Lately, everyone in advertising has become a “storyteller” specializing in “engaging content.”

This isn’t true, of course. But I understand why everyone’s making the claim: Digital is the hottest thing in advertising; social media is the hottest thing in digital; to make social media work, you need conversation-starting (and sustaining) content.

Content creation now is the biggest challenge of 21st century marketing. It’s time-consuming and complicated. Get it wrong and you can generate incredible brand damage. (Ask Fleet Laboratories’ Summer’s Eve “feminine wash,” Nestlé’s KitKat brand and many, many others.) But get it right and you generate legions of fans who promote your brand with more credibility, less cost and far greater effectiveness than you could ever muster with traditional ads. This is the enormous pot of gold at the end of the content rainbow. (Ask Ford Fiesta, a host of Story clients, including, most recently, WGN America, and others.)

With so many claiming storytelling expertise, how does a marketer figure out who’s competent to lead a brand to the correct end of that rainbow? How do you ensure that you head toward greater effectiveness and away from being (literally) a douche? Let me suggest an approach.

I’ve been mixed up in storytelling work—photography, music, the movies, newspapers, magazines, books and online—since I quit high school, which I confess was quite a while ago.

My Story colleagues and I predicted some 15 years ago that the world, driven by digital technology, was entering a post-advertising age. CMOs, we said, would quit searching for the perfect 30-second spot to interrupt well-loved TV programs; instead, adland would have to focus on making rich, original content — content good enough, smart enough, involving and valuable enough to attract and hold an audience on its own.

The predictions have come true. From academia, the Wharton School’s prestigious SEI Center for Advanced Management Studies has declared, through its Future of Advertising Project, “Classical advertising has gone the way of black-and-white television.” The new marketing gospel preaches that “every brand is a publisher” that must create its own media.

But this simple, true dogma has caught most marketers unprepared, struggling to figure out which stories to tell and how to get original content created.

Earlier this year, the Advertising Club of New York invited five top marketers from big brands to debate the future of advertising. I sat in the audience and heard Kimberly Kadlec, Worldwide Vice President of Johnson & Johnson’s Global Marketing Group, say, “Content is the biggest opportunity in front of us and probably the most complex.”

Kadlec was representing the prevailing sentiment. Many others have identified the problems associated with creating good content as among their biggest marketing challenges. Kadlec told the Ad Club that the quality of brand content is far more critical than the channel used to convey it. “Content—it isn’t going to be about where it is, but what it is,” she emphasized.

I’m pretty sure we all know what’s driving the great switch to original brand content: It’s partly traditional advertising’s continued slide down the slippery slope of ineffectiveness; partly the ascendancy of so-called social media, which demands and devours interesting content to spark conversations; partly the fact that brand storytelling is now old enough to have a track record which proves stories can drive purchase behavior quickly and profoundly.

Just as importantly, we’ve seen a renaissance of the cultural acknowledgement that stories are the best way to communicate an idea in a persuasive way. Here’s the literary glorification of storytelling that I encountered most recently. It is, of course, one among thousands of such passages permeating our literature. This one is from Middlesex, the Pulitzer-winning novel (2003) by Jeffrey Eugenides. The passage describes a Greek Orthodox seminarian’s response to another character’s cynical comments about Bible stories. (The added emphasis is mine.)

“That’s how people live…by telling stories. What’s the first thing a kid says when he learns how to talk? ‘Tell me a story.’ That’s how we understand who we are, where we come from. Stories are everything. And what story does the Church have to tell? That’s easy. It’s the greatest story ever told.”

With experts from Eugenides to old-fashioned management guru Tom Peters now saying stories are everything, what’s a beleaguered CMO to do with that information?

Can we start with the history? Please? Like any discipline worth mastering, storytelling has a history that needs to be understood and a set of skills that can only be acquired through long experience and maintained through constant practice.

Treating an old and tested idea as if it were new and revolutionary is never very helpful. In the case of brand content, it’s really important for CMOs and their teams to understand that content marketing is actually a very old idea that is being driven to ascendancy by the rise of digital media.

Mitch Joel, a thoughtful marketer whose blog we read regularly, recently posted “Will a Brands Next Big Move Be A Journalism Department?” It seems an interesting question, unless you happen to know about all the brands over the past century that created journalism departments to reach, involve and influence their audiences. I have to assume that Joel’s post would have been more valuable had he known something of modern brand journalism’s rich 111-year history. Brand journalism dates from the exquisitely factual and deeply reported travel stories first published in 1900 by a little French auto tire outfit called Michelin. The Michelin Guides, of course, still flourish.

Since 1900, brand journalism has recorded numerous milestones. Two of my old favorites include fashion brand Benetton’s launch in 1952 of Colors magazine, an experiment in crusading international journalism—pro-integration; anti-discrimination—that captured the imagination of the brand’s young audience. Another great milestone is the first publication in 1986 of a Dutch technology firm’s brand magazine, Language Technology (later, Electric Word). The content proved a lot more exciting than the original title and the magazine eventually morphed into Wired. (I first reported this story at length in my business book, Thinking Inside the Box, published by Simon & Schuster’s Free Press in 2003.)

