(moderate music) - If you look in your email
inbox, you look at Facebook, you look at Twitter,
you look at Pinterest, you look at Instagram,
you look at any of that, you will see, literally
adjacent, here's something from my a company and
then here's something from your mom. - There's been too much
content forever, you know, since Gutenberg invented
(laughs) the printing press, there's been people who
haven't had the time to read the Bible, right? - [Voiceover] Content
marketing is simply, you know, it's a nice term and lots of
people, consultants go around saying, "Oh look, I know what this is." - But it's been hot and
important and impactful and effective for over a century now. - It's like, whoa, somebody's
in the market who isn't just shouting about their
products, they're actually doing some cool stuff for their customers. - Well, you might be
surprised to hear that I think it's very powerful, right? I mean, (laughs) so
it's one of those things that I think is really, you
know, Seth Godin has said that content is really the
only marketing that's left, and I absolutely believe that. It's really the only way that
a business, going forward, is gonna differentiate
itself in a very crazy, noisy marketplace. - But until you get to
the real heart of it, which is where is the
customer, what's the customer involved in and what's the
customer get out of this? I think it's essentially,
kind of a, eh, who cares. (old fashioned camera rolling) - [Voiceover] Right now,
while we sit in this meeting, mass selling, using all the
spectacular resources of sound pictures and animated cartoons in color, is helping to sell great masses of people in the way they like to be sold. - [Voiceover] Brands
and branding are really an artifact of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s. That's when we had big mass media, television dominated everything. Family all gathered around in the evening, watched TV. Advertising came on and
what we did is we created commonality, in other
words, the family next door saw the same television
commercials that I saw. - [Voiceover] That's where
you found out about new products or services in the marketplace, that's where you found
out about new brands that might be great for your home, or great for your car, whatever. - [Voiceover] So marketing
for a long time has been about interruption. You know, I have to interrupt
your day by putting on a television commercial
when you're watching the game, or watching your favorite drama, or have to put in an
advertisement for when you're thumbing through the
magazine that will cause you to stop, or reading a newspaper
that will cause you to stop, or, God forbid, call you at
home with an unwanted message. - Pushing it out, pushing
it out, pushing it out. And it's always been that way,
I mean, that's the history of marketing. If you go back to what
the four Ps of marketing: product, price, placement, promotion. All in the control of the
marketing organization, we decide what product we're gonna make, how many we're gonna make,
how we're gonna price them, how we're gonna sell them,
where we're gonna sell them, all those things. Now I've created all that
and I've got to push that out to you and I've got to
convince you to buy. So it's been primarily about persuasion. - [Voiceover] It's one where
we actually go out in some persuasive way to try and
convince someone that our product or service is better. We describe value,
basically, that's the classic marketing training. If you look at how marketers
have been trained in university since really, time began, it's
how do we actually describe the value of the product
or service we're doing in an ever clever way? - And how do you do
that, you basically have levers that you pull. One of those levers
was advertising and you basically bought advertising
space and you knew that for a certain amount of
investment you could expect a certain amount of return. Good days, you did better, bad days, you did worse, but over time you learned the metrics that could help you achieve that. - [Voiceover] Marketers
fell in love with mass media because at that time it was
probably the best way to market. It was just blossoming
where you had newspapers and magazines and
television that could reach so many people and we
weren't used to that. - [Voiceover] Somebody
else owned the audience, so usually that was
traditional publishing, so perhaps a newspaper or a magazine. And so to connect with those
people you had to go through some intermediary. You had to figure out a way to get in front of that audience. - [Todd] The publishing
industry at the time, was very much, you know, a man with two lovers, if you like. He had the audience on
one side who he dearly, dearly loved but he actually
really loved the advertisers just as passionately, if not more when they came calling, right? So that whole dynamic was really founded on the principle of distribution. He owned, the publisher
owned the distribution power at that point. - Advertising was fabulous at
getting our attention, right? This burst of disruption. And then what did it
do with that attention? Absolutely nothing. It just hung there. Now that was great when
you had to watch it. - Companies, corporations,
media had all the power because we only had so many channels and consumers had only so
