Category: Articles

Political campaigns and media are not the only ones embracing long form content. With the rise of Netflix and online ad blockers and the decline of traditional television viewership, consumers are simply tuning out and turning off traditional advertising. In response, big brands are turning to new advertising techniques that inform and entertain more than directly sell.

These trends suggest long form content will not be relegated to a brand’s YouTube channel, but instead emerge as a key way marketers reach and engage consumers. Advertisers will need to find new opportunities with new digital platforms like Hulu or Amazon Prime, while competing to create the high quality, compelling content to which users have grown accustomed. With so much consumer choice, brands are now competing for the attention of a user whose preference is watching House of Cards on Netflix, where there are no ads. Ads need to be high-production and offer quality entertainment so that audiences want to watch them and have reason to seek them out and share them.

While the 30 second television spot is far from dead, successful brands are adapting to a new consumer-driven landscape, producing less heavy-handed content to appeal to the modern cynical viewer. When we took a look at the online campaigns that have gone viral, we found that they tend to be genuine, endearing, or humourous, connecting users to the traits brands try to represent. Red Bull sells adventure, Coca-Cola sells friendship and Nike sells athletic ability.

The old adage that Internet content has to be short and sweet to appeal to attention-deprived Internet users doesn’t hold as much weight anymore. Instead, companies like Pepsi are connecting with audiences using lengthy ads. Recently, Pepsi created a six-minute video for the Chinese New Year. The ad celebrates the year of the monkey using ‘The Monkey King’, an 80s TV show derived from a classic Chinese novel, Journey to the West. With more than 20 million views, the video ties Pepsi’s generational marketing to the impact ‘The Monkey King’ has had on many generations in China. This is the focus of the ad, and it takes much longer than 30 seconds for the Pepsi logo to make an appearance.

Closer to home, Dove uses long form content to position itself as a champion of male role models and positive body image. Its online videos explore these themes, the longer format delving into fatherhood, community leadership and self-esteem in ways that are thought-provoking, while complementing Dove’s traditional advertising efforts. Millions of views later, Dove’s ad proves audiences are interested in longer videos. So much for our short attention spans! If your content is compelling, your audience will stop channel or web surfing to take it in. Traditional advertising targets the viewer, while successful long form advertising attempts to reach their audience more organically by targeting shared themes and feelings that viewers can connect to the brand .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpaOjMXyJGk

Long form marketing immerses the viewer. When digital advertising is captivating, it’s more likely viewers will add a comment or share it with personal networks. Not only do these social media interactions help spread the ad, they add social proof – when something is shared online, it has been vetted by someone in your network. As such, people are more likely to click on ads when the source is a friend or a family member rather than a company. The Facebook like button and referral programs from online retailers all use the concept of social proof; people trust their networks more than marketers. Long form content is able to tap into this human characteristic in the same way that makes online reviewers like Yelp,TripAdvisor, and celebrity endorsements (like the Monkey King) so authoritative.

This new, longer approach is not limited to video. Recently, Shell partnered with the New York Times to produce an immersive digital takeover of its site. Interactive and animated, the ad discusses global urbanisation and how governments and corporations can work together to adapt to this trend while decreasing their environmental footprint. Adeptly showing that the medium truly is the message, the ad positions Shell as a forward thinking and innovative company – terms not commonly associated with oil companies.

The New York Times is not alone in experimenting with long form advertising. Recently, Turner Broadcasting announced that CNN, its flagship network, plans to launch its Native Plus platform. This new approach will ditch 30 second commercials in favour of two-to-three minute vignettes. Turner Broadcasting claims it is a less intrusive format for consumers and more powerful for marketers. If successful, the new format could mean that spectacles like the Super Bowl will be a completely different experiences.

The decline of traditional media consumption and the emergence of streaming video, tables and smartphones has advertisers migrating to new platforms and tactics. Long form content is one such promising tool. It offers tools for marketers, provides enjoyable and informative content for consumers, and for beleaguered traditional media companies, hope in the form of new revenue.