I tell these tales only to suggest that random thoughts about storytelling—a discipline as old as humankind—are likely not worth much. With all this in mind, let me quickly sketch the things a CMO ought to look for to make sure the agency that’s claiming storytelling expertise actually is content-focused:

1. The agency has got to know content marketing is not a new idea.

The first step toward being a storyteller—including a brand storyteller—is to know what’s been done in the past so you can imitate the best, avoid repeating the worst and constantly move the craft forward. Knowledge of the history and heritage of content, in other words, is the first critical component needed to answer the central pragmatic question confronting marketers: How do we DO this?

2. The agency must have people who know how to hold an audience— journalists, animators, writers, filmmakers, artists and others with real experience as storytellers.

Recognizing and crafting a good, authentic and persuasive story is both an inborn talent and a learned skill. Make sure your agency puts people in front of you who have deep experience at a very high level with all kinds of stories. A great content-focused agency will have award-winning journalists, screenwriters, playwrights, comedy writers, filmmakers, novelists and so on. These are people who have spent their professional lives working to engage audiences. Since the point of marketing content is to attract and hold an audience, these are the people you want in the room as your brand stories are crafted.

3. The agency has to understand that there are three ways to tell a brand story and two of them are wrong.

I’ve written this before, but it bears repeating. Most traditional ad agencies and digital agencies try to tell stories about a brand, which is just traditional advertising with a longer runtime and a new label. Or they present stories unrelated to the brand and tell the audience it’s “brought to you by” Brand X. This approach, which rarely works anymore, should be familiar from TV’s earliest days. The right way is to tell compelling stories that embody the brand, its attitudes and its promises. Brands must literally turn themselves into stories–creating original media that their customers actively choose to engage with, explore and then share with others.

4. There must be a repeatable, proven, understandable, results-oriented process for locating a brand’s core narrative and turning it into executions. Hunches won’t cut it.

A consistent narrative is really the only way to create effective multi-channel integration. So branding has to begin by locating the core narrative of a brand. That means your agency must have a proven process for finding a brand’s core narrative, for explaining the narrative and its creative implications to the brand team (including other agencies) and for setting brand strategy to achieve your marketing goals. Make sure your agency has such a process and that you aren’t the guinea pig for it.

5. Your agency must understand audiences and the stories of their lives.

Your content-focused agency is not there is broadcast the “messages” your brand “needs” to broadcast. Nor do they exist to agree with you about how important your brand’s attributes are. Your agency is there is understand what drives your audience, what role your brand can best play in their lives and how to narrate that relationship between brand and audience in convincing and entertaining ways that affect purchase behavior. Your agency needs to understand that the best brand story is the one the audience wants to be a part of.

There are lots of other considerations, of course, in choosing an agency. Do you like the people? Can you work collaboratively with them? Do they understand your industry, your brand? Are they smart? And so on. But the five must-haves listed here can eliminate most pretenders and allow you to choose among tested, competent contenders.

At Story Worldwide, we’ve managed Facebook accounts for some of the world’s biggest brands, and we’ve figured out a few things along the way.

We’re proud to announce that a summary of our strategic learnings is available in our very own “Best Practices for Facebook Audience Management.” It’s a living, breathing collection of wisdom on the world’s most popular online social network. Check it out after the jump…

We’ve designed this document to help brands build real and thriving online communities of interested, excited brand loyalists and advocates. With instructions on how to publish content that people really want and how to manage audience interaction in real time, it will take much of the guess work out of implementing a social media plan.  Download the free eBook today!

The post-advertising age is complex. Consumers controlling brands, optimizing search, utilizing paid, earned, and owned media…all aspects can seem pretty confusing. So what’s a poor brand to do? Never fear: Help is on the way!

Our storytellers created The Future of Advertising, a step-by-step video walking you through marketing in the modern era, starting with discovering a brand’s core story (what we call the Story Platform) and creating different narratives based on it. Then, brands must identify their audiences and publish these narratives in relevant spaces, using paid and free media to spread the news. Then, watch its effect and reach increase…while media spend goes down. As the cycle continues, the audience adds their own content, links, comments, and more, all contributing to a brand story that keeps growing and spreading.

Just see how it works below:

Living in the post-advertising age isn’t that difficult if you can find your brand’s story and tell it across the relative channels. With proper audience participation, it can develop into something even greater than itself.

The most exciting part? The future is now…

Kirk Cheyfitz – CEO
The current mechanistic obsession with media channels and “consumer channel preference” will go away, mercifully, and the ad world will come to understand that content (story) is what determines the audience’s channel choices, not some abstract preference for a one channel over another.

In other words, when it comes to messages, what it’s about is always more important than what channel it’s on. This has been verified by both research and common sense. Think: If there’s a great argument going on in the next room, you will press your ear to the wall and strain to pick out interesting words, ignoring the 52” LCD screen and 5-way speakers in front of you.

That’s a channel choice dictated by content. It’s how we all make our choices. Plus, there’s the fact that any content worth our attention will find its way onto multiple channels and will become social as we share it with others. So the focus on channel preference, so popular today, will be discarded as not useful.

Simon Kelly – COO
Some brands will realize owning is better then renting and start to create their own media channels. Better to be the content than adjacent to it.

Some brands will realize that the future of advertising is to outsource marketing to the audience & that they will gain a wider reach, with a deeper engagement for less spend.