many ways that they could get their information. - [Todd] With the advent of
the internet, that disappeared. And suddenly the advertiser
and the audience can find each other, or rather, the
publisher and the advertiser are essentially competing
through the same channels to try to reach the audience. So that's really where brands have come into their own when they
realize, "Well, we don't have to "go through a third party
to reach this audience. "We can actually try to
achieve that directly." - [Joe] Instead of having to advertise in someone else's channel,
I have the opportunity to create my own valuable,
relevant, and compelling content in our own channels
to really create loyalty, build relationships directly
with what we like to call subscribers, instead of
going out and having to pay for that attention. - [Voiceover] I think we have
to change the way we think about, you know, getting
access to the mind of the consumer we want to
have a relationship with. And one of the best ways to do that today is through content. - [Voiceover] Content
marketing, I think, preceded advertising when you go back
in history the first ads really were content that was connecting with people around value. At some point, I think in the '50s, we decided to dazzle and
sparkle by talking all ourselves instead of in
terms of what they needed. - [Voiceover] As they
define content marketing, communicating with
potential customers to drive behavior has been around,
you know, forever, right? For millions of years, since
the first caveman tried to sell a rock to another caveman, right? He was creating a rock brochure. - [Voiceover] We've always
had content marketing, we just did different
kind of iterations of it, where it's come from. If we look back in the
1800s there were quite a few companies that were trying
to figure out how to build lasting relationships with
customers by not talking about their products and services. While not the oldest example in the world, my favorite example is
probably John Deere's The Furrow Magazine. (gentle music) (tractor engine running) - [Voiceover] My name's
Bart, I'm 37 years old. I have lived on this farm my entire life and I can remember being
five, six years old, we were dairy farmers at that time and bucket feeding calves,
bottle feeding calves. That's how we started. I bought this farm from
my dad, he's a second generation, about 10 years ago and we raise corn, soybeans, and wheat, and we also raise beef livestock. I'd say I've been getting
The Furrow and reading The Furrow for about five years now. I will say that I think
the articles in The Furrow are very neutral. I mean, to the point that I always wonder, is this a John Deere magazine or not? - [Voiceover] The Furrow
came along in 1895 when our company was under the direction of John Deere's son, Charles. He recognized that need
for farmers to have an accurate, unbiased
source of information. Anything that we think farmers
can use to improve their operations, that's something
that's gonna make it into The Furrow. - [Bart] I try to key
in on the soil health and soil fertility. Fertilizers have gotten very
expensive through the years and how you apply them is very important, not only economically, but
also for the environment. I don't know where a company
like John Deere sits on soil conservation as far
as no till, versus being a more conventional type. To me, I think a company
like that has more to gain when people are working more ground. But, you know The Furrow
doesn't just talk about that, if they do at all, I mean, it's more about the opposite of that. - [Voiceover] If you go back through the entire history of the magazine, I would be very surprised
if in that editorial space, you saw the words "John Deere" mentioned more than 15 or 20 times
and that's going back 120 years. That veil of secrecy has
been lifted off of marketing. People know when they
are being marketed to. The John Deere brand still
stands for something. It stands for quality,
it stands for honesty. And that's been a critical
component of, not just The Furrow's success, but of
John Deere's success overall. (tractor engine running) - Customers are really
always faced with issues. What are my customers
really concerned about? What issues do they have? What information are they looking for? What kind of problems do they have and how can I help them
solve those problems? - Focus on being good
to a specific audience. Most companies need to devote resources and talents toward driving a very small, very niche audience. - [Voiceover] Understand
deeply, the buyer's that you're trying to reach. The people you're trying to reach. You call them buyer personas if you like, that you're trying to reach. - [Kirk] You need to
somehow integrate yourself into things that are valuable
and important to them and you have to deliver that to them and manifest your interest,
not just with words and pretty pictures, although
those are critically important but by actually doing
stuff that matters as well. - [Andrew] I think the
brands that really get it are focused on being
part of the information you want to consume. They're focused on creating
higher quality content that inspires people to
