Content vs Advertising

Content is king. Content is engaging. Content is a sales tool. Content is a lot of things, but advertising. Very often I see brands and partners I work with define the same KPI's for content as they have for their ads. In this short note, I will try to highlight some of the biggest ways in which content is different from an ad.

1. A content-consumer is looking for entertainment. A consumer of an ad is often trying to avoid watching it. If she/he does get stuck, all she's doing is waiting for it to end except if your product is revolutionary, your ad is telling them something they don't know or your ad is loud and colourful (a cheap trick that seems' to have become a thumb rule). The last thing you need to worry about doing via your ad is entertaining people. And entertainment is all a content-consumer is looking for. Your rules of advertising are bound to fail when you apply it to content. The easiest way to judge your content is to show it to your worst enemy - if you've impressed and engaged her/ him, you may please publish the conten

2. Unlike ads, content can be longer and needs to open conversations! Imagine spending 2 minutes of your life watching something and having nothing to say or think about... especially after you'd thought you'll either learn something or, at the very least, laugh or smile. Content inherently has the onus to make you feel something, challenge stereotypes, open social conversations and more. And ad (at a very high cost) can still achieve its purpose if it is loud and colourful and blasted across channels 3000 times a day - poor me and many more who have no way to express our disdain apart from feverishly switching channels. But content is different. A person who had been promised entertainment and has been delivered an ad is a hater on steroids. Please be kind to yourself too, most content consumers can express themselves and THEY WILL; so you want to be careful that angry words or emoticons aren't coming your way. The hate will spread on the net like wildfire and take your brand down with it faster than you can imagine.

1. Content has the advantage of targetted or segmented delivery - again, unlike the power an ad has to destroy people's minutes at scale, content is elegant and can be delivered in much smaller segments. The thing to remember is no content is poor content, it is only poorly timed or targeted. Find your segment, know what's important to them and tell your brand story in a way they'll care for. India's too large and Indians too diverse for brands to continue telling one story alone an entire season. The consumer has committed his time to the story your brand wants to tell and not to your brand - use it wisely. And remember you do have more than 30 seconds!
2. Content follows a cycle of entertain > engage > educate > convert. Don't jump the gun. Remember once a shot has been misfired you'd have killed that consumer forever. Take it slow, start small and be patient. Unlike your average ad, here you will spend slowly, see smaller results but in the end, you will have a consumer who will be able to forgive you torturing him with several poor ads in the future. You'll have a lover for a brand loyalist - just take it slow.

Hope this was helpful - I've just started doing this, so hit me up with all your views, questions and critique so that I can make my commentaries less biased against traditional advertising. I promise I'll try. What if we made a video montage capturing expressions of people while watching ads! It's a great content idea - off to it!

Pragya Priyali

2nd degree connection

Head of Content at Arvind Brands (Digital Center of Excellence)