Some brands will realize they can save the media business and start to rekindle expired, dormant or critically endangered titles by owning them (What am I to bid for Gourmet?)

Some brands will understand that they are nothing more than a story and brands that tell their story will win.

Most brands will do none of the above, not just yet anyway. Ask me again in 2012. Ho hum.

Disclosure: Story Worldwide is a charter sponsor of the Content Marketing Institute

Our Conferences Are Great, but Separate but Equal Isn’t Exactly Progress
by Chiqui Cartegena

I have attended every ANA Multicultural Marketing Conference since it started 11 years ago, and the one held this November in Miami Beach was by far the best. In his opening remarks, Gilbert Davila framed the conversation succinctly: “Yesterday’s minorities have evolved into today’s general market, blurring the lines between where one group ends and the other begins. The census will give us the impetus, energy and ammunition we need to no longer have to haggle over dollars allocated to multicultural marketing efforts. Plain and simple, those who do not follow the growth will stay behind.”

As a matter of fact, that was the message from the various C-level executives from Procter & Gamble, Fidelity, Time Inc., Coca-Cola and General Mills. Check out this clip from Mark Addicks, CMO of General Mills.

Also in attendance were many more senior-level executives from State Farm, McDonald’s, Unilever, the USTA and Best Buy, sharing case studies and best practices on how they put their plans to reach multicultural consumers to work for them. For the first time since 2005, I thought we’d reached that “tipping point” where Corporate America is finally getting it.

And yet, I left the conference knowing that those two days were just the same old, same old. I felt like those great messages were somewhat lost because we are still preaching to the converted.

The real problem with elevating the conversation around multicultural marketing and consumers is that we still have no place at the table with the people who really control the bulk of advertising and marketing budgets in this country. Those guys/gals may go to other ANA conferences (like the Masters of Marketing Conference), but they never have and never will come to this conference. And that is the problem. We are still viewed as a ghetto.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love the ANA and totally respect Bob Liodice and all the great people who work on this conference. (In fact, you could substitute ANA for any other number of trade organizations and the same would still be true). So I’m not picking on the ANA. I am just using it as an example. They surely “get it,” and most people would agree that they have certainly been instrumental in helping move a multicultural agenda in corporate America. But I think the only way we are going to see real progress is by taking the messages shared at this conference and spreading them to all the other important conferences at the ANA — and the DMA, the AMA, IMC, Ad:Tech, the 4A’s … I think you get my drift.

So I looked at the schedule of conferences the ANA (just to pick one) is preparing for 2011 and knowing what the Census will reveal and what others are saying about multicultural consumers (Check out this Ad Age White Paper: What the 2010 Census means to Marketing and Advertising), I find it hard to believe that none of the scheduled sessions in the upcoming (Dec. 10) Conference on Mobile Engagement addresses the importance of Hispanic, Asian and African-American consumers. Clearly that must have been an oversight, because numerous reports released this year have focused on how these consumers over-index on use the mobile. Maybe that agenda was set a long time ago, so let’s focus on next year.

Surely, multicultural consumers should be part of the TV & Everything Video Forum Presented by Google on Thursday, Feb. 10, 2011. After all, they will be talking about TV, video, gaming, social media, etc. — areas that are clearly dominated by multicultural consumers. But a quick look at the agenda shows me that they are not part of the conversation (although not all panels are set yet). What about the Digital and Social Media Conference planned for July 14, 2011, or dare I mention it, the Masters of Marketing Annual Conference to be held in Phoenix next Oct. 20, 2011?

By then the Census figures will have been out for months and surely the focus of many news stories, but will the ANA step up to the plate and actually have one or more panels specifically deal with perhaps the most important demographic shift this country is experiencing and how it affects what we do in Corporate America? Listen to this clip from Best Buy.

I mean really, how can you be a Master of Marketing and not know much about how to address the growing diversity of this country? To its credit, this year as ANA celebrated its 100th anniversary, it did have one panel about “How to Grow Your Business With Multicultural Consumers” that featured the work of Kraft and Univision, which was truly great. But one session isn’t enough. Hopefully, it’s just the beginning.

How about moving the Multicultural Conference to Phoenix and adding it to the Masters of Marketing Conference? I mean, the important people will already be in Phoenix and there will be plenty of time left for golf and other fun activities.

Seriously, if we could simply have some more of the high-caliber conversations we had in Miami Beach this year move to the golf course at the Biltmore Hotel next year, we will have accomplished a lot more in Corporate America than 10 more years of separate-but-not-equal multicultural conferences.

Much has been said about how Barack Obama harnessed the power of the social web in his ultimately successful bid for the White House. His campaign was heavily influenced by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s book ‘Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness’ and, as a result, ‘nudge’ has become the hottest term in brand communications.

The core subject of ‘nudge’ is ‘choice architecture’ — the art of indirectly influencing decision-making. As pharmaceutical brands are unable to market directly to the consumer, indirect routes that gently nudge an audience towards an ultimate goal is an attractive proposition. Not only that but it is the only technique that works on the social web, regardless of industry.

