” said co-founder Ash Kalb, who also serves as the company’s general counsel. “We’re examining the browser

environment and looking for signs of the automation that you need to do this sort of fraud at scale.”

“I always joke, there are no poor bot vendors—you’re dead or you’re rich.”

So who are the bad guys? That’s not exactly certain.

But Kalb said that in many cases, bot fraud can be traced back to organized crime. It’s a new, lucrative racket without much oversight. A 2013 Adweek article went as far as to claim that bot fraud “involves organized crime, Russian millionaires, ex-bank robbers, and one-sixth of the computers in the U.S.”

The worlds of advertising and criminality don’t usually mix, but bot fraud has been a serious problem for years. A comScore study from May 2012 to February 2013 suggested that 54 percent of display ads “never appeared in front of a human being.” Think of it like Mad Men meets Mad Max.

In that same article, White Ops chairman Jon Bond said: “I always joke, there are no poor bot vendors— you’re dead or you’re rich.”

The goal for White Ops is to cut off the profits for cyber criminals. Tracing the money back to organized crime makes for a good hook to get people’s attention, but stopping bot fraud is all about empowering potential victims with the right tools to accurately measure their true, bot-free audience. If done correctly, there’s

Q UARTER LY 7 3

no need to follow the money, because White Ops is targeting the root of the problem.

display ads. Beating bots is all about capturing value correctly, and those who verify quality traffic can stay a step ahead. Simultaneously, the ad industry has also

disclose much about who they work with (“We’re like a really good plastic surgeon—our customers don’t really want us talking about them”) or get into too many specifics about how they track bots. When I asked Kalb

deterrent in place to protect against bot fraud, traffic numbers are finally becoming more dependable.

seen a few premium publishers like The Economist and the Financial Times start selling ads based on time spent, not clicks.

if the company has spoken to former black-hat hackers to get a better understanding of who they’re going after, he paused for a beat and said, “I can’t confirm or deny that.”

“If you want to spend a million bucks to beat us once, you can do it,” he said. “It’s not that the goal is to totally eliminate bots, but if you cut off the money, there’s no reason to do it anymore.”

Eliminating bot fraud is also about changing the perception of how digital advertising should work.

Advertisers may be aware of bots, but,

according to Kalb, many don’t realize just how serious the problem is. Plus, in the past, agencies and publishers were incentivized to report bloated traffic to satisfy bottom lines and keep the money flowing. Now that organizations like the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) have claimed bot fraud is rampant and in the billions, looking the other way isn’t a viable solution.

“The bots make it feel like there’s an infinite supply of human attention on the Internet,” Kalb explained.

“They make it feel like there’s always another viewer available to go and see an ad, but there isn’t. That’s why the publishers are suffering from declining prices—we’ve got infinite supply and fixed demand.”

“The bots make it feel like there’s an infinite supply of human attention on the Internet,” Kalb explained.

Even though the automated functions of programmatic and targeted ads have recently made it easier for bot fraud to take place, White Ops gives their clients a reliable metric for buying and selling: cost per human, which filters out the bot footprint to accurately price

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With enough infrastructure in place, advertisers will no longer have to worry about computer hackers sitting in robes, aiming to become the next Die Hard villain.

“I think a lot of dollars are going to shift around from companies that may or may not know they have bot problems to companies that are taking proactive steps to eliminate fraud,” Kalb said. “We see a lot of people looking for trusted ecosystem players, people who they know have cleaned up their content.”

He turned to one of his company’s success stories: the website for a TV channel that is owned by a major media conglomerate. Originally, the site was hurt by 12–14 percent bot traffic. After three months, White Ops had sliced fraudulent traffic to below 1 percent.

White Ops has grown from seven employees to over 30 over the last year and now has offices in New York City, San Francisco, and British Columbia. Because of the sensitive nature of cyber security, they can’t

However, the company is currently working with the ANA on a comprehensive study that covers 36 brands and tries to demonstrate what ad fraud looks like across the industry. The results should be available by the end of the year.

White Ops is already aware of some emerging fraud trends—for example, bots have been going after video content more than written content. “The bad guys are in this business to make money, so they go where the money is,” Kalb said. “They chase high CPMs. And unfortunately, video is a natural fit for brands. ... It’s very easy to set up a video fraud cash-out site.”

Focusing on that area, as well as mobile, are two points of emphasis for White Ops as they move forward. Still, Kalb cautioned that getting rid of all bots isn’t a likely solution; the hackers are smart enough to retreat and adapt. But now that there’s a financial

Q UARTER LY 7 5

FUN

OUR

19

17

15

20 14 PREDICTIONS

Infographic overload will hit us, and we’ll finally start seeing fewer of them by next fall.

“Native advertising” will cease to be a buzzword or a bugaboo. Instead, both brands and publishers will talk about creating great stories.

We’ll see a trend towards “slow content.”

RANKED

—MARGIT DETWEILER, STRATEGIST

—JONAH BLISS, DIRECTOR OF MARKETING —SAM SLAUGHTER, VP OF CONTENT

BY JOE LAZAUSKAS

VERDICT:

A year ago, various members of the Contently team made predictions about what would happen in the content marketing world in the year ahead. From worst to first, here’s how we did.

VERDICT:

FALSE

After the apocalypse, the only things that will survive are cockroaches, infographics, and Gawker.

20 At least one writer will win a journalism award for a story produced on behalf of a brand.

—SAM SLAUGHTER, VP OF CONTENT

VERDICT:

FALSE

While native advertising grows, skepticism—and straight-up freakouts— about the practice are still dominating the media conversation.

For the past 15 years, media minds have been optimistically predicting that long reads will finally begin to win out over listicles, and for 15 years, it hasn’t happened.