Photo: “SF Bridge II” by Folkert Gorter

“How much money will you make writing this article?” he asks. EVEN DRUG LORDS DREAM OF LONG FORM
— Caitlin Flanagan (@CaitlinPacific) January 10, 2016

Over the weekend, Rolling Stone released an interview between Sean Penn and Mexican drug lord ‘El Chappo,’ which was immediately and soundly mocked on Twitter. Users took to the platform to post screenshots of long phrases of (grammaticallyﾅum, adventurous) text from the article. These sections of text exceeded 140 characters, making a screenshot necessary to post it in full. This kind of practice, which is common on Twitter, is one of the reasons why Twitter is reportedly considering changing the defining feature of its service: the 140-character limit.
When the news dropped that the character limit would increase to 10,000, Twitter users freaked out. Understandable, seeing as the 140 limit is the defining feature of the conversational and fast-paced nature of the platform. Basically, everyone is afraid of reading tedious rants spelled out with extra characters. But long form doesn’t have to be tedious and, contrary to popular belief, long form isn’t necessarily a deterrent for readers with short attention spans.

The case for long form

Digital marketers have been making a case for long form content since 2013. The appetite for substantive, quality posts is there — something that the most popular and innovative news services are noting. Vox, The Atlantic, and Buzzfeed all produce in-depth features that provide nuanced and detailed examinations of topics, rather than brief pieces that skim the facts. Blogs like Tumblr and Medium demonstrate the value in investing in the ‘slow content movement.’ Within media, there’s a definite shift toward covering the entire picture. What’s interesting about the switch is that real storytelling is winning out over quick hits. Here’s the thing — people don’t want to feel like they’re reading the equivalent of a Slapchop commercial. We are inundated with advertising, so anything that appears to be selling more than informing comes off as cheap or hacky.
The other obvious benefit to long form is that search engines have picked up on the hacky-ness, or sometimes otherwise lacking, shorter content. They prioritize well-crafted material that engages readers. From both a reader and search engine standpoint, a lack of details has become suspect.

Twitter and long form

Ironically, Twitter’s 140 characters could be considered part of the reason why long form is now more popular. Aside from forcing brevity, the 140 limit creates real-time updates, a level playing field for speaking in a public forum, and along with that, access. Pieces, like the Sean Penn article, can be discussed and dissected for their merit, and that discussion includes writers, editors, and subject-matter experts. The desire to read up on a topic, in all its complexity, comes partly from these kinds of conversations that point out biases and blindsides in standard news stories and poorly researched accounts.
Furthermore, Twitter has given voice to groups of people that have traditionally been excluded from public discourse. Black Twitter, #BlackLivesMatter, and a number of feminist causes have all used Twitter as a launching point. The existence of such groups online pushes content to be more inclusive and more representative, and often, more detailed. On The Atlantic, long essays like Ta-Nehisi Coates’ ‘The Case for Reparations’ have become typical. More than ever there is an appetite for the ‘real’ story, whatever that may be, that encourages users to spend more time with sources.

What this means for brands

While this might seem like it doesn’t matter for brands, it does. Vox has been pushing to deliver content to users in innovative ways, and as their CEO Jeff Bankoff noted in an interview with TechCrunch, there is an opportunity in digital media:

‘We know somethings as a fact. Globally there is a $250 billion advertising market of which 70 percent is really built on brand buildingﾅ the top of the funnel, to use the marketing jargon. If you look at the web, which is a $25 billion slice of that pie, 80 percent of it is direct response—it’s searchﾅ it’s bottom of the funnel stuff. So there’s a big market opportunity there that hasn’t been captured. Where is all the brand building going that we had seen previously in magazines and newspapers and even in broadcast going to go, as consumers turn their attention to digital media? We believe there’s a big opportunity there, but someone has to actually go after it—someone has to bring the quality back.’

People are more knowledgeable and are able to do more research. A large portion of this research is done via search, and people are more critical of the results. Online behaviour has adapted to an influx of information to spend more time with longer, quality content — if you want your audience’s loyalty, you have to earn it.
Twitter has always been a platform that embraces long form, but it’s done so by allowing its users to easily link and endorse outside sources. While Twitter obviously wants to appeal to a wider audience and keep users on its site, it risks alienating its biggest users. The fact that even Twitter — which has based an entire platform on brevity, created online communities using 140-characters, and has spurred the evolution of online language to fit such constraints — is considering abandoning the central feature of its service in favour of longer content should give you pause.
It’s time to embrace length rather than shy away from it. Like Jeff Bankoff said, ‘someone has to bring the quality back,’ and it might as well be you.
Photo: “2008-01-26 (Editing a paper) – 30” by Nic McPhee

