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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
June 27, 2017 11:24 AM
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In marketing circles, we tend to rely on things like flow charts, diagrams, and pyramids. But according to Hausmann, that’s no way to tell a story. “You wouldn’t summarize a trip by saying, I’d like to show you a couple of the key message points and summarize those for you in a beautiful pyramid and diagram,” he says. To close the time and efficiency gap between the typical (and boring) marketing strategy language and creative execution, bringing a screenwriters’ toolkit into the process can make a world of difference, according to Hausmann. At #ThinkContent Summit 2017, he provided step-by-step instructions for “brand scripting,” which he defines as identifying a company’s core brand narrative and building the story structure that aligns all executional efforts. Take a look at Hausmann’s script for content marketing success, illustrated through the brand Beats by Dre....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
November 15, 2016 3:19 AM
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Every great marketing campaign relies on being able to communicate your story, whether that be the story of your brand or the products or services that sit at the center of your company. However, brand storytelling is becoming the foundation of many content marketing campaigns and for a good reason. A powerful, creative and insightful way of providing that coveted personal connection between company and customer, if incorporated correctly, storytelling offers a progressive strategy that has the potential to strengthen your brand, drive sales, enhance customer loyalty and in turn improve retention. At first glance the science of storytelling may appear to be fairly straightforward but as is the case with all marketing tactics, ensuring this natural love every human is hardwired to have a good story concisely communicates your brand message isn’t as easy as many marketing professionals make out. The power of storytelling, however, is right there for the taking, and by following these golden rules, you can transform your marketing plan or your client’s for the better....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
January 19, 2016 11:45 PM
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As digital video and streaming services continue to recast the viewing landscape, a handful of digital executives and Sundance Film Festival attendees pushed to have the burgeoning videosphere represented during one of filmmaking's highest-profile events—and Rick Parkhill, CEO of VMA Media, made it happen. After securing support from sponsors Twitter, Fullscreen, Maker, Zefr, Above Average, Hulu and Naritiv, he persuaded festival organizers that this was, in fact, a viable extension, and Digital Storytelling was born. The event kicks off Thursday, Jan. 21, on the eve of the film festival, with additional sponsors including CNN's Courageous content studio, Fox Network Group's True(x) and The Huffington Post signing on....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
February 10, 2015 3:46 PM
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“Storytelling.” It’s the flavor of the day, whether you’re talking about content marketing, visual communications or public relations, and for good reason. Stories are how humans communicate – with each other individually, across populations and over centuries.
In fact, many organizations are pretty good at identifying and defining their key story lines. The key to success in brand storytelling is in the next step – the strategic deployment of the story. Telling the brand story effectively requires a plan.
And to be clear, we’re not talking about hanging a touchy-feely post up on the blog and then calling it a day. No. Brand storytelling, in this context, means developing a sustained plan to create and execute a strategic approach to telling the brand story, in a way that supports company’s objectives. Personally, I don’t give a hoot about impressions. Let’s gun for something a bit more meaningful....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
November 13, 2014 10:40 AM
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Steven Althaus's moment of digital truth came this past spring. BMW's global director of brand management stood in front of top management, telling them the automaker was about to use a drift mob to help market their new car, the M325i.
Five professional drivers were set to go behind the wheel of the M325is and drift--or drive at high speeds, hit the brakes, and turn the steering wheel to spin the car abruptly--around a traffic circle in Cape Town, South Africa. Their aim was to simulate a flash mob; a staged but seemingly spontaneous performance.
BMW executives fired off questions to Althaus that veered toward disbelief. “I presented the idea of a drift mob and they said: 'Is this really going to work?' I had to say, ‘I don’t know. Nobody’s done it before,’” Althaus recalls....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
September 24, 2014 9:01 PM
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It says something about our media culture that in a short time the term “native advertising” has gone from industry buzzword to pop culture punch line. The two most memorable references come from HBO. On “Girls,” Lena Dunham’s Hannah takes—and soon leaves—a writing job in the sponsored content department at GQ. More recently on "Last Week Tonight," John Oliver delivers an entertaining riff about the profusion of “sponsored content” on news sites.
Oliver conceded that Netflix's native ad for the New York Times about female prison inmates, promoting the series "Orange Is the New Black," was “about as good as it gets.” This got us thinking about all the other noteworthy executions this year which demonstrate that sponsored content can indeed be good—nay, great—content. With that in mind, we asked some of the native advertising gurus here at HuffPost-AOL to name their picks for the most notable native or branded content campaigns of the year thus far, both from around the Web as well as in-house.
