What are you most excited about in the digital marketing space at the moment?
The growing number of ways you can create an engaging and immersive experience for the user. In the rapidly changing world of digital, there’s so much scope to showcase relevant content in interesting and compelling ways, to engage current users, attract new users and encourage brand loyalty.
When producing the monthly Vue tablet magazine, we strive to come up with innovative ways to deliver rich content that embodies the brand’s personality. All feature stories are interactive, with touch controls for additional video content, related content pop-ups and buttons to book tickets or request film alerts – allowing our readers to control how they digest the app and enjoy it at their own pace.
It’s also exciting to learn more about an audience via social media – and those lessons are often immediate. So brands that listen to conversation on social media can be more nimble in giving customers more of what they want (and less of what they don’t!).
What’s your favourite example of innovative digital marketing?
I love NBC’s promotion of its Premier League football coverage in the US. It’s a simple web film that features Saturday Night Live regular Jason Sudeikis as an American football coach hired to manage Tottenham Hotspur. The YouTube clip sees Coach Lasso struggling to explain English football to Americans, with hilarious results. It simultaneously introduces the rules of football while also making fun of it – a clever way to appeal to football fans and non-football fans alike, and encourage people to tune in to NBC. The film has been viewed more than 8.5m times so far (with 3m views in its first week), and has been widely shared across the globe.
Where do you go for great content?
After checking out the headlines on theguardian.com, I have a quick look on NME.com, Indiewire and Digital Spy to catch up on all things music, film and entertainment. I say ‘a quick look’, but half an hour later I’ll be so immersed in the related content, I’ll have forgotten what it was I was originally interested in. Today I went on NME to find out more about Glastonbury tickets being sold out in record time and ended up reading Alex Turner’s 35 Greatest Lyrics So Far and The 28 Albums To Get Excited About This October. This is what makes great content for me – material that keeps you interested, makes you spend more time on a site/app and keeps you coming back for more. And I’m a sucker for ‘best of’ lists, which always make for a good read. They’re simple but very effective.
What’s next for digital content?
With the emergence of wearable tech, digital content should follow suit and be designed to be consumed anywhere, at any time, on any device. Users will also be generating a lot more content themselves. Arcade Fire, who headlined Glastonbury last year, recently asked fans to post their own photos of the Reflektor tour, the incentive being that their pictures could end up on the band’s Facebook page and website. In this way fans become more immersed in the Arcade Fire experience, while the band can use these images to generate new (and free) content online. It’s a two-way street, rewarding fans for their loyalty and potentially increasing album and ticket sales for the band.
What defines good content?
Entertaining, informative content, that’s of interest to the consumer. It should help and inspire so that they come away feeling that they’ve gained something. Just like a good film will provoke a conversation, so should good content, which should encourage people to talk about and share your content, thus raising brand awareness and positive sentiment.
What is the biggest myth about content marketing?
That it’s a new thing – content marketing has been around for years, but more brands are now seeing its value.
How are you amplifying and maximising your content?
As well as pushing content via social media, we have the print edition of Vue magazine as an additional marketing channel. Other brands operating in the digital space don’t have this advantage. The print magazine, with a circulation of 250,000, is perfectly placed within all Vue cinemas, and we can advertise the tablet edition within the print magazine – and vice versa.
What have you #discovered today?
Another fantastic musicless video by Mario Wienerroither, via a link on Huffington Post. Wienerroither’s well known for his musicless music videos (and now everyone’s doing it) and recently moved on to musicless film clips, including this from Singin’ In The Rain – cue lots of splashes, shoe squeaks and silly screams. It’s genius.
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If you would like to nominate yourself, or a colleague as a Rising Star please contact Outbrain@cubaneight.com with details.
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