Brands are still being opaque about their relationships with publishers which is losing them trust of customers, according to David Lerman, co-founder and CTO of Say Media.
Speaking on a recent panel during Advertising Week Europe, Lerman was joined by Gary Knight, commercial content director at ITV, Greg Witham, group publishing director at Hearst Entertainment, Stacy Martinet, CMO of Mashable, Michael Pennington, director specialist sales EMEA at Yahoo and David Pepper, SVP digital sales at Live Nation. The focus of the panel was to explore the intersection of branded content and distribution; and was moderated by Katie Lee, managing director at Gravity Road.
During the discussion, Lerman became the latest big name executive to voice his concern about the foggy relationship between advertiser and publisher.
Recently a number of executives commented on the accusation from Daily Telegraph journalist Peter Oborne that the newspaper’s advertisers were dictating the Daily Telegraph’s editorial content.
Lerman has now joined the fray and called for more transparency between publisher and advertiser.
While native advertising and sponsored content is now commonplace, Lerman is concerned that in some cases there is not clear signposting where the content is paid for.
He said: “I think often brands think they are better serviced by being a little bit opaque about their relationship with the content. They want the content to say good things about them but not sound like they paid for them things to be said.”
“The brand is much better saying ‘here is some great content, we paid for it’. This way they are being transparent about it,” said Lerman.
At the same time, ITV’s Knight called for the industry to bury the term “branded content” and replace it with “partnered content”. He highlighted that the fusion of customer, content and brand was key.
“It’s the ability to fuse these three components together that’s going to make it the most effective,” he said. “I want to take that term ‘branded content’ and bury it. Can we start talking about partner content?”
The conversation went on to explore the importance of respecting the consumer and being genuine with content before warning brands off the idea of becoming publishers in their own right.
Lerman said: “We often get asked by brands, ‘can we use your [Tempest] platform to publish our own content?’ We say, yes, sure, we could create it and make it look great but who do you think will be going to spend time there and how do you plan on getting them there? For content brands, building a destination where people want to spend time is incredibly hard. To think you can just throw some content up on a nice looking site and have people show up is naïve. You need a long term commitment to creating quality content and creating a destination that people are willing to spend time with.”
Yahoo’s Pennington added: “In 2015, resources are scarce; to set up a publishing division for your own corporation takes away from your own business objectives. It’s best, in my opinion, to work with partners who have spent time on storytelling and the diffusion of that content.”
A constant theme that emerged from the discussion was collaboration. According to Mashable’sMartinet, “there’s still a lot of collaboration to be had”. She went on to say: “Creating content is very hard; it’s an art (that’s where the creative comes in) and it’s also a science (understanding the when and where for distribution).”
“How do we add value and speak to people natively? It’s the partnership between the media companies/publishers and brands – because you need to have the people who intuitively understand the brand and the experts who understand the communities,” she added.
Moving the conversation forward, Knight was keen to point out that the opportunity for brands is how to connect across audiences. “Premium content is still really key but now we’re entering an age where premium content isn’t bound by just one platform,” he said. “[It requires] connected creative work around that content so that the brand can truly connect with consumers across every platform with one big creative idea.”
One final point from Say Media’s Lerman moved to the pricing of branded content and how brands and publishers should focus on quality not quantity. “Aren’t you much better off saying: Let’s create a couple of pieces of amazing content and then instead of charging per piece of content, charging for the distribution?” he asked. “How about charging to get 100,000 people to spend time with that content and suddenly everyone’s aligned on quality instead of quantity – and engagement.”
Originally posted What’s New In Publishing 8 April 2015