Here’s what we came up with, in alphabetical order by advertiser....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
October 30, 2013 1:39 AM
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Yesterday, the architect behind Coca-Cola's content strategy, Jonathan Mildenhall, took the keynote stage at Content Marketing World and brought both smiles and tears to all our eyes.
Why? Because he told an epic series of stories. And he told these stories, by sharing stories, in order to teach how to tell stories. (Whoa, meta, right?)
But when all was said and done, after Mildenhall delivered his keynote, the same questions we hear time and time again came up."How do I create that kind of content without Coca-Cola's budget?"...
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
September 12, 2013 11:57 AM
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Businesses are getting better at telling stories through content - either video or text -- and that helps with branding. View these examples to get started.
Brands. Stories. Profits.
Story telling is powerful. Stories help with branding, i.e., making an impression that stands out and sticks in our minds.And businesses are getting better at telling stories through content – whether through video or in text form.
Stories that follow a brand’s theme can be told over and over.Let’s look at some of the best stories in the business and unravel how some brands do storytelling in style...
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 30, 2013 6:30 PM
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Many brands jumped into the real-time marketing fray with the Royals’ latest addition to the family on Monday. This effort wasn’t as effective as what took place during the Super Bowl blackout for a reason I’ll get into in a minute.
Still, I don’t think the Mashable headline, “Brands, Try, Fail to Capitalize on Royal Baby Hype” quite captures the situation. After all, the Oreo Cookie tweet triggered more than 800 retweets and more than 300 favorites, not exactly chopped liver (no charge Nabisco for the cookie filling idea).
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
June 21, 2013 6:45 PM
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A brand story is made up of all that you are and all that you do. From the company’s history, mission, inspiration, goals, audience, and raison d’être, it’s why you exist. Your story is the people, places, and ideas that your company thrives on. It’s the foundation that keeps a brand going and growing. It’s a blend of those vital little core pieces of information about your business — how you came to be, why your products or services are special, what you’re passionate about, your company culture, how you make people’s lives better, and why you would do business with your company.
Brand stories can be told in many different forms, with an evolving story line and cast of characters, but content creators must be vigilant about continuity and consistency, avoiding any holes. Your brand’s story has to resonate with people at a level that goes way beyond what’s tangible — the functionality, features, and benefits of your products or services — to create a deep, emotional connection with your audience. You have to create something that they want to be a part of and show that you really “get” who they are and what they need.
Here are a few basic questions to answer to help you pull your story out of its box
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
April 13, 2013 7:46 PM
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Drinking From the Content Marketing Fire Hose As we launched the site, the iQ team started to work with a team of journalists and editorial partners, conducted editorial meetings and worked closely with the Intel social media team to amplify and extend iQ content. Before we knew it, we were beginning to operate a newsroom, managing a robust content machine and starting to see our goals for iQ come to fruition. By end of 2012, iQ was emerging as an essential asset to Intel’s marketing and social media strategy. Although satisfied with the early success of iQ, we knew there were many improvements to be made. In January 2013, iQ version 1 (the current site) was released. Several new changes and strategies were implemented from our learnings since the BETA launch. So what have I learned about content marketing in the last 11 months? I’ve distilled the 12 core lessons for brand publishers organized by the tenets of the iQ content marketing approach; production, process and promotion....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
April 1, 2013 3:12 AM
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Brand newsrooms are supposedly the next step in the ad agency’s evolutionary process. The rallying cry is for brands and their agencies to adopt a newsroom-style operation in response to modern media habits. But the reality is that your marketing team and ad agency are not in the business of creating news. This won’t work. Here are four reasons why. Brands are not in the content business. Neither are ad agencies, PR firms or digital shops. More importantly, they are not in the audience development business. That is what newsrooms are about — creating audiences that can be monetized. Everything about news organizations, from culture to employee compensation, is built around moving the audience needle. If you’re building a brand newsroom to enable real-time content production instead of enabling audience development across all your owned media properties, you’re looking through the wrong end of the telescope....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
March 23, 2013 5:17 PM
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Content and commerce have always had a symbiotic relationship that many traditional content providers tried to separate. The wall between editorial and business, otherwise known as the separation of church and state, is and always has contained back doors and windows in which compromises are made. The slow adoption of all that the digital revolution has to offer – curation, aggregation, social, and automation – has also hobbled many traditional content providers. Depressed revenues, layoffs and shrinking bully pulpits are the results of an industry that doesn’t quite know how to monetize content beyond selling advertising space. Today’s successful digital companies know to blend content and commerce so that the content is compelling and, frankly, still sells stuff....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