buy something they didn't know they needed. - That's Procter and Gamble. I mean, they're trying to sell more soap. How are they going to do that? They said, "Well, who are we targeting? "We're targeting women. "Women are trying to
build their households. "What do they like, they like
certain kinds of programming." - [Voiceover] They wanted to
be entertained, they were busy. Most of them were women, they were working around the house. So when they were either working, or when they had an
opportunity to sit down and take a break, they
wanted to be entertained. We began to go ahead and realize, let's provide them story
lines, entertainment, something that will be so immersive that they're
gonna come back tomorrow and the day after that
and the day after that. So deep characters, rich characters, stories lines that actually had meaning for these individuals,
something they could relate to. And this is how we got into Soap Operas. It was nothing that was
coined within the industry, this was something that
consumers began to create for themselves and that's
what they were calling them. What is the return on investment? You know, I'm sure that there
were people in the business that were asking that. You know, you can try to sell your story or you can just simply tell your story. And so that's what we were doing and the brands were doing very well. The longest running ones
that we ever produced, such as The Guiding Light
and As the World Turns, they all started on the radio. And then come the 1950s, the
invention of the television, they made that transition. We never really even started as a sponsor, we went all in. We went ahead and we started up our own production company. We were hiring them to hire the writers, hire the actors. And I don't think the
company ever really put any directives or, you know,
characters must do this or a story must do that. But I think we hired creative people and Irna Phillips was
someone that we worked very closely with. She is legendary in terms
of writing soap operas and she wrote for The Guiding Light for a number of years. So it's like any other
business that P&G is in, we want to hire good people
that know what they can do and let them loose and let
them build that business. And that's exactly what Irna
Phillips and others did. - I don't think there's ever
been a hack for that, right? That's the bizarre part of this of this business that is
more art than science. There's no way around
needing to have talent. Good journalists have to have it, good screen writers have to have it. You have to know a good
story when you see one. - [Ann] That's something that
publishers have always done that's what they do really well. And when they think about their customers, they think audience. - [Joe] If you look at
Europe, where they called it customer media, customer publishing. UK, I mean back in the
day, seven of the 10 top publications on
the newsstand in the UK were custom publications,
were branded vehicles. (accordion music) - [Voiceover] Germany used
to be a magazine country. We have so many publishing houses and people still read a lot of magazines. When you look at the
newsstands at the airport or the train stations, there
are still so many magazines on sports, on soccer,
and things like that. With a small audience, magazines
only with a circulation of 10,000 copies or so, but
very, very sophisticated in editorial design and editorial content. Companies in Germany who need to have, well, content for their products, I think they recognized
as well that with complex matters, complicated products
and things like that, they need more content,
more stories to tell about what they are doing. By 2000, 2001 we had a special term. We were talking about
orchestration of different media channels with mobile channels with the internet and things like that. We, as corporate publishers,
were the first ones to use tablet magazines, for example. We invented corporate blogs and podcasts and things like that. And so we were doing content marketing already. - It was called all kinds
of different things. So it was called custom publishing, custom media, branded content, customer media was big in Europe. Everybody was talking
about it but they were all using a different
language to talk about it. - [Kirk] I think there's a
lot of things that it isn't that people think that it is
that are really too simple and too truncated and don't get anywhere. Lots of advertising agencies think of things as content marketing that aren't really content and
a lot of content agencies think of things as content marketing that aren't really marketing (laughs). And that's where I think
it gets complicated. - [Voiceover] If you go
up to somebody, like say, a CEO of an organization or president, and you say to them, "Are you better at solving "people's problems than anybody else "in your space?" That's a question that'll interest them. But if you say to them, "Are you the best content
marketer in your space?" They have no connection. - [Joe] If we don't
start communicating this in the same way, we're never
gonna grow as an industry. And sort of in 2007, you know,
put the flag in the ground and said, "Look, we're gonna
call it content marketing." And you just see this wave of momentum. (gentle techno music) - Obviously, content marketing
has been around forever, but there's a whole new