Thanks to massive media conventions like SXSW, ‘brand activation’ is one of the hottest trends in consumer marketing today. But when you source a definition of this newest buzzword, it comes suspiciously close to reading like text-book definitions of good ol’ fashion ‘marketing.’ Plug the term into Google and you’ll stumble upon this common definition: ‘brand activation is the art of driving consumer action through brand interaction and experiences…to get consumers to act…it’s about bringing brands to life.’ There’s nothing wrong with that definition, but it doesn’t enlighten us on how activation marketing can be used to shift public opinion when you’re facing a public affairs challenge. Typically, marketing deals with messages that challenge your a brand (a competitor arguing that their product is better than yours). By contrast, public affairs deals with messages that attack (a protest group saying your product kills). In this context, having an ability to mobilize supporters can make the difference between a winning and losing campaign.
Call us biased, but because most of us at Navigator cut our teeth in the world of hard-knock politics, activation marketing isn’t exactly a hot trend. It’s been a fundamental part of how we do our work for some time. Every objective of every single political campaign is, at its core, activating people to show up on election day to vote. And since most campaigns have limited budgets, voter identification and activation efforts need to be hyper-targeted and cost-effective. That’s where digital activation campaigns come into play.
First, a quick review of some fundamentals: In a political fight, if your base of supporters doesn’t show-up on Election Day, you will lose. One of your first priorities is to shore up that vote early, before you turn to approachable segments of the population who don’t associate themselves with your cause. A well-organized party will have an extensive database of identified supporters. But if you’re not a political party and find yourself in a public affairs fight, how do you get that intelligence? You have to build it. If that sounds daunting, that’s because it is. But now you can build it in record-time without ever having to knock on a single door or make a single phone call. But if that’s the sort of thing you’re into, we highly recommend volunteering on the next election campaign. There’s no greater exercise in humility than having people slam doors in your face!
Once you have that database, you can do what political parties have been very successful at doing: keep supporters engaged so that when you need to mobilize them, they take action. And when they take action, they lend you social proof. Social proof is the credibility of word-of-mouth marketing, and with that comes the opportunity to shift public opinion. At its core, an activation campaign mobilizes the supporter base, which then mobilizes its own network of friends and family. We go after these individuals—your advocates—because they have a better chance of convincing inaccessible individuals to come on side than you do. People trust each other more than they trust most brands, especially brands caught in a public affairs fight. The real value of an activation campaign is that you’re giving your best spokespeople a chance to speak on your behalf.
A word of caution, however. Yes, you can build your list in record time—we now have access to unprecedented technology to do this—but to do it well, you need to focus on building a supporter list of quality prospects. In a world where most people go online for a dose of dopamine, getting them to care about your (serious) issue enough to opt-in to your database is no easy task. It can only be done with the right message. Finding the right message takes science. It takes research. You need to know which segments of the population would be most responsive to your campaign, where to find them, what language motivates them, and what it would take for them to lend social proof to your campaign. Armed with that evidence-based knowledge, you can begin the hard work of reaching out to your potential supporters. Then, once you start, you should never stop. Because to activate your supporters, you’ll need to know what makes them tick. But getting them to that point requires care—it requires an ongoing relationship between you and them. Are you nurturing your advocates? If not, you’ll find yourself on your back foot when the time comes to win your public affairs campaign.

With more and more people cutting their cable TV cords, how can political campaigns reach their target audiences?
As is often the case, we can look to our southern neighbours for guidance. Marco Rubio and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaigns are now actively creating varied, original content and pushing it out through their social channels. By using platforms like Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook video, Periscope and Reddit, these campaigns are sidestepping the media filter and engaging voters on their own terms. And in the age of the 24-hour news cycle,with the social media cabal ready to dissect, parody and express outrage at every turn, message control is crucial to candidate’s ability to focus the larger campaign narrative their favourable issues. Further, creating fresh, genuine content can penetrate the cynical shell of the modern voter, while potentially, earning traditional media coverage of these efforts.

For example, Marco Rubio posted a video of himself on YouTube and Facebook responding to the most common search terms about him on Google. This allowed Rubio to gracefully discuss his religion, background and political beliefs while showcasing his sense of humour. The Rubio campaign has since followed up with another video, where Rubio answers a blitz of sports and political questions while catching (and even dropping) footballs.