May 23, 2017 9:59 AM
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Quality storytelling and narrative matter more than ever, and must be first and foremost in your mind when approaching “branded” content. The quotes are intentional. It is an opportune time to drop the word “branded” from that phrase and from your vocabulary. Content is content. Good content is good content. If a story is moving, no one is going to care that it’s brought to you by a brand. Rather, they’re going to be happy the brand brought it to them. And by the same token, content that is annoying is now amplified rather than ignored (because no one can resist a good call-out) and can be more harmful to a brand than ever....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
May 24, 2016 10:37 AM
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The sound of a word like "knife" or "truck" seems totally arbitrary—it’s just a random sound we’ve assigned to a thing, right? But for several decades, scientists have found good evidence that the sound of words have meaning in a very real way. Sound can convey subtle information about traits such as size, shape, smoothness, and also, according to a new study in Cognition, distance. This suggests that while the sound of company and product names—Lyft, Smuckers, Nike—may seem meaningless, it may actually quietly shape consumers' perceptions. This is what’s called "sound symbolism"—the theory that there’s an intrinsic meaning we unknowingly attach to certain speech sounds. Sound symbolism is probably best illustrated by a well-known study from 1929 by the renowned linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir. In his experiment, Sapir had people assign two fake words—"mil" and "mal"—to either a larger or smaller table. And what he found was pretty astonishing: The majority of participants called the smaller table "mil" and the larger table "mal." Since Sapir made up the words "mil" and "mal," he concluded that people inferred word meaning from the sound. Over the decades, researchers have verified and added to what Sapir discovered in his study, that certain speech sounds have meaning, separate from the definition of a word itself. They’ve found links between word sounds and concepts for all sorts of characteristics, including size, shape, speed, weight, sharpness, and creaminess. "Sound symbolism says that people have this intuition, that there are right words for certain things," explains Sam Maglio, one of the authors of the new Cognition study and an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Toronto Scarborough....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
December 7, 2015 12:47 AM
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Marketing is no longer about the stuff you make, but about the stories you tell,” said entrepreneur and marketing guru Seth Godin. On his blog he explained what makes a story great, “A great story is true. Not necessarily because it’s factual, but because it’s consistent and authentic. Consumers are too good at sniffing out inconsistencies for a marketer to get away with a story that’s just slapped on.”
Storytelling has become a skill that business owners can no longer ignore because of its ability to transform how a brand is perceived by potential customers. A brand that is able to tell a great story is more trusted and favored than a brand that doesn’t.
Today, brands can’t afford to be boring and overbearing with the promotion of their products. It turns a lot of consumers off; especially Millennials because they have gained the ability to filter out content that doesn’t benefit or entertain them. Businesses needed to learn how to integrate storytelling into their marketing and communication efforts to make their brands seem more appealing....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
November 15, 2014 12:01 AM
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Content is the core of any strong digital marketing strategy, and a strong narrative is the foundation of all good content.
When the iconic high-fashion house Chanel sought to revolutionize the way it engaged with customers, content and technology was at the forefront of its approach.
The 105-year-old brand has a clear advantage when it comes to storytelling – a rich history. The legacy of the company’s late founder Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel is so compelling, that the brand’s insignia – two interlocking C’s – is one of the most recognized and respected in the world.
Not only has the company managed to ramp up engagement with the development of their highly interactive, commerce-driven website, it has astutely leveraged the modernist philosophy of its creator, Ms. Chanel, best exemplified in the following quote...
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
October 17, 2014 12:56 AM
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...But while brand storytelling may be dominating the trade conference stages, it’s not enough on its own for brands aiming to add meaningful value to their customers over the long term.
Strategies for Retention: Own Every Consumer Touch Point
Most content marketers know this particular statistic: 70 percent of consumers prefer getting to know a company via content over ads. To deliver this type of lasting, comprehensive value to their audiences, brands must build their content strategy around three core areas of focus: Foundational content Engagement content Social content...
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
January 4, 2014 9:54 AM
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Great content marketing and storytelling lesson from The Christmas Story and Ovaltine. Be Sure To Drink Your Ovaltine!Did you catch the content marketing lesson during The Christmas Story marathon on TBS this holiday? Since 1983, we’ve been drinking up the Ovaltine content marketing story on The Christmas Story. Ovaltine almost pulled off the perfect execution of using storytelling to generate awareness, engagement and generating a sale with Ralph!...
