[ed. See also: Newsrooms struggle with free-content strategy]
At a glance, the Daily Growl could be any morning news meeting held in the “win the internet through pet videos” bureau of a lavishly funded media startup. Rows of eager young people stand behind their monitors—“TMZ-style,” managing editor Lisa Keller told me—as Keller solicits memes and news pegs to supplement the content already scheduled on the team’s editorial calendar. Monitors are tuned to Twitter feeds and Photoshop works in progress. Any of the team’s 10 “community managers” and eight designers might produce as many as 10 postings a day. Those numbers don’t include the constant interaction with fans and followers and strangers that is also a big part of the job. The office is light-filled and, despite the heavy productivity expectations, seemingly free of stress. I’m struck by this, having been in so many newsrooms in which there’s a palpable sense that the media industry, to say nothing of the country and the human race, is at the abyss.
The Daily Growl is the morning ritual of Nestlé Purina PetCare’s content marketing team. Neither the Daily Growl nor its counterpart, the Weekly Meow, are really news meetings. But the Purina operation is, in some ways, closer to a newsroom than journalists would care to admit. As its name, The Feed, suggests, the team produces timely information and entertainment and pushes it out to an audience on social platforms. It’s focused on speed, accountable for accuracy, and perpetually aware of the needs of its readers. The most obvious difference between The Feed’s work and that of an actual newsroom is that the team is explicitly aligned with the interests of the world’s second-largest pet food company. Then again, boundaries between editorial and advertising in journalism newsrooms aren’t what they used to be. Editors at Time Inc. now report to managers on the business side, and a series of recently leaked emails suggests that executives at Vice expect to know in advance about stories that mention advertisers or other corporate brands. That The Feed’s work is overtly coming from a brand is arguably a win for transparency.
The Feed devotes itself to customer service, with the ultimate goal of making money. Signs posted throughout the team’s office remind members of this: “Engage,” “Impact Business Now,” “Convert,” “Results.” How different are these reminders of the realities of capitalism from the various measures of popularity (total traffic, new readers, etc.) prominently displayed in newsrooms? Are the lists a reminder that reporters should be giving readers what they want, or just rankings of the writers whose stories have been most successfully monetized that day, not unlike the sales-leader board in a firm hawking timeshares?
Another thing The Feed’s work on behalf of Purina has in common with the work of journalists on behalf of their own (often corporate) owners: People are reading it.
The employees of The Feed are practitioners of a shape-shifting genre that has taken over billions of dollars of corporate marketing budgets globally in the last decade. Content marketing is so broad that it eludes definition even by its most ardent practitioners, but the term includes essentially any form of content (a Facebook post, a celebrity Q&A, a feature-length documentary) created by or on behalf of a brand with the hope that it will attract an audience on its own merits—as opposed to traditional advertising, which has the far smaller ambition of gaining notice from a captive audience before the ad break ends, or the page gets flipped, and the real content begins.
Most content marketing bypasses traditional media entirely, and as such it threatens to further erode journalism’s dwindling advertising revenue. (...)
As journalism newsrooms have diminished in strength and ambition over the last decade, “brand newsrooms,” a term that’s now used casually within the marketing and PR industry, are booming—and have been for some time. As Sam Slaughter, the vice president of content at Contently, a software platform with a network of freelance writers available to both marketers and journalism publishers, notes, Red Bull was covering the action-sports industry when “BuzzFeed was just a twinkle in Jonah Peretti’s eye.” American Express has a publication devoted to small-business owners, and General Electric covers its own scientists and hopes to never send another press release to an inattentive newspaper reporter. Chevron runs a community news site for Richmond, CA, where it is the town’s largest employer. Coca-Cola now reportedly spends more money creating its own content than it does on television advertising.
Nestlé, Purina’s parent and the world’s largest food company, creates more than 1,500 pieces of content each day company-wide, and its brands have accumulated more than 250 million Facebook fans.
Advertisers and journalists have always been partners, and that partnership has always contained an inherent tension. Content marketing has the potential to turn that tension into an existential threat. Journalists like to think of themselves as protectors of the public interest, intermediaries who police both fact and rhetoric. The very premise of the profession is that it’s dangerous to have words pass straight from the mouths of CEOs or politicians to the public’s ear. This intermediary function is at the core of journalism’s identity and, though it wasn’t always thought of this way, the core of its business model. But each successful piece of content marketing is, in effect, a statement that a journalist wasn’t wanted or needed. Each time a consumer clicks on a piece of content marketing, or shares it with a friend, it’s confirmation that they’re very comfortable being out there in the information landscape on their own.
