Posts by Arjun Basu

PASADENA, CA– The North American Travel Journalists Association (NATJA) recently announced their 2011 competition winners. Now in its 20^th year, the NATJA awards honor the “best of the best” in travel writing, photography and promotion that cover all aspects of the travel industry worldwide.

Spafax media winners include: Air Canada’s enRoute (5 awards), Air Canada’s OnAir e-zine (1 award), Fairmont Magazine for Fairmont Hotels & Resorts (1 award) and Bombardier Business Aircraft’s Experience Magazine (1 award).

Gold awards were won by  Bombardier’s Experience magazine for food writer Alan Richman’s “Bubble Economics” in the Culinary Travel category, and by Air Canada’s enRoute magazine for Susan Nerberg, Alex Redgrave and Stephen Marche’s stories in “Geek Odysseys” in the Travel Series – Magazines category. enRoute also earned a Silver for best in-flight magazine.

“This speaks to our overall commitment to quality content marketing,” said Raymond Girard, President, Content for Spafax. “It’s our calling card and it’s always nice to see our hard work rewarded.”

“At Spafax we believe in great content,” said Arjun Basu, Content Director. “Winning these awards is a testament to the talents of our staff and contributors, and to the dedication of our clients not just to their brands but to excellence overall.”

NATJA is the second largest travel media association in North America. Members include travel media professionals, convention and visitors bureaus, social media, hotels and attractions, and other travel marketing agencies. Members are provided with professional development workshops, peer-to-peer evaluation, web tools and networking opportunities. NATJA also publishes Travelworld International Magazine (www.travelworldmagazine.com). For more information about NATJA or a complete list of 2011 award-winners, visit www.natja.org.

Spafax and Kinetic sign up to support the Love Content initiative in 2012, which will award the best in Digital Out of Home Advertising campaigns.

After a very successful partnership last year, Spafax has once again teamed up with the Screen to present the 2012 Love Content Awards. Now in it’s second year, the Love Content Awards celebrate the very best in digital out-of-home advertising and campaign creative.

“Love Content is all about celebrating the growing body of exceptional creative campaign work being produced for the digital out-of-home industry,” explains Niall McBain, CEO of Spafax. “It is this creativity which is defining the impact and growth of the medium and we want to acknowledge the companies who are really pushing the boundaries.”

The 2011 Awards, held at the Screen Media Expo at Earl’s Court in May, generated over 165 submissions and saw prizes going to the likes of Nike, Lynx and JCDecaux for their innovative work across the medium. This year, many more entries are expected, with significant growth in the industry.

“Love Content is a great initiative and an ideal platform to engage the creative community, and celebrate and share the innovative work that’s currently being seen on digital OOH globally.” Says Carolyn Nugent uk head of digital at Kinetic “With more advertisers using the medium than ever before, and the growing potential for interaction with consumers on the move, I’m looking forward to the bar being raised even higher in 2012.”

‘We are delighted to be working with both Spafax and Kinetic,” says Richard Cobbold, Chairman of The Screen, “The commitment of Spafax to help us get Love Content off the ground in 2011 bore fruit with the incredible response we generated – with 160 creative submissions to our awards last year. This year with KINETIC on board – we are really find at the centre of the digital out-of-home advertising industry and we expect to see ever greater numbers of submissions for the awards.”

Judging the entries will be representatives from Agencies, Network Owners & the Technologists, including; Spafax, Kinetic, JWT, Ogilvy, HMDG, JCDecaux, CBS Outdoor, Ocean, Eye, Clear Channel & Outdoor Plus, ISE2011 & DV Signage.

Entries are open for any creative or nominations up until April 2012 with the award ceremony to be held in London Wednesday 16th May.

For more information or to submit entries, please contact:
Lisa Goldstein at The Screen: T: +442076312152  E:  lisa.goldstein@thescreen.org.uk  or visit www.lovecontent.org

About Spafax

Spafax is one of the world’s leading providers of branded content in the form of entertainment production and management, publishing and media sales. Clients include British Airways, Air Canada, Etihad Airways, Emirates, Mercedes Benz, Fairmont Hotels & Resorts and more. Spafax is a tenthavenue WPP company. For more information, please visit www.spafax.com

About Kinetic

Kinetic Worldwide is the world’s largest planner and buyer of Out of Home media and the global leader in understanding how brands can connect with people’s lifestyles and the environments they engage with. Fully owned by WPP and part of the tenthavenue performance marketing division, Kinetic’s expertise and insight helps deliver solutions for clients that achieve ambitious brand and marketing goals.