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
September 29, 2013 10:57 AM
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Lippincott, a brand strategy and design firm, and Hill Holliday, a full-service advertising and marketing agency, released “Welcome to the Human Era,” a report that examines the fundamental decline of consumer trust and the subsequent shift in how brands need to act to garner lasting connections with their customers. The report highlights key characteristics of Human Era brands and defines the behaviors of companies both big and small that are able to break through in this new environment. The full report can be accessed here.
The report asserts that brand-building today can no longer be led by messaging and advertising alone, but rather requires both “story” and “experience” to work together to drive brand favorability. Key characteristics among Human Era brand leaders are that they: have a deep cultural trait of customer empathy; talk and act like people; are open, real, and even flawed; aren’t boring; care intensely about the little things; and empower individuals to be the brand....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
August 1, 2013 9:21 AM
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In a consumer-driven economy, the good a company does is increasingly becoming its defining competitive advantage. While CSR, cause marketing and sustainability might have seemed like nice-to-dos just a few years ago, articulating your brand's core values is now critical in terms of the reputational, employee productivity, and bottom line impact to your company.
As Rich Fernandez, Director of Executive Development at Google, said recently at Sustainable Brands '13, If a company's product is not improving lives, it's diminishing them." In the face of rising consumer activism, Marketing 3.0 will be won by those who become purpose-driven social brands. To do so, the CMO, CSO, CSR, and Foundation leads must align to bring a cohesive brand story to life that clearly defines the company's "social license to operate....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 28, 2013 12:46 PM
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Why does interruptive marketing and selling make our blood boil? If you answered “Because it wastes our time,” you’d be wrong. While that is definitely true, it’s not what makes us angry, because wasting time isn’t something that intrinsically upsets us. I’ll be the first to admit that at times I get lost down black holes filled with listicles, cat-befriending-dog stories (read without a tissue at your own risk) and “what we should call me” GIFs, and the only redeeming quality of that content is that it makes me happy.
Telemarketers and the like drive us crazy because of one thing: their agenda.
There is no story. They just want our money, and that’s not something we are generally eager to part with in exchange for what we didn’t go looking for in the first place (we’ll happily part with it if we’re just “browsing” in the aisles of Target). Inherently, we don’t want to be “sold.” We feel we’re being tricked. That’s why we avoid the people with clipboards standing in the street and the kiosk people who stare us down in the mall....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
June 19, 2013 9:50 AM
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...Brands are answering the call to create more value for customers by publishing news and content marketing. In fact, 86% of BtoC and 91% of BtoB organizations are now using content marketing tactics. As companies adopt a publisher model of content and media creation, many are beginning to rival the reach and influence of the publications in their industry.
Amex OPEN Forum and General Mills’ Tablespoon are great examples of this. What do these changes mean for Public Relations and Communications professionals? How is PR competitively positioned compared to marketing and advertising in a content centric web? Read on for answers to these questions and more.
By providing news content that traditional sources are not, brands are creating new connections with their communities and customers. While much of content marketing falls under the realm of corporate marketing, the expertise in messaging, content creation and media relations that many Public Relations professionals bring to the table can offer a competitive advantage in 3 key areas...
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
April 11, 2013 9:40 AM
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I'm always fascinated by organizations that embrace brand journalism, hiring reporters to create content that serves as marketing and public relations. For almost a decade, I've recommended that companies of all kinds model their sites not on their peers' boring old brochure-like approach but rather aspire to becoming like a media site such as Forbes, the BBC, or The New York Times and that they actually hire reporters and editors, not marketers and copywriters, to produce the content. One look at the Raytheon homepage shows they do exactly that. There are real-time news, images, and a top stories section. And Raytheon is a B2B (and B2G) company! "You can see our homepage is very much a news operation," says Corinne J Kovalsky, Director, Digital & Social Media at Raytheon. "We've got feature stories and trend stories about cool products."...
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
March 25, 2013 1:40 AM
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Brands that successfully use content marketing say that 1% of their audience drives anywhere from 20% or 30% - but sometimes up to 70% - of all discovery and engagement with their content. That’s better than paid advertising. If you’re looking to boost your content marketing efforts and gain more leverage and brand recognition in your industry, top influences can help you get a competitive edge. Identify Brand Ambassadors Brands that successfully use content marketing say that 1% of their audience drives anywhere from 20% or 30% – but sometimes up to 70% – of all discovery and engagement with their content. That’s better than paid advertising. What’s more exciting is that sharing content through likes, tweets, pins and so on not only increases your brand’s reach within the social circle of a brand ambassador: it can also boost your search engine ranking and result in significantly increased traffic from organic searches too....
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Clay Hausmann, CMO of Aktana, on using screenwriting techniques to create more engaging, compelling content marketing.