thing when content marketing collides with the
internet and with digital. - [Voiceover] There's been
this cataclysmic shift in how customers get
their information today. - [David] I remember when
I was first doing content marketing, I would see stats that said, "There was 20 million
people on the internet." I'm like, "20 million
people on the internet, "that's nothing," when
you figure today there's billions of people on the internet. - [Joe] So if I'm trying
to get their attention, I'd better be creating some
pretty fantastic information on an ongoing basis to
get their attention. I can't just rely on the very few channels that we had in the '90s, now we've got hundreds of channels. So how are we going to get
our audience's attention? - [David] One of the
times I really thought, "Wow, this is pretty
cool stuff," was the old Will it Blend YouTube videos and YouTube had just started. YouTube had been around, I don't know, months or something like that and Blendtec, this very
smart company said, "Well shoot, we can use this new media "to market our blenders." So they created this Will it Blend series. - I'm going to place,
approximately, 50 marbles in a jar
(marbles clinking in jar) and I'm gonna run the ice cream cycle, which is the slowest cycle we have. (blender whirring) This is glass dust, don't breathe this. (jazzy music) I had no idea that this would turn into such a monster. A good monster. I've always wanted to have the fastest, the most powerful thing I could have. So for a wedding present in 1968 I got a blender. And I thought, "Man, I can
make this thing better." So for years we've had the opportunity to build a blender that would not fail. We're an engineering company, so we have 40 engineers. No other blender company has 40 engineers. I'm an engineer, which was a real problem because we didn't have any marketing and sales. I thought that if we had the
best blender in the world that people would beat a path to our door. I thought if people go into a scoop shop or a smoothie shop or a coffee shop, and then people would
go in, they'd get these fabulous drinks and they'd think, "Wow, I gotta get one of these blenders. "I just can't wait. "Hey, would you tell
me what that name is?" And people would,
literally, write it down. And I thought that's the way to sell, someone buys something from
you and then demonstrates it in a commercial setting,
that's the best way to sell it. Not so. We finally decided that we needed to hire
a real sales person, a marketing person. He saw a pile of sawdust one
day and he asked someone, "What is that on the floor?" And they said, "Oh,
that's just Tom, you know, "blending two by twos." And (laughs) he said, "Really?" "Yeah, sure." So he buys a rotisserie chicken at Costco and he buys a six pack
of Coke and some marbles and rake handles and a
bunch of other goodies, came to me and said,
"Here, blend this stuff." And so I said, "Okay." And so we filmed blending this. And he came to me five days later and he said, "Tom, we hit a homerun! "We have six million views on YouTube!" And I said, "WhoTube?" (blender whirring) - [Voiceover] My name's Holly Jackman. My husband and I own four
Roxberry Smoothie stores. Carrots, celery, cucumbers, beets, ginger, lemon, limes, make them taste incredible. Nutrition never tasted so delicious. Well, we did a lot of
researching and looking around. I'd had a lot of home blenders
that I wasn't as happy with so we were very excited
when we found out about the Blendtec. We watched all the
commercials, Will You Blend It? We saw them throw in iPods
and all kinds of crazy golf balls and things in
and we were very impressed. - [Tom] We've done, on YouTube, we have, I think 145 that are up. So in all total, not just
YouTube, but other views, around a half a billion
views, 500 million views. I thought, "Wow, this is great." What an opportunity to sell
a product and not have to spend any money (laughs), you know. It was wonderful. So in short order, our
sales were up 1,000%. And we just kept doing videos. At this point we used to say, "Hey, check out this video, "you know, I'm blending an iPhone." And, "Whoa, really,
you can blend an iPhone "in a blender?" That's how it used to be. The way it is now is people come to us and say, "Hey, no question in our mind, "we're hooked on your videos," you know. "We want a Blendtec blender." - Our job is to now take that trust and not abuse it. We don't have to try to
get into our customers, they're already letting us in. - [Julie] And that's a big difference. That's really that direct connection opens up a whole new world of relationship with consumers and content
is the fuel that creates that opportunity. And because we've got
that connection with them around something that they
value, we don't have to pay to find them because
they're coming to us. They sign up for our emails,
they follow us on Facebook. - [Voiceover] Content at this
point is a form of currency that brands, that brands that storytellers use to have
a conversation with somebody. - [Doug] If marketers
are gonna use that new direct channel, just to do
what they always did before. - Like us, share this,
click here, follow us, watch our video. - And just push their product messages, it's an abuse of the
channel and, in truth, they lose the channel. They're now denied it