Recognizing the potential
Most pharmaceutical brands recognize the huge potential of the social web to transform their business and brand. Some are even dipping their toes in the water with some success. J&J’s YouTube channel, Pfizer’s ‘Get Real, Get a Prescription’ campaign, the virtual world Second Health, the ADHD awareness campaign ‘Living with ADHD’, the animated films created by Levitra, Boehringer Ingelheim’s use of Twitter and MTV’s promotion of sexual health using FourSquare all spring to mind. Many lessons have been learned from these pioneering initiatives and pharmaceutical brands are now in a position to use that knowledge to develop an effective strategy for harnessing the social web. However, I still often get asked the question ‘Why should I use social media?’ and there are three compelling reasons I usually roll off:

1. Audience: The end-consumer is using social media on a daily basis and he is taking an increasing interest in the treatments he’s being prescribed. According to a study by InSites Consulting, 82 per cent of people online in the UK have used the internet to look for information on healthcare topics.

2. Credibility and influence: The two biggest influences on purchase decisions are ‘real friends and virtual strangers.’ As Nielsen reported, ‘Recommendations from personal acquaintances or opinions posted by consumers online are the most trusted forms of advertising.’ In other words, a brand’s fans spreading the brand’s messages is far more effective than the brand talking about itself.

3. Reduced media spend: If consumers are broadcasting a brand’s messages for free, the brand is saving money that could have been spent on paid media.

Networks, channels and tools
Given that social media is something the pharma industry can no longer ignore, the first step to effective engagement is to demystify the space. Broadly speaking, the social web can be split into three main categories: social networks, social channels and social tools. Understanding how audiences can be nudged across these spaces is the key to success.

Everyone knows social networks are the online environments that allow people to connect and communicate with each other: obvious examples are the Goliaths of Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn. I would also add the microblogging platform Twitter, the geolocation service FourSquare, niche communities like doctors.net.uk and PatientsLikeMe and any other platform whose main purpose is facilitating peer-to-peer communication.

Social channels are hubs where content can be consumed, interacted with and shared. The best known social channels include YouTube, Flickr, SlideShare, iTunes and other specialized content hubs. These social channels exist to make it easy for people to comment on and share different kinds of content across wide networks. The content, of course, can be almost anything: video, animation, photo, graphic, presentation,podcast, editorial, map, game, app or tool. The purpose of this content is simply to inform, entertain or be useful in some way.
Social tools enable an interaction with content by encouraging such things as sharing, bookmarking, downloading, rating, signing-up, commenting and so on. Among others, examples include social bookmarking tools like Digg or StumbleUpon; RSS feeds; sharing functionality, such as AddThis; rating systems that tally participants’ votes, such as Facebook’s popular ‘like’ button; high-score tables; challenge-a-friend mechanisms, and easy ways to embed content. The great thing about these tools is the minimal effort that is required to use them.

Harnessing the power
The first step to harnessing the power of the social web is to understand the relationship between these three categories. The aim of a social media strategy is to create a piece of valuable content that is shared across social networks and social channels using social tools. This is achieved by creating multiple ‘sign-posts’ across the social web that point people towards pieces of branded content. Once people have engaged with this content, we the brand marketers learn about their likes and dislikes and they can then be nudged towards increasingly relevant content and ultimately to a branded website, a disease awareness site or indeed a pharmacy, depending on the ultimate objective.

The initiative starts with a central piece of media or branded content, for example an online film, an editorial article, a tool or a game. This piece of content sits on the social web and is, of course, interesting in its own right, genuinely adding value to people’s lives by being entertaining or useful. The campaign then revolves around this piece of branded content.

By giving away content on the social web without an expectation of an immediate return, pharma brands can encourage brand advocacy and increase customer value. This content needs to communicate brand values and tell the brand story in an intelligent way. It needs to be informative or educational and it needs to be placed at the appropriate stage of the brand-consumer relationship. However, this is still not enough. On the social web, not only do you have to be interesting to your audience, you also need to be interested in your audience. This requires new skill sets, new ways of communicating and a willingness to collaborate and co-create. A piece of branded content therefore doesn’t only need to be interesting in its own right, but it also needs to stimulate a positive response and evolve with consumer interaction.

A 2009 Forrester Research report suggests that 24 per cent of people online create content; this means the vast majority do not. Given this rock-solid statistic, the initial response that a brand seeks from its audience should not be in the form of user-generated content, except in unusual circumstances. Expecting the average user to upload a home movie or even a picture of himself or herself is a big ask, after all. Nudge marketing is all about gentle suggestions that require little effort on the audience’s behalf. It can be something as simple as selecting one option over another, sharing the content, joining the Facebook group or signing up for a newsletter. Once the user has interacted in even this superficial way, we can direct him towards even more relevant content that sits on the website or within a branded community and deepen the relationship while bringing the audience closer to the product.

It doesn’t matter how great your content is if nobody sees it. Fortunately, there is much that can be done to generate an audience and jump-start a campaign. In its simplest form, this is a link generation exercise, each link being a signpost that points towards a piece of content. These links can be categorised into three areas: Links you own, Links you buy and Links you earn.

‘Links you own’ is, in principle, the simplest part of the process to initiate. However, within large pharma corporations the task often involves complicated logistics and co-ordination. Multiple online properties will need to be channelled towards a piece of content. This often involves mobilising multiple stakeholders, including your company’s website, Twitter account, Facebook group, blog, eDetails and so on. Links you own form the basis of a campaign, but are not enough to form a critical mass.

