Content Marketing Today

When It Comes to Content Marketing Online, Washington Post Buries the Lead!

Recently the Washington Post wrote about how slowly major brands are moving ad $$ to the Internet.  The real story for me is the growing deployment of content marketing strategies by these same major brands.  This IAM’s puppy video offers a glimpse of what the Post is missing. 

What’s Going On?

We all know that Procter & Gamble is the biggest television advertising spender.  So it wouldn’t be an incredible leap to assume they are the biggest online spender as well.  Not so!

In fact, in the Post’s lead paragraph they mentioned that a fellow named Rob Wrubel is spending almost $250 million per year on Internet advertising.  His company: the University of Phoenix.  (As a sidenote, and we might not be surprised by this, the Post states that they spend more on advertising than they spend on their faculty). Wrubel is outspending P&G online by more than 200%, although his TV dollars would be a mere rounding error within their total advertising budget.

The Post quotes an expert about this surprising underrepresentation:

“While spending on Internet marketing has been growing dramatically over the past decade, the top 50 or 60 brand marketers are very much underrepresented,” said Randall Rothenberg, president and chief executive of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade group. So far, the online industry has been “growing by grabbing the low-hanging fruit.”

You might think that these facts about the relative underspending by other major brands is the real story.  From my perspective, the real story is buried on the third online page.  It’s all about content marketing.  If you think about the term ’soap opera’, you get a better sense of what’s going on.  As big spender Wrubel predicts,

“We are now going to see large advertisers do what they did with television in the ’50s — to get behind programming,” he said, offering that the advertisers are likely to capitalize on the Internet’s social and interactive aspects. “The medium offers a fundamentally different experience for consumers.”

In other words, just as Procter & Gamble long ago virtually invented daytime television dramas, he believes that they will be providing and supporting similar content on the Web.  Most of the consumer products brands are going one step further and creating online communities which make that content interactive in a way that would have been impossible on TV.

Take a look at what P&G is doing with its IAM’s brand.  They provide an incredibly rich amount of information about looking after your beloved pet–dog or cat–from the time they are puppies and kittens to the time they are senior citizens.  It offers lots of videos which teach you, for example, how to train your puppy in basic obedience commands.  This is the sort of stuff that they just can’t do on a television commercial.  Although I have no idea how much money they have invested in the IAM’s website alone, it’s probably much more than the University of Phoenix has spent on its website.  Multiply that by the huge number of Procter & Gamble’s powerful brands and you get some idea of the level of content marketing investments are making online.

Another good example of consumer product content marketing efforts is Kraft’s uPumpItUp which works hard at creating an interactive community among young women.  As they put it, “This is a place where women meet up with friends, inspire each other to do more of the things that make us feel great, and help share the good feeling with others!.” I’m not sure that they’re getting it exactly right with this site. But they are obviously willing to make a significant investment based on the expensive videos and visuals with which the site is replete.

The University of Phoenix may buy much more online advertising.  But,P&G, Kraft, and their high-powered brethren are investing much more on content rich websites.

I believe that the future of the big consumer brands online has more to do with content and community than it does with raw advertising.  Clearly, more and more of big dollar television advertising directs  customers toward specific online content. And, as TV advertising dollars migrate to the Web, a big percentage of those dollars will migrate as content marketing investments.

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