because the consumer doesn't want to hear anymore. - This is the same problem
that was posed when the introduction of a new
technology was introduced in the 1920s, and that was the radio. How do people want to interact? How are companies supposed to get their messages across to their consumers? - The challenge in today's
marketing landscape is differentiating from your competitors. What's usually happening is the production of that product or the
production of that service, you know, think of off
shoring for services and you think of 3D printing for products. It's become commoditized and it's being, it's getting very, very
difficult for product companies and services companies
to differentiate against all of the other competition
that's out there. Content allows you to do that. That is the biggest opportunity. - [Jay] Search, by definition, doesn't create demand, right? It just fulfills demand. Nobody goes to Google and says, "Hey, I'd like to buy something. "I don't really care what,
just surprise me," right? Of, socks, okay, a
hamster, whatever you think is appropriate. - But nobody cares about your product, they're trying to solve a problem. - [Voiceover] What are my
audience's pain points? What's keeping them up at night? What's important to them? - So market Marcus
Sheridan is a great example of the power of content marketing. A couple of years ago,
Marcus was the co-owner of a pool company and it wasn't doing so well. So what Marcus decided to
do was to launch a blog, very simply, and answer
questions that his customers had based on the searches that they did as well as conversations
that he had with customers. So a couple times a week,
he would just come up with a blog post that would be
very specific to a question. And he talked about things
that a lot of pool companies don't like to talk about. - [Voiceover] In 2008,
as most people know, the market crashed and for pool guys, this was a terrible time. We went through a period
of three straight weeks, we were overdrawing our bank account. I didn't know what we were gonna do. I thought, every consultant
that I talked to said you need to close your business and that was when I discovered what today I know to be content marketing. All right, so this is the beginning of the next chapter off River Pools and that
big, red, shiny thing you see behind me is what
is considered a mold. And a mold is what is used to produce a fiberglass pool. We always felt that we were
gonna move in this direction of manufacturing and, of course, that's what you're seeing now. When we started River Pools and we had two really nice stores, one
in Richmond, Virginia, one in Warsaw, Virginia. And they were nice and
they had tanning beds and hot tubs and pool
tables and all these things, they weren't generating revenue. And I said, "Okay, what can we
be the best in the world at?" Well, we know we can teach
about fiberglass pools better than anybody else. That's our thing. Let's just focus only on fiberglass pools. Let's forget the whole, we
got to have a building to feel like we've accomplished
things, the Edifice complex. And so we got rid of those retail stores. We got out of the leases
early, we paid the, you know, we paid the fees and all those things because we said, "Now, we have a focus." So we moved into this big warehouse. And today, the way
people view your building is the information they
see and it's what they feel on a computer screen. - When he saw that we could actually bring people to the site for free by doing what he likes to do best, which is really is teach. - Let's get everybody on board, let's get everyone involved, everyone in this company is a teacher, now let's do it. - [Jason] We learned to
think like the consumer. And in doing that, we saw their questions. We asked the questions ourselves. We would be on an appointment and a question would come up and the first thing we would think of is, "Wow, we haven't written about that yet." Or, "Wow, that would make a great video." It forced me to kind of have to step up and learn how to write, learn how to, learn this whole new skill set. - [Marcus] We were on to something within about six months of producing content on
the River Pools site. - We've developed a nationwide brand. So we're contacted by people
from all around the world and all around the
country on a daily basis. - I knew the consumer
wanted to learn about pools. Fine, fine, why not give it to them? Why not become the Wikipedia of fiberglass swimming pools, which is what we became. People are gonna be vetting you, they're gonna be vetting me, they're gonna be coming to your website, they're gonna be coming there and saying, "I want to feel
good about my decision. "I want answers to my questions. "I want to get a sense for this company." That's gonna happen as
long as we have this thing called the internet. The moment we stopped saying,
"We're pool builders," and started saying, "We are
the best teachers in the world "about fiberglass pools and we happen to "install them as well," that
was one of the most prosperous days of our lives. - The consumer has incredible
amounts of information. Marketers are not accustomed to that. Marketers are accustomed to control. Controlling the system, controlling the activities. And that's, I think,