The number of signposts can be dramatically increased through the addition of links you buy, which include paid search, rented lists, seeding initiatives, traditional advertising and media planning and buying. These techniques allow you to distribute links across a far wider network to a much greater audience.

However, a brand can’t just tell people that its products are great, or even that its content is great. Instead it has to encourage its customers to do this, with advocacy through social tools, which leads us to links you earn. Where brand communication on the social web differs most dramatically from traditional brand communications is that a piece of social media not only has to grab the audience’s attention but also needs to stimulate sharing with friends and connections to start a positive conversation about the brand across social networks.

Nudge marketing integrates content across channels with increasingly experiential engagement at each touch-point. The narrative begins with introductory content that helps people ‘learn’ about the brand, before moving on to immersive content and tools that help people ‘live’ and eventually ‘share’ the brand. The strategy here is less about a quick sale and more about deepening engagement, loyalty and advocacy and as such has deep resonance with the pharma industry. Moreover, it is about an intelligent system that analyses what content individuals are responding to and uses this to inform the content strategy for those individuals’ peers.

Redefine success
Nudging a potential customer directly from awareness to consideration to purchase in a single journey is a big ask. It is more likely that the consumer will be directed to increasingly relevant content as part of a mutual learning process, in which brand and audience learn more about one another. Eventually a level of trust will be established and the consumer will have an innate predisposition to the brand.

Brands that are succeeding on the web recognise this and, as a result, have redefined what success looks like. It is no longer about converting 1 per cent of all people who come into contact with a campaign; instead, it’s about making sure that 99 per cent have a positive brand experience. By generously creating branded content that consumers actually want to engage with, and by making this content two-way and individual, transactions are turned into relationships.

Brand building on the social web is not about conversion; it’s about encouraging and rewarding positive consumer behaviour. In doing so, brands increase the probability of the behaviour reoccurring and nudge the consumer one step closer to the brand, increasing loyalty and encouraging advocacy along the way. Brands achieve this by turning themselves into stories — creating original media that their customers actually choose to engage with, explore and then recommend to others.

The Author
Jim Boulton is deputy managing director at Story Worldwide.

This article originally appeared in Pharmaceutical Marketing Magazine. It has been reposted here with permission.

There is angst in ad land over the complexity of media. (There’s also endless angst in legacy media companies, but that story’s been told and re-told .) Ad planners wring their hands, bemoaning the proliferation of media channels and the unpredictable ways in which “consumers” (as they refer to people) jump from TV to Facebook to text messages to Google to foursquare to iPods…and so on.

What’s a brand to do?

Out of the chaos in the media world and the complexity of infinite digital channels, a new way of looking at media is emerging that is simple, useful and strategic. The latest buzz in advertising puts all media in just three categories: paid, owned and earned. But advertisers and everyone else struggle to make sense of that. So this is a combination how-to and how-come piece about those three categories of media and how they can vastly improve the way advertisers small and large approach advertising.

For everyone who’s addicted to short, numbered lists, here’s the 3-step answer:

1. Paid jumpstarts owned.
2. Owned sustains earned.
3. Earned drives cost down and effectiveness up.

(If, by any chance, you are a real person, not a media person, definitions of paid, owned and earned media are lower down in this post. For shorthand purposes, paid is stuff you pay for like TV spots; owned is stuff you create and own; earned is nice free stuff people say you about on Twitter–and anywhere else.)

There are a plethora of benefits to approaching media this way; the most important are these two:

1. No matter what new media channels the geniuses invent tomorrow, this logical set of strategic categories doesn’t change; and

2. The end result of using media this way is the creation of a permanent marketplace advantage for a business: Total cost of marketing ultimately goes way down because expensive media buys are less necessary. Credibility goes way up because ordinary people are talking up the brand to their friends and online connections, which has far greater impact on purchase behavior than anything a brand could ever do or say on its own.

Any brand that doesn’t put this set of media strategies to work will end up with a higher cost basis and lower credibility than its competitors. Not a good thing.

What you’ve read so far may be all you need to create a new mental framework that goes beyond old thinking about media channels and ad planning. But read on if you want some background and a few prescriptive words about a new, more useful approach to advertising and the nature of media in a digital, social era.

First, some necessary background.

Roughly eight years ago, it became clear that traditional media (newspapers, magazines, TV, music and so on) and traditional marketing (TV spots, print ads, radio spots and so on) were on a collision course. New technology was passing control over media from the media companies to the audience. The day was approaching when no one could force people to watch ads. So the ads had to go away or become something else.

It became accepted dogma that advertising needed to add value to people’s lives or it would be ignored. It had to be useful and valuable, entertaining or informative or both. It had to be (drum roll)…great media. Everyone supposedly began to understand, in other words, that brands have to be media companies, but almost no one knew how to do that or what it really might mean.

Also only dimly understood until just a few years ago was how much legacy media companies would suffer as advertisers began to become media companies. But as old-fashioned advertising began to be less effective and as people gained the power to by-pass and avoid most ads, everybody in the media/advertising ecosystem began see they were in the same leaky boat: Not just advertisers, but publishers, broadcasters and agencies, too. Everybody.