Kinetic is traditionally an Out of Home media agency and in addition today delivers wide-ranging specialist expertise through its complementary service divisions including Joule, Aviator, Target Health, Destination Media Group, Kinetic People, Meta, ALCANCE, Zone and Hi Rezz. Kinetic employs over 800 professionals across 38 offices.
www.kineticww.com

About tenthavenue

tenthavenue’s vision is to optimize performance wherever people engage with the world. tenthavenue’s mission is to be the leading global company to identify and build tailored audiences and outcomes across multiple channels and devices. For more information, please visit www.tenthavenue.com 

This isn’t a new idea. But it’s something that is floating around in so many different places that it’s starting to feel true. In the content business, I’ve always told my editors that spotting an idea twice is coincidence, but three times is a trend. I didn’t make that up either. But I believe it. A big idea from last year’s International Content Summit focused on Slow Content (I wrote this up in Sparksheet here). More than one speaker talked of consolidation. When Google+ went big last year, I wondered about social media overload. And now Chris Brogan, smart guy that he is, has labeled 2012 as the Year of Consolidation. And this is good news for everyone. The rush to “new” is going to slow, while we start to take deep breaths (yes, collectively) and hunt out quality. Good ideas will trump flash. This is good news for all content marketers who believe in substance to drive results. And maybe, just maybe, the internet will stop being an outlet for cute kitties.
(not that we have anything against kitties….)

Brand managers (or guardians – that’s a much grander sounding word, no?) are busier than ever. And sometimes they’re confused. They should be. Brand guardians are having a tough time seeing themselves as publishers, as content managers. The world is changing rapidly and sometimes it’s tough to get your bearings. That they never “owned” their own brands has long been established but even today some brand guardians seem to think they do. Worse, there have never been more brand touchpoints – consumers can literally access a brand whenever or wherever they want to. And if they can’t, that’s also a potential problem. Some basic basic truths in 2012:

1)   No one cares about your brand. Absolutely no one. Consumers only care about your brand as it pertains to them. Does your brand make them happy? Does it improve their lives? Is your brand and the values it espouses in line with how a consumer sees him/herself? Everything about a brand has to be seen in relation to the consumer. Without the consumer you have no brand. A brand isn’t just PR. It’s an outreach program and it needs recipients. Without a recipient and a brand is just floating in space, lifeless and meaningless. Without form.

2)   Without brand consistency you have nothing. How many touchpoints does your brand have? I remember once walking into a secret lair, an office hidden behind a staircase in a non-descript building. Inside, a giant windowless office that was a client’s rebranding nerve centre. I was shown a very simple Excel document, printed out and pinned up on the wall. And on it were the almost 200 consumer brand touchpoints that had been identified to that point. All this to say, your brand is more than just some words. It’s more than just a story. It’s a voice. It’s your company’s voice. Its humanity. And if you have different voices for different media, you’re just confusing the customer. And that’s bad branding.

3)   Don’t confuse a mission statement with a brand’s meaning. You should be able to describe your brand in one word. The mission statement (say “Generic Corp’s brand embodies the values of honesty and simplicity in improving the lives of its customers”) is just that – a statement and something for the staff. It’s internal. The word? That’s the nugget that goes out to the world.

4)   Your brand is the source of all media. Or it should be. A brand may start as a nugget but it sets a lot of stuff in motion. In this sense, perhaps nugget isn’t the right word. Pearl is. Your brand is like a pearl. Get it right, execute properly, and your brand shines. And since your brand is the source of all media, and your company is a publisher of content, you need to get that right. Everything is content. Brochures. Video. Your website. Any print materials. Custom publications. Newsletters. E-zines. Signage. Stationary. Posters. Ads. All of it is content. Because every company in the world is a media centre.

5)   Just because your brand was successful yesterday means nothing tomorrow. Brand maintenance is hard work. We all know that. And the worst thing a brand guardian can do is rest on his/her laurels. A brand review should be regular. Even when things are going well. Especially when things are going well. And a brand review should include all stakeholders. Both internal and external. Sometimes external agencies have a better idea about a company’s brand than its internal guardians.

6)   Don’t take your brand somewhere just because the competition is there as well. If the answer to anything is “Because everyone’s doing it” your brand is in a bad spot. Yes, the consumer demands and expects a lot more than they did just a few years ago. That’s why you need a solid strategy. Too many brands have rushed into various platforms and spaces without understanding what they were doing. The resulting brand black eye is both predictable and unfortunate. Does thinking things through make you slower? So what? If the brand is strong, it will survive the wait. And it will probably thrive.