what creates the problem. Marketers can't give up control. They don't want to give up control. They don't want to give it away. - [Andrew] I think marketing is broken, to be honest. I think, you know, if
you're a marketer today, you're stuck in what I call a CMO pizza. You essentially have a fixed budget that is your pizza every single year and you just keep slicing it
in more and more ways, right? You've got your SEO
budget, your PPC budget, your, I don't know, even
the acronyms to add, right? You end up with this giant
pizza sliced a million different ways, hoping
to have a bigger impact than you did last year. - [Robert] The idea of the
marketer as knowledge worker where being busy isn't the
same as being successful. Which is he way we've really
equated jobs for so long. And this traditional
organization of the marketing department is as new
technologies and as new channels come along, what we do
is we throw a team at it. We throw a new process at it
in the same old hierarchy. - You can approach content
marketing as a program, or you can approach it as a culture. Programs, they live and then they die. They're forced, they're not
enjoyed, typically, typically. But a culture becomes who you are. - We're seeing this
transformation of marketing departments that were set up long ago in those mass media days,
they've transformed into publishing departments. And we've really seen that and it's a big struggle
for large enterprises because you have to dismantle
what we built over the past 30, 40, 50 years. - The brands who get it
have transformed the brand. They've become something else. And part of it is from
letting go of this idea of, you know, we own
everything about the brand, and trusting that if
you engage a whole lot and give some of these brand
values to your customers something good happens. And something good that
you can't even predict. (loud techno music) - Yes, Red Bull's an amazing brand. - Well, certainly, there's
the Red Bull example. And they're the poster child of content marketing these days. - [Voiceover] I think from
the very beginning, Red Bull was a storytelling brand. I spent six years at Red Bull
and we were a marketing team and actually, I guess, most
of the content and activities came from the communications function within the marketing team. We used content as a
tool to tell our stories and to show people the amazing things that we were doing and the great athletes we worked with. A lot of the things that we
did at Red Bull were in the action sports realm, so
that was super visual and spectacular and it just
made sense to capture that, and share that with the world. Perhaps, a little arrogantly,
we felt that the mainstream media weren't particularly good at filming and photographing the kind of sports and things that we were involved in, so we took ownership of that. At Red Bull, we were always told to focus on the audience and what
was important to them and what made them
passionate about their scene, about their sport, about
their favorite athletes, and really think about them as individuals and not really worry
too much about how they all crossed over. So I think that sort of single-mindedness and focus on quite a few audiences was one of the things that put us ahead. That we were able to say, "What would a "BMXer think is awesome
about this BMX event?" rather than trying to think
about, "What would a youth, "aged 16 to 22 think
about this BMXer event?" They target people through their passions. Whether it's music or sports or culture, these areas have
rules, they have stories, they have stars and Red
Bull pays a huge amount of respect to those scenes
and those audiences. And they don't treat
them like demographics, they treat them like the
passionate people that they are and they give them what they want. At Red Bull we felt like we
had an actual role to play and something that we could
contribute to these scenes. And we were always looking
for ways to help progress, create new things, help
facilitate collaboration. And it felt really good
to be adding something into these scenes rather
than just taking out. And I think that was core
to the way that people felt about us as a brand
operating in these spaces. When I started at Red Bull,
there was a huge amount of scope and free range. We were in each of the markets, absolutely entitled to do whatever we wanted to do, of course with a huge
commitment to quality. As the Red Bull media house took shape, the whole company began to
professionalize its media operations from legals and
contracts and licensing, through to production, quality,
frame rights, and delivery. So there was a massive
undertaking to get ready to become a global media company, rather than a brand that was producing a lot of great content. - [Todd] When you first
start getting serious about content marketing
then it really starts with appointing someone or
understanding there needs to be a custodian of the audience's view point within the organization. - You've got to have tremendous buy-in top to bottom, that's key. You've got to have a central organizer, that Chief Content Officer,
whatever you want to call that person, the Content Manager, and you've got to start
