The digital ecosystem is awash in content, but it’s not a case of more is merrier. “We think less is more,” says David Lang, Chief Content Officer for Mindshare NA and President of Mindshare Content+ Entertainment.
As he looks ahead to the 2017 Cannes Lions festival, Lang talks about the importance of conducting content strategies and audits for brands and explains how Mindshare used data and technology to tackle the challenge of getting Millennials to consider buying a Jaguar automobile.
“As a Chief Content Officer, this is going to sound funny but there’s too much content out there because a lot of the content doesn’t have a reason for being,” Lang says in this interview with Beet.TV. “It’s not based on a strategy, it’s just noise and clutter.”
He prefaces his thoughts by noting that Mindshare has removed the word “branded” as it relates to content. The bigger issue is that content needs to have “a reason to live and a purpose,” for both brands and their target audiences.
This was a particularly thorny issue facing Jaguar when it came to convincing the Millennial age cohort to include the brand in their consideration set, something they’d never really done before. Mindshare decided to create a two-minute action movie with a Jaguar model in the hero role and seven separate shots of potential protagonists. The goal was to lure 10,000 Millennials to Jaguar dealers for test drives during a six-city campaign.
Using the understanding that Millennials are the “selfie generation” and proprietary technology from Canada, Mindshare was able to film the 10,000 people and put each of them in the seat of the protagonist so that it appeared they were starring in their own action movie.
“So we had a technology stream, we had a data stream and because the content was relevant to the Millennials themselves, we had a 50 percent shareability on Facebook with a target that didn’t consider this brand at the very beginning of the conversation,” Lang says.
Via RFID technology, Jaguar dealers were able to follow up with the test participants. The effort was “hugely successful” and Jaguar “sold a ton of cars,” he adds.
“I would say in Cannes, less is more” with regard to the plethora of content available to consumers, says Lang. “It’s really important to do a content strategy and content audit to help drive what you should be doing, why you should be doing it and the metrics associated with those outcomes.”
This segment is part of the Beet.TV lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. 2017. The series is presented by Storyful. For more from the series, please visit this page.