The collision between marketing and media finally occurred in the mid-2000s. The exact date doesn’t matter. Ever since, everybody has been wandering through the wreckage, dazed, trying to figure out what happened and, more terrifying, what will happen next.

A recent dinner party at New York’s 21 gathered two-and-a-half dozen smart media people to talk about what might happen next. The Jordan Edmiston Group, media investment bankers, invited the leaders of established and emerging companies in publishing and marketing to sit down together. Mediating and setting the agenda was Rishad Tobaccolwala, a man with a large reputation and title, Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer at VivaKi, the media arm of Publicis, the French advertising holding company.

“The future does not fit in the containers of the past,” Tobaccowala began. It was, of course, an incantation echoing the parable from the Gospel of Luke: “And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the new wine will burst the skins, the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined.”

One way to apply that biblical metaphor, of course, is to conclude that the new forms of advertising–the post-advertising forms–will not fit into the old categories of media. That might have been on Tobaccowala’s mind when he identified the central question for the dinner discussion–a question he believes will be at the center of media’s future for quite a while: What roles are to be played by the three kinds of media that now exist: paid, owned and earned?

Again, this was not new for Tobaccowala or, he acknowledged, the rest of us at dinner that night. But it was, I think, a very smart way to focus the evening because it is precisely the question that advertisers are asking (or ought to be asking). Everyone is talking about media in a new way, but few know what’s to be done about it.

What’s needed, of course, is a new mental framework about media.

In the old days, just a few short years ago, all media was conveniently and simplistically divided by channel or device–broadcast was radio or TV, print was magazines and newspapers, out of home was billboards and events. And we confidently measured things like “impressions” and “reach” and “frequency”–measurements that have no meaning today.

As a matter of habit, the advertising business is still trying to think this way; ad folks just keep adding new media categories–”digital” and “social” and “mobile” and so on–and new metrics that sound disturbingly like the old ones (clicks, hits, etc.).

Ad agencies are still organized to a great extent around this ancient view of media, dividing their people by channel as if that made any sense: Over here are our TV people and there’s our print unit and, oh yes, here’s our digital agency and way over there in the corner are the social media experts…and so on. Advertising clients, too, tend to organize in this outmoded fashion, sporting titles like “Head of Social Media” and “Head of Digital.”

Problematically, this kind of division doesn’t work anymore when all kinds of content routinely runs on multiple channels and most content with any value becomes social. Print (text) exists on mobile and stationary screens as well as on paper of all sorts and walls and bus exteriors and so on; film is on theater screens, DVDs, TVs, PCs, tablets, smartphones; conversations are on telephones, email, mobile text, Facebook, Twitter and a thousand apps. And so on.

As a result, on a practical level, it just doesn’t help today to draw up advertising plans that begin by dividing a brand’s budget mainly by media channel. “How much cash should we plow into TV?” is no longer a meaningful initial question.

What makes sense now is to understand how to achieve the right mix of paid, owned and earned media. But to do that, of course, advertisers first need to know which jobs should be done by paid media, owned media and earned media. They need to know if these are different or identical jobs. They need to know how to allocate money and effort among the three to get the best results.

Brands also are asking how to migrate from traditional advertising to non-traditional. But that goes back to understanding the roles of paid, owned and earned, all of which come in traditional and non-traditional boxes. (Consider: A 30-second spot on “The Closer” is paid, but “Iconoclasts” is owned media–a TV show owned by brand. And when a fan who knows video creates a new, unauthorized episode of a branded series and puts it on YouTube, that’s earned TV.)

It was in vogue for a while to declare that traditional advertising was dead. (I used to say it myself to get attention.) But it’s a silly thing to say. What’s not silly is to understand that TV spots are just one tactic (and a pretty expensive one with decreasing results) among a wide range of paid media–a range that now runs from network prime time spots to paid search to promoted tweets, for example.

So the time now has arrived to define paid, owned and earned and consider how best to use each. I’m going to offer my definitions and a few examples as my final act in this story. (For some statistics on the buzz around these terms and a look at the history, read my colleague Ryan Saghir’s recent post.)

FIRST, PAID MEDIA: It’s any form of media where brands pay the media owner to insert the brand’s message. Central to this exchange is the idea that the media owner has gathered an audience that the brand wants to address. That’s why the brand is willing to pay.

Examples of paid, as I’ve said, include TV spots, print ads, billboards, paid search, online banners, promoted tweets and so on.

The truth about paid media: Paid media works, but only so long as the money spigot is turned on and gushing. Stop spending and paid media stops working with little or no residual benefit. Put another way, the meter is always running and no matter how far you ride, you never own the taxi.

NEXT, OWNED MEDIA: Owned media is real, engaging media that is created and owned by a brand. That sounds simple enough, but it requires great skill to execute. Brands now create and own all kinds of media. Films, TV shows, webisodes, magazines, books, blogs, Facebook pages, tweets and so on. Owned media is what everyone is talking about when they say, “Brands must be media companies.”