off on the same page. - They need to make a lifestyle change and they have to swear off spending money on the stuff that doesn't work. And they have to say to themselves every single day, "I'm gonna create content." Every single day for an hour or two or an entire day. Or, if I'm a big company,
10 people's entire days have to create content, full time. - [Voiceover] You ever look
around at all the incredible technology in our world
and think to yourself, "How in the name of science
does all this work?" Me too. I'm Baratunde Thurston, and this is GE Masterclass. - [Katrina] When we,
certainly when we started producing a lot of this content, it meant that we had to
get into our factory floors and if meant that we had
to get into our labs. And they're doing, you know,
they're doing very important stuff in there and so a
lot of the culture change and the kind of learning and evolving came at those points. Used to be that it could
be very tricky to get onto a factory floor or
to get to a customer site and now our customers call us sometimes and say we have this great new story, we'd love to do another
production with you. - [Robert] I do believe
that it is a practice, it is a skill that brands are
gonna have to get good at. It is something that,
whether they outsource the execution of it, you
know, whether they actually develop the talent within
to actually shoot video, create imagery, I think is not
as important as the business getting good at managing
a marketing process that is at its heart, a
media company-like process. It's interesting what
some of these large brands are doing now around content marketing. If you look at Marriott and their creation of their content studio
is they're putting a flag in the ground and saying,
"Look, we are a media company "and our goal is to be the
leading informational provider "in the travel industry." They've said it and now they're putting
the construct together to make that happen. - [Voiceover] I have a
presentation that I give here and globally, called Publish or Perish. All right, the idea if we
don't start publishing, we're not gonna be around
and not be relevant. It's the idea that today,
as a brand, we're all really media companies, it goes back to all of us are media companies. So the Marriott Global
Creative and Content Studio is focused on developing content. Digital projects, we've got TV projects, we've got film projects. We've got stuff in animation. Great story telling comes from people who know how to tell stories and the creative community, right? So we partner directly
with, mainly, influencers across Youtube, Instagram,
and other channels, but also traditional talent in Hollywood, producers, directors, writers,
to create content for us. (upbeat music) - Look around, look at these people. They come in, they go out and we make that flow. - [David Beebe] So the biggest
project we've done today is Two Bellmen, it's a short film. We partnered with a group in Los Angeles called Substance Over Hype. They are a Parkour group, they do music, dance, motion, music,
it's all their thing. Created a 15 minute film
where the set is the hotel. It's just naturally a part of the story. It's never an integration, it's not about, "Here's your key card,
thank you for checking in." All right, that does not exist. You just naturally see
it in its environment. Whey you let creators,
give them parameters and let them do what they
do best, storytelling, they'll figure out in an authentic way. It's when it becomes ugly programming is when a brand says,
"Well, can you put my logo "in there four times and
stop it on the screen "for three seconds." Content marketing is not overnight. You know, it's a marathon. And so you have to really educate folks, that, you know, it's not
gonna happen overnight, you have to scale this and
you have to really have that whole content ecosystem built and how you're using social
channels and everything else to drive back to wherever
you want that center of your universe to be. - Like a halfway decent human being, brands have to be about
more than themselves. - [Voiceover] It's humans
dealing with humans, we forget that, right? Instead of trying to be real
time, you got to be real. - [Christie] That single-minded
focus on your audience and what they love and
what they really care about and trying to offer value in that space is something that
anybody, any brand can do. - And the rules by which we play by are human behavior, right? Every organization, I
don't care what you sell, it's P to P, it's person to person, people to people. It's not stinking B to B, B to C, B to G, which is business to government, but the philosophies of
becoming incredibly helpful, being a great teacher,
listener, communicator, they don't change. I don't care what it is that you're on, what it is that you're doing. So it's not about size, it's not about what you do. It's about a mentality and a culture. (car engines running) - [Joe] Jyske Bank is
one of the largest banks in Denmark and for years they were paying a lot of money for sponsorships. And they didn't want to do that anymore. They didn't know if that was
a good use of their resources. So they created Jyskebanktv, targeting to financial consumers, and they started to
answer questions on this video channel about how consumers can save for retirement, how they
can get checking accounts, savings accounts, do things
