Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
By: Dr Borislav Miljanović, CEO of Represent System
Last week I attended a two-day native advertising conference in Berlin. It is the largest gathering of content marketers in Europe where the latest world trends in this area can be heard. We listened about our business from people belonging to content studios of large media giants: Washington Post, CNN, The New York Times, Build Content Studio. I had an emotional moment when I met Melanie Dezel, who in 2014 wrote a series of texts for Netflix’s Orange is the New Black, which was a breakthrough in T Content’s development and through her story we saw that content got entitled to survive in one of world’s media flagships, such as The New York Times. It was particularly interesting for me as I myself, in 2014 – reading that exact example how even content texts can have great quality and be acceptable for the media, and how a media giant is turning to content and native advertising – I decided to turn the development of my agency in that direction. Initially, everyone laughed at me, even in the Represent itself – “here comes Bora to bore us with content again” – but now, two years later, we have 20 employees in that sector and one fifth of completely new revenue. Not to mention that The New York Times in that same time dismissed nearly 500 journalists, but also employed more than 150 communicators at T Content Studio and bought two smaller agencies.
In addition to media experiences, we also listened to leading communication people from LinkedIn, Mashable, Cisco, Nordic branch of the Spanish bank Santander, which services four million users and has 1,400 employees without a single bank counter. And what does everyone have in common? Fear of further monetization of social networks, and especially Facebook. One chart remained etched into my brain, showing organic reach on Facebook has been steadily decreasing over the years, while the value of its shares is almost proportionally increasing. And so, at world level, media budgets spill over into Zuckerberg’s pockets, and the pockets of people gathered around Google. That’s why none of these communicators is talking about media freedom or paid PR, because it’s clear to everyone that we already live in a communications world with three supporting pillars: Google, Facebook and all the other media combined. Now it’s only important to be creative enough and use this third pillar in the right way to reach the audience that is still there. Completely new agency hybrids are emerging, all of which are something in between – they are both creative agencies, media leasers, and production studios. The media are forming their own creative communication teams, and on the example of the Nordic guys, who have went the furthest in Europe in this regard, we saw how dozens of small publishers joined together and formed their own unique content team that creates, but also sells content for all of them.
In the end, I realized that for all of us who came from the media into marketing, the renaissance is just beginning. At our regional conferences, I always say that for all the disappointed journalists the better days are coming, because we will need more and more good storytellers. This is not the future, this is the now in Europe. Of course, unlike in America, native advertising in Europe is still struggling with the old norms of the journalist model of large media houses. But when you see with which fervor Build Studio develops native advertising, and until last year it didn’t even exist, then it has to be clear to everyone in what direction this marketing and communication ship of ours is sailing. And we all get flabbergasted at how the internet has ruined the print, but we don’t see – or we pretend not to see – how quickly it will massacre the classic marketing as we’ve known it for years.
Just don’t say later that I didn’t warn you!