Examples of owned are everywhere now. Brands like Levi’s jeans and Palladium boots are creating new forms of journalism on film. The Converse shoes folks are producing new bands in the brand’s Brooklyn recording studio like some new-age record label. Lexus (disclosure: Story Worldwide client) publishes one of the world’s leading luxury lifestyle and travel magazines, in print and electronic versions, featuring world-class writers like Jane Smiley (A Thousand Acres). And so on. Owned media traces its history back to 1900, when tire maker Michelin launched a travel guide for drivers.

The truth about owned media: It is relatively expensive to create great content, but when the spending is over the media can keep working indefinitely. In the case of owned media, the brand’s spending is really investing; the brand is creating a valuable asset with a more or less unlimited useful life. There are two main challenges. One is finding the right people to create great content that actually embodies a brand, achieves the brand’s business goals and truly engages its intended audience. Traditional ad agencies have proven to be unskilled at this. The second is gathering the audience to consume the brand’s media. Audience generation usually requires paid media to get it started, especially if anyone’s in a hurry to get noticed, which everyone usually is.

FINALLY, EARNED MEDIA: Earned media is positive brand messaging that’s produced and spread by unpaid (at least not paid by the advertiser) influencers. This group includes bloggers and tweeters, journalists and media reporters, Facebook updaters. Anyone large or small, amateur or professional, who finds your brand content worth sharing with others is creating earned media. Earned media is routinely focused on spreading content that an advertiser created (see “Owned Media” above). (This, of course, makes owned media the center of all attention because it is or should be the object of paid media and the subject of earned media.) The purest variety of earned media, of course, involves content that is both created and spread by brand advocates on their own.

Pure examples of earned media are not rare, but they are rarely measured or documented except in the most vague way by “social media listening tools” which claim, with huge margins of error, to measure sentiment and volume of online chatter.There are myriad, well documented examples of brands creating media that is then seen, commented on, shared and spread by fans. This is owned media sustaining earned media. The brand blog post that gets attention and draws comments. The YouTube video that gets a million or 100 million views largely because people are telling their friends to watch it. (The “telling” can take place in-person, through emailing the link, through Twitter, Facebook or almost anywhere outside of YouTube.) And so on and so on.

Ford has been pretty good about generating positive buzz for new cars by loaning them to influential bloggers and other social media mavens, as in the Ford Fiesta Movement. Johnson & Johnson’s pharma division, Janssen (disclosure: Story Worldwide client), won a prestigious European digital award for making a film about ADHD that appeared only on YouTube and was watched 120,000+ times in some three months. And so on.

The truth about earned media: Earned media, when it happens, is the best form of advertising on Earth. Not only does it spread brand messages at no additional cost, it also carries more credibility and has greater impact on purchase decisions (according to global survey evidence from Nielsen) than anything the brand can ever say about itself. But it is impossible to control (a popular corporate word) and very hard to generate completely free marketing from a brand’s fans. Generally, you need a paid campaign to get it going and owned media to keep it going.

All of which brings us back to the beginning of this story and the roles of paid, owned and earned in the new age of advertising, which my friends and I call the post-advertising age.

Paid media, more and more, is all about generating an audience for owned media. Paid’s greatest virtue is that it gets attention and it’s fast. But it works best if it’s getting attention for something specific–if it’s pointing people to a piece of content that can deepen their knowledge, understanding and emotional connection to the advertiser’s brand. So the first new rule of paid–whether it’s a network TV spot or banner ad or search–is that it should point to a really good, genuinely engaging, audience-pleasing piece of content.

Owned media is about telling the brand’s story in great depth and infinite variety. This is the kind of media that connects the advertiser’s brand to the audience’s lives. Like all great media, it’s got to be deeply engaging, informative, entertaining. But that’s just table stakes in the owned media game, because the content also must embody the brand and accomplish the brand’s business goals. Fueled by a smart paid campaign to generate audience, owned media needs to be search optimized so it’s easily findable and it must be spread across digital and traditional channels where its audience spends time. When all this is done properly, there is nothing more powerful than owned media, which has the unique ability to gather and grow communities of brand fans.

It used to be that owned media was pretty much restricted to a brand’s web site. In today’s world of distributed digital content, owned media needs to be strategically spread all over hell and gone on the digital and traditional channels where its intended audience is most like to encounter it.

Advertisers looking for earned media have only one choice: a really well executed owned media strategy. Owned media, deployed so it is easily shared and commented on, is the sole reliable sustainer of earned media. Every marketer, of course, has the option of praying or waiting for lightning to strike. But only by sending off a piece of attractive owned media can advertisers set off a predictable round of conversation and pass-along that has the potential to spread brand stories and messages almost endlessly through the ranks of their audience.

Paid, owned and earned–the present and future structure of media–only work together in integrated, content-focused programs. They are not generated by siloed marketing organizations. They are not the province of the old general agency or the new digital agency or, sad to contemplate, some even more isolated and truncated little silo like the social media agency. Thinking about such programs and executing them requires, in many cases, re-organizing the advertiser’s marketing function and the agency’s structure.

The bad news is that the punishment for not pursuing true integration is to be left behind. The good news is that the rewards are worth the pain.

By Jim Boulton, Deputy UK Managing Director

By Keith Blanchard, North American Executive Director

By Kirk Cheyfitz, CEO

There’s been much crowing by traditional publishers about how the iPad will save books and magazines. But the content we’ve seen so far won’t save anything because it fails to re-imagine books and magazines for iPad-like devices.