with their lives financially. And they were starting
to share information like a media company would. - We say that if you
can't rely on the media, you have to become the media. And that's, basically, what we think. - [Voiceover] My name is Rasmus Nielsen. I work as a host and
journalist at Jyske Bank. Well, since it started
in 2006, we started doing internal communication on TV and then in 2008, we started
also sending to our customers. (speaking in foreign language) - [Lasse] The hard part is
not to produce the content, it's to get the right idea for the content and then to get the big "yes"
from the CEO in the company, so you get in there. - [Rasmus] We have had
our CEO call us and say, "Hmm, that wasn't my kind of story, "but that's all right, I'm still here." But you need to have that
kind of CEO that thinks, "All right, I give you some freedom "and I won't intervene." But, of course, you have an opinion, but he believes that if you
tell it as a journalist, people will believe it and people will, they will like it. It's been a long process
about getting where we are now because people
are very skeptic about this. But every time we do a
story where people say, "Oh, that's actually what
we were talking about "in the canteen. "So great that you guys
are talking about it also, "even though it's kinds
of bad story for us." But people are talking about it anyway, so if we don't talk about
it, it will just, you know, grow bigger and bigger
in the organization. - You earn the respect from the audience. You have to get good stories
that go into people hearts. And when you reach people
heart's, they will do the right things for the brain. Think like a publisher, produce
content that is relevant for your audience. You have to believe that
this is the right way to go. And I don't think it's
just the right way to go, it's they way you have to go. (bells echoing) - [Christie] Having that
real respect for content as a thing unto itself, it will reward you if you invest in it. But it's not something
that can be done cheaply or easily or quickly. - [Kirk] The content business is the only part of this business that
I can see credibly leading the new practice of advertising. And I'm moderately upset
because not enough of us are trying to do it. - [Marcus] I don't get tired of it. If you have the right mindset and if you believe that just
because it was done that way doesn't mean it's
necessarily the right way, if you're willing to create
and make the rules in your own industry, you can
do exceptional things. - [Robert] The real future
is, I think expansive. And what I mean by that is I
think content marketing itself is going to expand beyond
what it is considered now. - [Julie] When we looked at what we had in terms of a relationship
with 100 million, you know, uniques a year and the
kinds of information that they give us based
on the way they connect with our content, we realized
that that was going to be the fuel that would drive our future. - [Joe] The number of
companies that are creating new products because they
have a content marketing platform that's working
for them and they're seeing new opportunities, is just amazing. - [Christie] Storytelling
helps cut through, it helps us make sense of the world. Content that has a
storytelling backbone to it is just easier to consume,
it's easier to remember, it's more engaging. I think it's an essential
part of everything that we do. - [Todd] And I think we're heading in this direction longer term. It's much more about the
personality of the organization being able to come out and
connect and emotionally engage with individuals rather
than thinking the tactics of how we're going about things. It's actually putting a
flag in the sand and saying, "We represent this, come with us." - [Kirk] What brands have
to be in this new era, is they've got to be a
coherent, core narrative. Because that's the only
thing that's gonna remain consistent and distinguishable
and differentiating across all kinds of channels. The only way (laughs), the only right way to do content marketing is to be a story. (fireworks booming) - Or they can just
assume that everything's already understood, right? But you know what they say
about assuming (laughs). It doesn't always work out very well. (upbeat music) - You cannot consume more
information (stutters), sorry, let me, (video rewinding). - And take two. - Brant, clear these guys out, quick. Chase them all out. Yell at 'em. (child screaming) (laughing) Get these guys, they're too close. - [Voiceover] Oh, they saw you coming. - Chuck Norris was fun
because, what a wonderful guy and I had an action figure of Chuck Norris and then a bunch of
these bad guys with guns and beards and all this stuff. And so I put it in a blender-- - My dad drives a Ford truck, I drive a Chevy but we
both agree on John Deere. - Don't giggle, this is serious. - Chuck, it looks like, um-- - [Voiceover] Total Gym. - Total Gym. I said, I said, "Oh," I said, "I guess that, Chuck,
I guess that Total Gym "really works." - It's really pretty
and it dresses nicely. (laughing)
That's what I think the future of content marketing is. And it's gonna grow up and
marry a really nice boy. (sighs)
And have a family. - [Voiceover] That's good.
(laughing) - I don't know, does anybody
know this (beep) really?
