Coca-Cola and New Republic content marketing

Welcome to Content24. Why is it different? Because it’s a digest of the stories that have made an impact over the past 24 hours, and not just a platform for recycled content marketing. Today we’re looking at Coca-Cola, New Republic and nothing less than the “future of marketing”

Coca-Cola’s Journey and the social networks

This is a piece from Digiday that is worth reading and echoes points we’ve been raising here for a while. It’s looking at Coca-Cola’s Journey site, which replaced its brand platform around three years ago. Essentially, Coke has tried to do everything right with Journey in that it’s a publishing platform running articles and videos with subjects not necessarily concerning soft drinks.

The problem is that it is struggling to compete with the social networks, most notably Facebook. One issue is that people are more likely to view news through an app than go to a home page to find it directly. Then there is Facebook Instant, which allows you to publish and keep your own ad revenue.

Maybe Facebook and other social networks are the future. But it would be sad to have such a uniform presence replace the current content marketing landscape.

New Republic relaunches content marketing agency

NewsCred has run a piece on New Republic relaunching its content marketing subsidiary Novel online.

“At the New Republic we believe great journalism can impact society and effect change,” says Chris Hughes, the company’s publisher and executive chairman. “This belief is part of the inspiration behind Novel, a creative agency that we have incubated in the New Republic.” He adds: “Novel works separately from the New Republic monetization team, but is grounded in the history and experience of a mission-driven media organisation that has championed progressive ideas for over 100 years.”

It also released some US research into consumer views towards content marketing. Some of it is relevant to the piece above.

• 34% dislike or distrust clickbait headlines.
• 64% prioritise serious journalism on issues they care about when assessing a new news site.
• Topics of importance ranked: 85% healthcare, 80% education, 80% work-life balance, 70% climate change.
• 72% come across new publications on Facebook.
• 52% of traffic to newrepublic.com in June-August 2015 was from mobile.

Former Red Bull marketing boss puts out ‘marketing manifesto’

Red Bull is one of the trendsetters in content marketing, while adblocking could potentially be a huge boost to the sector. Huib van Bockel, former Red Bull head of marketing, has some advice for brands on the issue in his new book.

He makes the point that much online advertising, such as banners, is simply an outdoor ad dressed up online. The difference is the outdoor version doesn’t follow you around, slow down your car or install malware on it.

The answer, he says: “Instead of asking: how can we make sure ‘consumers’ will like us, how can we make them buy us? How can we target them? We should turn this around. We should ask ourselves: what can we do for the people who are important to us? How can we give them something they will truly appreciate? Something that they will want to see and engage with, something that they do not want to block, but seek out and share with others. This will not only make sure that our messages will be heard, but in my opinion it is the only proper way to build loyalty.”