Mariner (Holland America Line), Lexus Magazine, Endless Vacation (RCI), and Outlook (Acura Financial Services)

The Custom Content Council held their annual award ceremony last week and Story Worldwide, the world’s first post-advertising agency, was honored with 11 awards across four publications. Story was the fourth-most awarded agency in the competition, which featured 638 entrants from dozens of agencies.

Said Simon Kelly, Story Worldwide COO, “I’m thrilled that once again Story Worldwide proved that as a post-advertising agency, narrative excellence is at the heart of what we do and while we left the custom publishing industry behind some time ago, it is reassuring to know that we compete at the highest level.”

Mariner magazine, a thrice-yearly magazine mailed directly to past guests of Holland America Line, did the heavy lifting taking home five awards including Gold Awards for Best Proof of Return on Investment, Best Editorial, and a special Perfect Score Award for Best Overall Editorial. This was the first year such an award was handed out. In its two years of existence, Mariner Magazine has earned ten Pearl Awards.

Story’s Lexus Magazine, the most awarded custom publication in the world, earned two awards for Best Web Publication and Best Overall Web Design for the magazine’s digital presence.

Endless Vacation, a custom published magazine for RCI, garnered two awards for Best Interactive Content and Best Launch or Relaunch, both for its exceptional iPad application.

Outlook, Story’s B2B newsletter for Acura Financial Services, scored Gold for Best Newsletter Design and Silver for Best Newsletter Editorial.

The full list of awards can be seen below:

ENDLESS VACATION. Best Interactive Content. SILVER.
ENDLESS VACATION. Best Launch or Relaunch. BRONZE.

MARINER. Best Overall Editorial. Perfect Score Award. (Special Award)
MARINER. Best Overall Editorial. GOLD.
MARINER. Best Proof of Return on Investment. GOLD.
MARINER. Best Column. BRONZE.
MARINER. Best Use of Photography. BRONZE.

LEXUS. Best Web Publication. BRONZE.
LEXUS. Best Overall Web Design. SILVER.

OUTLOOK. Best Newsletter Design. GOLD.
OUTLOOK. Best Newsletter Editorial. SILVER.

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“This year’s W3 Winners demonstrate the out-of-the box thinking and creative execution that exemplifies what the Web is all about” said Linda Day, the Executive Director of the IAVA. “On behalf of the entire Academy, congratulations to this year’s W³ Award entrants and winners for their dedication to pushing the limits and finding new ways to raise the bar in Web Creativity.

Receiving over 3,000 entries, the W³ Awards honors creative excellence on the Web, and recognizes the creative and marketing professionals behind award winning Websites, Web Video and Online Marketing programs. Simply put, the W³ is the first major Web competition to be accessible to the biggest agencies, the smallest firms, and everyone in between. Small firms are as likely to win as Fortune 500 companies and international agencies.

The W³ Awards honors creative excellence on the Web, and recognizes the creative and marketing professionals behind award winning Websites, Web Video and Online Marketing programs. Simply put, the W³ is the first major Web competition to be accessible to the biggest agencies, the smallest firms, and everyone in between. Small firms are as likely to win as Fortune 500 companies and international agencies.

In 2010, Story took home six W3 awards, including two gold awards on behalf of Klondike.

Westfield, the shopping centre developer, has launched an East End-themed Facebook competition to mark next month’s opening of its £1.45bn shopping complex next to the 2012 London Olympics site in Stratford.

The competition, created by Story Worldwide and entitled ‘Create your Take’, invites users on Westfield’s Facebook page to share their opinions about “East End classic” events, songs or locations.

Users have to upload imagery associated with East End classics, which include the song ‘Lily the Pink’ and the Hoxton Fin haircut.

The user whose post receives the most “Likes” will receive a cash prize of up to £10,000, depending on how many votes it receives.

Spot prizes from Westfield retailers will also be awarded to participants throughout the competition, which runs until 22 September.

Westfield has also launched a Westfield Stratford City website to showcase the area’s history and diversity and provide information about the shopping centre.

Users can upload stories of the area to an interactive map on the site.

Westfield Stratford City will be the largest shopping centre in Europe and opens to the public on 13 September.

Its two external pedestrianised streets will form the main thoroughfare into the Stratford base of the London 2012 Olympic Games.

In June, CBS Outdoor was awarded the £100m outdoor ad contact for the shopping centre.