At a glance, the Daily Growl could be any morning news meeting held in the “win the internet through pet videos” bureau of a lavishly funded media startup. Rows of eager young people stand behind their monitors—“TMZ-style,” managing editor Lisa Keller told me—as Keller solicits memes and news pegs to supplement the content already scheduled on the team’s editorial calendar. Monitors are tuned to Twitter feeds and Photoshop works in progress. Any of the team’s 10 “community managers” and eight designers might produce as many as 10 postings a day. Those numbers don’t include the constant interaction with fans and followers and strangers that is also a big part of the job. The office is light-filled and, despite the heavy productivity expectations, seemingly free of stress. I’m struck by this, having been in so many newsrooms in which there’s a palpable sense that the media industry, to say nothing of the country and the human race, is at the abyss.The Daily Growl is the morning ritual of Nestlé Purina PetCare’s content marketing team. Neither the Daily Growl nor its counterpart, the Weekly Meow, are really news meetings. But the Purina operation is, in some ways, closer to a newsroom than journalists would care to admit. As its name, The Feed, suggests, the team produces timely information and entertainment and pushes it out to an audience on social platforms. It’s focused on speed, accountable for accuracy, and perpetually aware of the needs of its readers. The most obvious difference between The Feed’s work and that of an actual newsroom is that the team is explicitly aligned with the interests of the world’s second-largest pet food company. Then again, boundaries between editorial and advertising in journalism newsrooms aren’t what they used to be. Editors at Time Inc. now report to managers on the business side, and a series of recently leaked emails suggests that executives at Vice expect to know in advance about stories that mention advertisers or other corporate brands. That The Feed’s work is overtly coming from a brand is arguably a win for transparency.
The Feed devotes itself to customer service, with the ultimate goal of making money. Signs posted throughout the team’s office remind members of this: “Engage,” “Impact Business Now,” “Convert,” “Results.” How different are these reminders of the realities of capitalism from the various measures of popularity (total traffic, new readers, etc.) prominently displayed in newsrooms? Are the lists a reminder that reporters should be giving readers what they want, or just rankings of the writers whose stories have been most successfully monetized that day, not unlike the sales-leader board in a firm hawking timeshares?
Another thing The Feed’s work on behalf of Purina has in common with the work of journalists on behalf of their own (often corporate) owners: People are reading it.
The employees of The Feed are practitioners of a shape-shifting genre that has taken over billions of dollars of corporate marketing budgets globally in the last decade. Content marketing is so broad that it eludes definition even by its most ardent practitioners, but the term includes essentially any form of content (a Facebook post, a celebrity Q&A, a feature-length documentary) created by or on behalf of a brand with the hope that it will attract an audience on its own merits—as opposed to traditional advertising, which has the far smaller ambition of gaining notice from a captive audience before the ad break ends, or the page gets flipped, and the real content begins.
Most content marketing bypasses traditional media entirely, and as such it threatens to further erode journalism’s dwindling advertising revenue. (...)
As journalism newsrooms have diminished in strength and ambition over the last decade, “brand newsrooms,” a term that’s now used casually within the marketing and PR industry, are booming—and have been for some time. As Sam Slaughter, the vice president of content at Contently, a software platform with a network of freelance writers available to both marketers and journalism publishers, notes, Red Bull was covering the action-sports industry when “BuzzFeed was just a twinkle in Jonah Peretti’s eye.” American Express has a publication devoted to small-business owners, and General Electric covers its own scientists and hopes to never send another press release to an inattentive newspaper reporter. Chevron runs a community news site for Richmond, CA, where it is the town’s largest employer. Coca-Cola now reportedly spends more money creating its own content than it does on television advertising.
Nestlé, Purina’s parent and the world’s largest food company, creates more than 1,500 pieces of content each day company-wide, and its brands have accumulated more than 250 million Facebook fans.
Advertisers and journalists have always been partners, and that partnership has always contained an inherent tension. Content marketing has the potential to turn that tension into an existential threat. Journalists like to think of themselves as protectors of the public interest, intermediaries who police both fact and rhetoric. The very premise of the profession is that it’s dangerous to have words pass straight from the mouths of CEOs or politicians to the public’s ear. This intermediary function is at the core of journalism’s identity and, though it wasn’t always thought of this way, the core of its business model. But each successful piece of content marketing is, in effect, a statement that a journalist wasn’t wanted or needed. Each time a consumer clicks on a piece of content marketing, or shares it with a friend, it’s confirmation that they’re very comfortable being out there in the information landscape on their own.
by Michael Meyer, CJR | Read more:
Image: Noma Bar