Maybe in 2015?

14

18

16

Instagram will develop feeds (God willing) allowing individuals to filter content to different audiences and followings for different themes of work

At least three brands will recruit a big-name journalist to helm their media division.

—ELISA COOL, VP OF SALES

—JOE LAZAUSKAS, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Expect the return of the Esso Newsreel and the Camel News Caravan.

—JOHN HAZARD, DIRECTOR OF CONTENTLY STUDIO

VERDICT:

FALSE

Sam swung big with this one, and boy did he miss. We're still years away from branded content winning any journalism awards, but when it happens, it'll be fun to see Jeff Jarvis' head explode.

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VERDICT:

VERDICT:

FALSE

FALSE

Nope. Didn’t happen

VERDICT:

FALSE

While Microsoft, Basecamp, T Brand Studio, and several other brands and content marketing shops hired journalists with impressive résumés, no “big names” of note jumped to the “dark side” in 2014.

FALSE

While brands underwriting editorial content is on the rise—such as when Ford underwrote AOL’s “This Built America” series— brands sponsoring straight news still makes people a little queasy. Rightfully so.

Q UARTER LY 7 7

FUN

13

11

9

7

The “Red Bull effect” will inspire more companies to take a page from the soft drink/extreme sports/music brand’s uber-cool style guide.

User experience will count—marketers need to blow their consumers away with well-thought-out experiences that are easy and enjoyable to use

The agency game will change—expect to see a lot more standalone “custom publishing” houses emerge.

B.S. metrics will die.

—DORI FERN, STRATEGIST

—KELSEY RAHN, UX DESIGNER

—PAUL FREDRICH, VP OF PRODUCT

—COLIN GRIGSBY, ACCOUNT DIRECTOR VERDICT:

VERDICT: VERDICT:

?

INCONCLUSIVE

A number of brands tried this in 2014— specifically, everyone who worked with Complex—but we’ve yet to see anyone replicate Red Bull’s unique success.

VERDICT:

?

TRUE

INCONCLUSIVE

Brands certainly upped their content design game on desktop this year, but they’re still struggling to design groundbreaking mobile experiences.

Yep, this is happening pretty much every day. Is the name Herodotus taken yet?

10

Brands will take the issue of business results seriously and start tying publishing results to business results.

Agencies will announce mini content shops/garages with silly names.

INCONCLUSIVE

The rebellion against the pageview and vanity social metrics was surprisingly strong in 2014, but despite Tony Haile’s most valiant efforts, they remain alive and powerful.

8 12

?

6

More companies invest in the long view of brand publishing and hire in-house chief content officers.

—DORI FERN, STRATEGIST

The brand publishing arms race will escalate as brands battle to one-up each other.

—SHANE SNOW, CO-FOUNDER/CCO

—ELISA COOL, VP OF SALES —SHANE SNOW, CO-FOUNDER/CCO VERDICT: VERDICT: VERDICT:

?

INCONCLUSIVE

This conversation has begun, but brands are still struggling to effectively track content back to their bottom line.

WI N TER 20 15 QUA RTERLY 78

TRUE

This happened, and they all pretty much follow the same formulation: (agency name) + (content marketing buzzword) + STUDIO.

TRUE

IMG, StyleHaul, and Machinima were just a few of the brands to hire chief content officers in 2014.

VERDICT:

?

INCONCLUSIVE

This started to happen in 2014, particularly in the finance industry, but by and large, brands have yet to pull out the big guns.

Q UARTER LY 7 9

FUN

5

3

Branded content will continue to advance in volume and quality.

Transparency will become a major buzzword as deceptive content strategies get brands in trouble.

—MATTHEW ROTHENBERG, STRATEGIST —JOE LAZAUSKAS, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

VERDICT:

TRUE

This was a safe prediction, but it certainly came true. Branded content is getting better, but when will it get great?

VERDICT:

TRUE

Nailed it! From Verizon’s Sugarstring, to Chick-fil-A’s Let’s Gather, to mega-sponsored content site Collectively, plenty of deceptive content plays got brands in hot water.

Photography! Data visualization! Video!

These things enrich storytelling and we’ll see a lot more of them this year.

—KELSEY RAHN, UX DESIGNER

2 By the end of 2014, every major publisher will have a sponsored content offering.

—SHANE SNOW, CO-FOUNDER/CCO

VERDICT:

TRUE

This is one of my favorite analogies, and it’s dead-on: Content marketing is still in its formative stage. Will 2015 be the year it has its Bar Mitzvah? For that, check out our 2015 predictions on page 8.

TRUE

Brands undoubtedly created a lot more multimedia content this year, thanks in part to upstart publisher studios like the ones at Vox and The New York Times.

WI N TER 20 15 QUA RTERLY 8 0

2014 will be for content what 2010 was for social—everyone is going to jump on the bandwagon, but not everyone is going to be doing it equally well (naturally).

—ROB HABER, DIRECTOR OF ACCOUNTS

4

VERDICT:

1

VERDICT:

TRUE

The New York Times and the Guardian were two of the last publishers to add sponsored content to their advertising offerings, but both jumped on board this year. The question isn’t whether you’re doing sponsored content, it’s how you’re doing it.

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“A marketing conference for people who can’t stand marketing conferences” –ANONYMOUS

WWW.CONTENTLYSUMMIT.COM

MAS LOW ’S

CONTENT MARKETING HIERARCHY OF NEEDS

ROI Sales Pulitzers Expensive Scotch

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Audience, Press, Twitter Followers, Hugs

CMO Support

Editorial Staff

Drink Fridge

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Budget

Content Management System

Clean Clothes

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Steady Paycheck

Internet Connection

Laptop

Coffee