The rare exceptions prove the rule. Marvel Entertainment has re-invented and reinvigorated the comic book for iPad. (It may not be coincidental, of course, that Disney own’s Marvel and Steve Jobs is Disney’s biggest individual shareholderthanks to the Pixar deal. But this doesn’t makes Marvel-for-iPad any less cool.) Atomic Antelope has provided a stunningly engaging version of Alice in Wonderland by using the accelerometer (the internal gadget that senses up and down) to enhance the story. But this scattering of exciting content just makes the majority of what’s out there look even more painfully mundane and old-fashioned.
Technology, of course, can’t save publishing unless publishing gets on board and saves itself. The industry, however, has not been up to the task. Their heads are so far up their old approaches that they can’t (yet) see a way out.

The only really fabulous thing about the iPad and the future it portends is that it continues to push the democratization of publishing. Tablet computers (iPad now,Google’s Android tablet next and many more devices down the road) represent a full-color, full-motion platform on which multi-media content can be readily, easily and inexpensively published. (One of Apple’s e-tail partners for iBooks is Lulu.com, the self-publishing site.) So it will be up to real people with unique visions to shape the future of books and magazines on devices like the iPad.

None of this helps existing publishers one bit and, in a repeat of TV’s history, the books and magazines available for iPad are lagging the technology by a mile. Until content catches up, the iPad and its tablet cousins will be consigned to wasting innovation by serving up content so insufficiently re-imagined as to bore the pants off everyone. At the moment, most of it just makes readers yearn for paper.

I’m purposely ignoring the widely annotated tech glitches and shortfalls of the iPad itself. (One of the best lists of iProblems appears here on HuffPost.) The device, in its own right, is a huge disappointment to many.

But the technical failings pale in the face of traditional publishers’ failure to transform their content. It’s as if the publishers were waiting for Apple (or Adobe or some other hip tech outfit) to tell them what to do. Since Apple didn’t do that, publishing is still lost.

For most iPad reading, the content has been put on a screen instead of a piece of paper with no real appreciation for the difference. This is certainly true of GQ magazine’s iPad edition, which has no notion of how to integrate text and images. It appears to be true of the not-yet-released-but-much-hyped Wired magazine for iPad, which looks in available demos like it suffers the same problems.

You begin to understand what real game-changing approaches might look like when you see what Disney’s Marvel Entertainment has done to genuinely change the comic book game on an iPad. It’s far cooler than paper. As Josh Fisher, a creative director and designer in Portland, ME, recently tweeted to me, “Marvel is apparently doing such a great job, people are buying iPads just to subscribe to their comics digitally.” There is vigorous chatter on various blogs to back that up.

Marvel’s iPad app has two viewing modes. Full-page mode looks a lot like a comic book, except the colors are more vivid and luminous. But tap twice and the mode switches to frame-by-frame, using built-in zooms, pans and dissolves that take the reader through the story panel by panel at the touch of a finger. In panel-by-panel mode, you are effectively immersed in an animated slide show where the experience of reading has been transformed. The iPad version makes the art work better and the story more alive. It really is fabulous.

Then there’s “Alice for iPad,” a re-imagining of Lewis Carrol’s wonderful tale. In this beautifully designed and illustrated “Alice,” 3-D looking objects from the story (a bottle labeled “Drink Me,” for example) roll and fall around the page realistically as if pulled by gravity as the reader shifts the iPad’s orientation. It’s all put together in ways that uniquely enhance the fantasy experience of reading the book.

On the other end of the spectrum are disasters too numerous to mention, like the iPad version of the classic 1994 kids book Miss Spider’s Tea Party by David Kirk. The original book, published by Scholastic, featured Kirk’s gorgeous, oversized, richly colored illustrations, each one filling a page with the words opposite. It endeared Kirk instantly to parents and kids and led to millions of sales.

On the iPad, in “read” mode, the pictures are stuck above the words and a five-button navigation bar further clutters the screen and never goes away. The pictures are too small and you can’t enlarge them. Tapping them sets off predictable animations: bees flapping wings and buzzing, Miss Spider slurping tea and speaking, etc. All the while, irritating piano music plays. Miss Spider’s Tea Party was produced by Calloway Arts and Entertainment, a multi-media company that has a partnership with David Kirk.

Friends with cooler heads and warmer hearts tell me to relax. It’s just a matter of time, they say, before the content fits with the technology. After all, early TV was radio with boring visuals. We’ve been here before.

But this isn’t 1948 and traditional publishers should know better. The web has been around for 15 years. Some content creators have used that decade and a half to learn how text, animation, video and other elements can be integrated on a small screen. Evidently, the publishing industry didn’t paying much attention until the hour grew late and their entire business became threatened.

Like a lot of content creators, my agency, Story Worldwide, is working on new ways to use these devices. Frederik Andersen, our group creative director, says, “As with any other new platform, what I am most excited about are the things we haven’t seen or imagined yet.” So far, Andersen says, most of what the publishers are showing looks “like a PDF document with a bit of video and nice transitions, which has been around for years.”

Andersen is “still looking for those ideas that no one has had yet — the ideas that will turn this device into an innovation.”

Me, too.

(Published on HuffingtonPost.com)