Kelly will be part of a panel of content marketing experts in a session entitled, The Role of Content and Storytelling in Today’s Integrated B2C. Alongside fellow panelists Ellen Moreau, VP of Marketing Communications at Sherwin Williams, John Gower, VP at Future Plus, and Jeff Rohrs of Exact Target, the roundtable discussion will address what leading brands are doing to set up content marketing for success and will ultimately answer the question, “How do the leading consumer brands structure their storytelling within the myriad of channels?”

Blanchard will be joined by Josh Richman, VP of Marketing for WGN America, Tribune Broadcasting’s national cable network and Story Worldwide client, for a unique hour-long session. Rise of the SuperFans: Growing TV Audience by Empowering Digital Communities will show attendees how managing digital communities can generate productive offline behavior while lowering traditional ad spend. Today, WGNA features “Superfans” in TV spots, tweeters show up in crawls during shows, and fans program the lineup for episode marathons. In exchange, WGNA has been able to leverage each show’s existing online fan base to drive audience, positioning WGNA well for the long-term transition from lean-back-TV to online-interactive experience.

About the Event
Content Marketing World 2011 will be in Cleveland, September 6th-8th. For three days, over 50 of the best and the brightest from the marketing industry will converge in Cleveland to share the latest custom content and social media trends, client success stories, best practices and more.

Over 500 marketing professionals will attend this year, including those from GE, Ciena, IBM, Cleveland Clinic, Hitachi, EMC and marketing professionals from more than a dozen countries.

If you’d like to join Keith, Simon, and hundreds of B2B, B2C, and Small Business/Non-Profit marketers at Content Marketing World you can register online here. Use the coupon code “EVENT42” for an additional $100 the registration price.

New York (July 12, 2011) — Story Worldwide, a next-generation digital agency telling brand stories for companies like Unilever, Lexus, and Johnson & Johnson, announced today a partnership with StrikeForce Communications, an entrepreneurial healthcare agency that finds “open source” communications solutions for clients like Alcon Laboratories, Teva, Pfizer, Pozen, and Abbott Labs.

The goal: To create customized digital solutions for pharmaceutical clients seeking to leverage cutting-edge digital storytelling to drive business.

The alliance will utilize Strikeforce’s “SWAT Team” approach, which gathers specialist teams to address particular healthcare challenges with unprecedented precision. Says Mike Rutstein, founder and president of StrikeForce: “We believe that linking the right talent—whether individual or agency—to the specific client is a lot more effective than the one-size-fits-all mentality of traditional agencies.”

Similarly, the narrative approach of Story Worldwide will empower pharma brands to sensibly produce executions of genuine value to end users. “It’s a crowded media landscape out there,” says Keith Blanchard, Executive Creative Director of Story. “Brands need to publish truly useful, informative, and entertaining content if they want to reach audiences. We help brands compete and win in that complex environment.”

The two firms today began development on their first project, a multi-million dollar DTC women’s health campaign for one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies.

About StrikeForce
STRIKEFORCE is an entrepreneurial healthcare communications agency that operates through a unique, open source model called Precision Pairing. This “in-sourcing” approach offers clients greater access to top-level talent and the ability to tailor solutions to meet the individual needs of each assignment – without the overhead and fixed assets of a traditional model. The result is greater specificity, efficiency and a more potent work product.

STRIKEFORCE COMMUNICATIONS LLC is based in New York City. The agency’s engagements include work for the following clients: Alcon Laboratories, Orexigen Therapeutics, Pozen Pharmaceuticals, KCI, Azur Pharmaceuticals, Abbott Laboratories, Ocean Nutrition Canada, Wyeth/Pfizer, Sepracor and Teva.

For more information about StrikeForce, please contact Mike Rutstein at 917-475-1876, or e-mail: mrutstein@strikeforcenyc.com.

About Story Worldwide
Story Worldwide, launched in 2007 and with offices in New York, London, Seattle, and South Norwalk Connecticut, is a next-generation marketing agency that believes every brand has a story to tell, and those who tell it best win. Working in all media channels around the world, Story relies on a narrative-based approach that has produced strong business results for brands like Lexus, Popsicle, RCI/Wyndham, Green Giant, WGN America, and many more.

