ESPN's College Game Day is my go-to channel every Saturday at the gym. Listening to coaches and young athletes talk about gridiron life as I furiously pedal away on an elliptical machine gets me to thinking. Organization. Chemistry. Obstacles. Rivalries. Setbacks. Successes. Strategies. I find myself putting these elements of football through my 40-year filter of newsroom operations and product development. I've been pushing for a bold new round of change at FORBES and the X’s and O’s of Game Day a few weeks ago hit a nerve. When I got home I sketched out two Venn-like diagrams. Here’s the first:
What does it mean? The 20-year-old banner ad, the digital revenue driver that journalists and many consumers love to hate, is in steady decline -- and it's in every newsroom's best interests to help find a replacement. That's right, a critical piece of the banner business, a kissing cousin to the single-page print ad, has finally met its match. Content marketing aka native advertising aka brand journalism is the new thing, overcoming widespread journalistic condemnation only a few years ago. Still, marketers need even newer if they're going to support what reporters and editors do rather than join forces with Facebook and Snapchat. That means newsroom culture must step further outside its century-old comfort zone. It must think in terms of co-storytelling with marketers (clearly and transparently labeled) while developing other business-minded products (see the diagram below).
Let's back up for a moment. Basically, there are two marketplaces for the trillions of banner ads that have sustained digital journalism. They're either sold by humans running around the country for months to complete a sale (in industry parlance, direct sold) or on computer exchanges in microseconds (known as programmatic trading). Direct sold banners are now a far tougher sell and the efficiency of computer buying and selling of ad puts unrelenting downward pressure on ad rates. Against that backdrop, Facebook and Google now account for two-thirds of all mobile advertising revenue.
This triple whammy is a big reason why advertising departments industrywide are restructuring and newsrooms are yet again tightening their belts. Print's continual struggle with marketers (readers still like their magazines) certainly don’t help. As The New York Times reports, highly respected news outlets, itself included, plan to "reorganize, shed staff, kill of whole sections, or all of the above" as print revenue declines outpace digital gains.
So, what are marketers and their ad agencies looking for? I was in London and Zurich last week, tacking on a dozen sales calls to the 300+ I’ve made these past six years. All the talk (after Donald Trump, of course) was the future of content marketing — the need for a solution that works even better (particularly in a mobile, social world) than what publishers offer at the moment. FORBES BrandVoice was a leading force in desktop native advertising way back in 2010, taking slings and arrows before an entire industry came around. In Europe, I began to outline what's up next for us: with direct newsroom involvement, new kinds of integrated editorial and branded feature packages as well as edit/brand content creation and distribution via our social streams.
Our belief system moving forward is represented in the diagram above. Gravitas comes from our 99-year heritage of powerful staff-written journalism. Our 1,700-strong expert contributor network (hand selected and directed by our editors), provides the scale a Web business requires. BrandVoice (which actually emerged from an editorial team) recognizes that if topic experts outside the traditional newsroom have insights, so do industry marketers. A natural extension of that thinking is co-storytelling by editorial in association brands, always transparently identified and clearly labeled. In other words, a partnership between the newsroom and those in the FORBES sales department responsible for content produced by our marketing partners.
Diagram 2 (below) drills down a bit further into co-storytelling. Notice the X = journalist in each circle. Initially, a small newsroom unit at FORBES, along with our video team, will work across edit and sales.
2) Integrated Editorial and Brand Video: We’re moving forward with the idea that video storytelling can seamlessly inject content from marketers as complementary or explanatory.
3) Integrated Social, Mobile Storytelling: We've already opened up our social streams (25 million followers) to BrandVoice partner promotion. Now, we plan to develop editorial/branded social content, too.
4) Data-Centric Social Engagement: In creating integrated edit and brand concepts, social metrics can inform what needs to be created and where it should be distributed.
5) Data-Tested Product Development: All of it must pass the test of metrics, from monetization to on and off-domain engagement (likes, share, follows, etc.)
In the center of it all is Business-Minded Thinking, with specific newsroom personnel working to create monetization opportunities around what they understand best — content of every type. As with the last six years of BrandVoice, reporters will find nothing changes about their jobs. They will investigate and report the news and do what they love to do. At FORBES, transparency and labeling will make it all possible, as it has for the 130 marketers that have participated in BrandVoice, both in the magazine and Forbes.com.
I was watching College Game day again last Saturday. This time, one of the hosts (my favorite is former coach Lee Corso) talked about one team having a "schematic advantage." I took that to meaning a better playbook of X's and O's. I like our new plan because it's consistent with our innovative approach these past six years. Now it's about the execution, just like it was since years ago this month when we set out to help lead the industry forward.