As a content marketing agency, Spafax has seen some brands get it really really right and then others, well, not so much. We often tell potential clients that we want to “get under the skin” of their brands so that our work makes sense in a larger context. So that the message we create fits seamlessly into the existing brand universe. If we do our job well, we can even lead a brand to a new space by enhancing it in ways the client hadn’t ever considered. Content marketing is, in essence, another way of pushing brand values out to the consumer in a way that is relevant to them. Difficult? Yes. But definitely not impossible to do properly.

The word “brand” has gone through a huge shift (and will probably continue to do so) but the essence, the pearl of it, has remained constant. A brand embodies the soul of a company, how it wants to be perceived by consumers in a world of almost limitless choice. It is an amazingly powerful thing. And needs to be treated with respect. And intelligence.

We in the content industry tend to go to a lot of conferences. And there are a lot of conferences about content. With the vast changes in technology, everyone in the field wants to know the ins and outs of content and content strategy to better service their client needs. That’s perfectly understandable. But it also leads to something we’re starting to call The Conference Bubble: if you stay inside of it for too long, you tend to stop experiencing the outside world. The real world. And that disconnect is not good for content providers and it’s especially not good for their clients. It’s disastrous. In the end, the conference was really about a big idea and that was: quality over quantity. It’s something we preach at Spafax and it’s nice to know that after a few years of everyone trying to parcel out content in the shiniest baubles

At the recent International Content Summit, held in London, we were lucky enough to hear some compelling stories from the trenches (there’s more on the “big idea” from the conference here, at Sparksheet).

People Still Like Print

This is perhaps self-evident but you wouldn’t know it from The Conference Bubble. At least conferences that are about “content” or “content marketing.” The irony, of course, is that many of the speakers at these conferences are published authors pushing their books. Irony, another inconvenient truth.

Richard Cope, Global Head of Insight at Mintel, called print a status symbol. He said research has shown that “we still need to carry badges and emblems of taste” and that print fulfils that function. (This thinking went into the relaunch of Air Canada’s enRoute – we wanted to make it “printier” and also speaks to the sumptuous feel of our print media for Bombardier Business Aircraft, among others). An iPad may say something about us but a magazine says something specific. And then he put numbers to something we all understand intuitively: 42% of people consume print for “long journeys” (this is a UK study so take that to mean train trips) and 71% would rather read print than online. This stat was one of the most retweeted from the conference. For obvious reasons. Reading is a luxury, or should be qualified as such, because time is the new luxury, and it is relatively accessible, just like reading. Print might be on the way to niche status but it is an aspirational niche, and anything aspirational is also marketable.

These insights jibe closely to what we at Spafax have been saying for a while now: print is still important and a key component of a multi-channel communication strategy. Speaking of multi-channels….

What Hath the Touchscreen Wrought?

Nothing. It’s great. The Telegraph’s Mark Challinor even showed off the “nightmode” button on their app – a smart idea, brought on by user analytics (that is, a good number of their subscribers read the newspaper on their iPad in bed).  In good news for people who like to make money, the Telegraph’s studies have also found that readers like ads because it gives the newspaper app “a premium feel.” This goes back to the great thing about ads in print: readers have long found that ads are “content” as opposed to something they can skip over, a fact that has long explained the mammoth sizes (and success) of the fall fashion books. And Richard Cope asked a question that lingered long after he had asked it: Is the touch screen dulling our sense of touch or reawakening it? I’ll be thinking about that one for a long time.

One Brand, One Voice

Ruth Spencer, Head of Loyalty, for Boots (the largest drugstore chain in the UK and the home of one of the world’s great integrated content programs) affirmed that her company is “absolutely a content company.” And with a wide-ranging content strategy that embraces almost every form of media she insisted that her content must: be consistent, get integration right and play to each channels’ strengths. Meaning, quite often, one photo shoot for print, digital, in-store, you name it. What this says, really, is no silos, something I’ve touched on earlier. By employing a brand strategy without silos, Boots wins. And they do. Their program is something to behold.

Customer Loyalty

Myf Ryan, GM Marketing for Westfield UK, a large shopping mall developer, spoke of launching an enormous new mall in a relatively depressed section of East End London during the current economic climate. Westfield did this through the power of storytelling. That is, they gave a shopping mall that didn’t exist a backstory and then sold that story (as opposed to selling a mall) with stunning success. But more importantly, Ryan realized that any audience is “not channel loyal, they are content loyal” – so her story was consistent over multiple channels. More importantly, she said “Don’t tell a story about the brand, tell compelling stories that embody your brand” – something any good content marketer tries to get their clients to understand every day. The best brand stories are the ones the audience wants to be a part of, after all. No one really cares about a brand. Just what it can do for them. Brands that understand that are successful.

All great examples of good content done well. But more than that, all great examples of smart strategy in the service of great content working toward the same goal. It is really what all content marketing should strive for.