For more information about Story Worldwide, please contact Chris Parker at 203.258.1588, or email: chris.parker@storyworldwide.com

The film Where is Your Line?, made interactive with the help of Story Worldwide, has been honored with a Bronze Lion at the 58^th Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

The objective of the film was to raise awareness of The Havens, a London based Crisis Center that helps victims of rape and sexual assault, and to foster conversation among young people about what constitutes rape.

The film, conceived and directed by Sara Dunlop of Rattling Stick, London, follows a group of young people on a night out. As the evening turns sour, audiences are asked to consider at what point the line has been crossed. Instead of simply raising the question, viewers were invited to answer it by clicking the screen when they think the line has been crossed.

When audiences interacted with the film they were taken to a hidden video within YouTube and presented with a statistic relevant to the specific point in the film at which they clicked. Tracking user clicks, the film became self-perpetuating, generating new statistics and behavioral insights that actually fed back into the campaign. Using the social functionality of YouTube, the film was supported by a wider seeding strategy, generating over 20,000 views in the first two days of launch. Currently the video has garnered over 50,000 views.

You can see the full award entry here.

The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is the world’s biggest celebration of creativity in communications. As the most prestigious international advertising awards, more than 24,000 entries from all over the world are showcased and judged at the Festival. Winners receive the highly coveted Lion trophy, presented at four award ceremonies throughout the week.

The eighth annual Magnum Opus Awards have announced their 2011 winners and Story Worldwide has been honored with 13 awards across four different publications. This is the fifth consecutive year Story has been honored and the second straight year that Story has received over a dozen awards. This year’s competition included 560 different entries.

“It’s very gratifying to see this kind of grand recognition of our team’s wonderful creative work,” says Story’s Executive Creative Director Keith Blanchard. “Almost everyone on our creative team has significant experience in consumer magazines and websites—we know how to create the kind of content people love, and love to share, and that’s what makes the difference.

Endless Vacation, a magazine custom published for RCI, brought home six awards across print, digital, and email platforms, including two Gold Awards for Highest Response Generation and Best New Publication Launch, both for the innovative Endless Vacation eZine.

Story’s Lexus Magazine, the most awarded custom publication in the world, scored three awards in the Electronic Publication category, including the prestigious Grand Award for a web-based publication, as well as two Gold Awards for Overall Editorial and Overall Design for a web-based publication.

Mariner Magazine, the official magazine of the Holland America Line, garnered three awards in the Print Magazine Category. This included a Gold Award for Best Regularly Featured Department or Column for “New Voyager,” which featured essays by Pulitzer Prize winner Jane Smiley, Presumed Innocent author Scott Turow, and actor and award-winning writer Andrew McCarthy.

Outlook, Story’s magazine for Acura Financial Services, earned a Gold Award for Best Overall Editorial in the Print Newsletter category.

The Magnum Opus Awards are an annual competition dedicated to the world’s top content marketing efforts. The awards are conducted by ContentWise in conjunction with the University of Missouri School of Journalism and are judged upon informational and entertainment value, quality of writing and display copy, creative use of imagery and typography and consistency of color palette and style. The Magnum Opus Awards are the leading custom media awards program recognizing excellence in editorial, design and strategy for organizations using print and online publications as well as social media in their content marketing efforts.

A recent article in Marketing magazine lists Story Worldwide among the 31 top-ranking customer publishing agencies for 2009 and 2010. The article, entitled “The Rise of Branded Content” puts Story at #14, up a spot from last year.

The piece makes an excellent argument for something we’ve long advocated: the importance of branded content. It’s further proof that this is the year branded content is truly coming into its own. As the Marketing piece explains, digital communication through apps, emails, and social media has risen in parallel with the custom-publishing industry. Print remains crucial — even digital brands like Google have launched print titles — but print now must work in conjunction with other marketing tools. Through creative integrations of print and digital, brands can execute campaigns that tie one medium to the other and produce a more engaging and well-rounded consumer experience.

We at Story Worldwide are firm believers that creating original content that entertains, informs, or assists consumers is the only way to foster loyalty, create brand advocates, and generate a following. It’s quite an honor to be recognized as one of the industry’s top agencies. It goes to show that in the end, great content really does win.

The entire list consists of more than 400 blogs, but only the top 42 are considered award winners. It’s an honor to have PostAdvertising.com included among today’s top content-marketing sites and further proves that, in the end, great content really does win.

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.