Brand Made Stories: In Cannes You Renew Your Partnership Vows

Hi all,

Hope you’ve been well.

Welcome to Brand Made Stories (formerly known as Friday Thing/k) – a brand storytelling canvas where I’d like to share with you smart, creative, inspiring, engaging, cool, and innovative brand stories that take my marketing breath away once a week.

It’s a good time to launch the new name as the holy week of advertising and media, the week of Cannes Lions 2016, is upon us.

I also wanted to use this special moment in time to share with you a love letter I recently wrote. Imagine that a violin is playing in the background when you read the following lines…

This is an open (love) letter to the creative agencies and media agencies out there.

As Cannes Lions takes places when this post is published, the time has come to renew your partnership vows. It’s probably been too long since you last truly felt you’ve complemented each other.

What is the magic love spell you ask? 

You’ve heard this word many times in the last couple of years. You might be all over it, but I don’t think that it’s all over you. 

It’s ‘content.’

After many years of creating it in the traditional ways you’ve become accustomed to, you’ve mastered it. You know how to create great ads and you know how to get in front of your audiences’ eyeballs.

But admit it, that has come with some fatigue, no?

Doing the same things, coming up with great ideas, bending them into 30” or 300×250 formats, using the same channels while not delivering the same results.

That’s tough.

Your life these days is everything but easy because technology is determined to change it all, and it has. You know who has the control now, how fragmented they are, and their immunity to your messages.

The audience.

We are living in an ‘Uber era’ where disruption is the name of the game.

Business models are breaking leaving ripples that impact you too. More channels, more metrics, more content consumption alternatives and much less attention from your audiences.

I’m actually surprised that you’ve read this far (thanks!). That’s our era.

But as Leonard Cohen wrote and sings, “There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light comes in.” That crack is, as you’ve come to know it, is content marketing. Or what I like to call, Brand Storytelling.

Think about it for a moment…

Only you, from both sides of the marketing plan, have the skills, experience, brains and tools to re-ignite the love. The love between the two of you, and the love between brands and their audiences. This is your time to work together and invite audiences into the lives and stories of your client’s brands clients.

As best-selling author Seth Godin put it, “Content marketing is the only marketing left in our age.” We at Outbrain say that opt-in, not interrupt-in’ is the new adage.

Madwomen and men, YOU know how to create interesting content. YOU know how to inform, entertain, and add value to consumers in a way that changes and shapes their perceptions. YOU are the ones with the big ideas and plenty of butcher paper to storyboard beautiful brand stories.

Technology has allowed you to explore a world where formats don’t matter anymore. As a kid in a candy shop, brainstorm, create, and watch your creative ideas amplify!

Over to you, Med(ia)man and women, YOU know how to reach the audience at the right time with the right messages. YOU have a complete view on the channel plan, control the data, and can see the impact between channels. YOU are fantastic, programmatic, and cost efficiency is your modus operandi. YOU can take a story, channel it at scale, and make sure it delivers the right impact with the right results.

Together, both sides can add value, entertain, educate, and inform audiences in exchange for their attention. They WILL opt-in, click-through (in some cases won’t stop clicking), and continue watching without skipping.  

*Click links for two examples of my favorite Cannes campaigns*

Great work like this can only happen when media and creative work together, join forces and share insights.

So, I suggest you go on a date and talk about content.

While it’s going to be exciting, it won’t always be a bed of roses. But it all starts here:

• What content do we create?
• How do we create it?
• How do we get this content in front of audiences?
• Once we get audiences, how do we keep them engaged with the content?
• And finally, how can we measure performance and ROI?

The technology, tools, and data are available for you to take your relationship and the brand-consumer relationship to the next level.

Love is in the air. Just look around and you will see that content is everywhere you should be.