 
Perhaps showcasing a fondness for disappearing messages, Hillary Clinton has been using Snapchat to promote the lighter side of her quest for the White House. This is in addition to Clinton’s active Instagram account, which features quotes from inspiring female leaders, ‘Throwback Thursday’ photos of her and Bill when they were younger, and video testimonials from supporters. These posts are softening Clinton’s image, promoting her issues and helping her reach more voters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxfMUEf9otQ
But are Snapchats about ‘just chilling in Cedar Rapids’ just frivolous?
While some social media content might be cringe-inducing, these campaigns understand that creative and original content enhances digital efforts to turn views into engagement, into real action. Someone who sees a Hillary Clinton meme on their newsfeed may become a follower, and later, an email subscriber, donor, or volunteer. Further, original content allows campaigns to test messaging and learn about the demographics and psychographics of their audience. In all, showcasing that like digital, creative content can no longer be treated like an afterthought.
The old political joke that the most dangerous place in Washington is between a politician and a television camera is becoming less and less relevant. But unfortunately for those who thought unplugging their cable meant avoiding political campaigns, tenacious politicians will continue to find new ways to reach you and ask for your vote.
 
Photo: “I voted!” by Vox Efx

‘I’m not a big Twitter person.’
 
Carleton University Professor David Carment expressed a less-than-enthusiastic reaction to the Canadian government’s efforts at digital diplomacy during a segment for Radio International Canada. He echoes a general worry that complex discussions, such as matters of state, cannot translate into the more colloquial 140 characters of a tweet.
 
This worry is often shared by corporations and CEOs — that a tweet doesn’t carry the gravity or seriousness required in high-stakes, complicated situations. Moreover, they are afraid of the immediacy of responses. Often, you don’t have the time to allow for tweets to go through a ladder of approvals to reply and be active online.
 
But if bureaucratic agencies and world leaders are using social media to engage audiences on everything from security issues to an international refugee crisis, it’s safe to say the worriers are underestimating the platform.
 

What is digital diplomacy?

In its simplest form, it’s how governments use social media to engage in foreign relations with both state officials and everyday citizens. This is done with varying levels of success, but the intention is to embrace an open format and create another dialogue for diplomatic issues. However, without the formal boundaries and borders of traditional diplomacy, this dialogue often bleeds into other forms of dialogue that include civil society activism, policy development, and general public affairs communication with audiences both foreign and domestic.
 
Six years ago, Canada was considered a digital diplomacy laggard. We have since dedicated resources and time to exploring how our government can expand its social media presence. This includes an investment in the Digital Public Square at the Munk School of Global Affairs, an initiative that focuses on open online spaces for citizens living under repressive governments. The project started in 2013 by facilitating a dialogue between Iranian citizens and the Iranian diaspora in Canada, expanding beyond the traditional concepts of foreign ministries. In 2014, Canada was recognized in Twiplomacy, an annual global study of world leaders and governments’ Twitter activity, for having dedicated accounts for most of the country’s missions and embassies. The study also measures the online influence of global leaders by aggregating their tweets, retweets, and interactions on Twitter.
 
The challenge with digital diplomacy, and digital public affairs, isn’t that Twitter or other forms of social media lack sophistication. Anyone who has ever given a presentation knows that the difficult part isn’t the presentation itself; it’s the Q and A that follows. You need to be able to speak on your issue and also be prepared for the ways in which your issue can spread and create new topics and lines of dialogue.
 

The government gets it and you can too:

It’s not just getting your content on social media, how you do it matters just as much. The Internet is an open forum, and response, tone and nuance are all paramount in what should be approached as an ongoing conversation. That the conversation often involves memes or vines doesn’t make it any less effective — often the opposite — and anyone who thinks it unsophisticated does so at their peril. Take, for example, the Canadian NATO delegation’s quick ‘geography’ lesson for Russia.

Geography can be tough. Here’s a guide for Russian soldiers who keep getting lost & ‘accidentally’ entering #Ukraine pic.twitter.com/RF3H4IXGSp

— Canada at NATO 🇨🇦 (@CanadaNATO) August 27, 2014

The difficulty then is in actually embracing the open forum and creating content for participatory platforms. It’s understanding that you’re there to talk with people and not at them. To use it, you can’t think of yourself as bigger than the medium – dense jargon and opaque or vague descriptions don’t play well with others. It can be easy to forget that serious issues don’t necessarily require anything more than straight-forward conversations.
 
So if you’re not a ‘big Twitter person,’ perhaps it’s less about Twitter and more about your approach: it’s hard to be successful on social media without being, in fact, social.
 
Title photo: “tweet” by mozzercork