Experienced Ad-Side Creative Director Says Content and Creative Are The Same

While it may not always be obvious, there has long existed an invisible wall between “creatives” (art directors and copywriters charged with dreaming up marketing campaigns and executions) and those of us who were not trained to be, well, creative. The world of content marketing is systematically tearing down that wall, from both sides.

Today’s ad creatives are building out integrated, holistic campaigns, forcing the incorporation of social and digital. And, digital-centric content marketers are developing bigger ideas that can carry through to above-the-line print, television, radio and outdoor.

In my never-ending search for answers to the question, “Are content marketers today’s ad creatives?” I called on David Bonner, Executive Creative Officer at On Ideas, to sit down for another installment of Thismoment in Content Marketing.

Bonner and I worked together for a bit at Doe-Anderson in the mid-2000s. He was the Chief Creative Officer, and I was a fledgling PR account rep that knew a little something about these new social platforms and blogging. In his tenure there I wound up moving up to Director of Social Media and then VP and Director of Interactive. So we pitched a lot of business and worked on a lot of brands together.

His work over the years has touched a number of brands, but I am most familiar with our collective Maker’s Mark work. He’s also worked with brands like Kohler, Winn Dixie, American Red Cross, Shoney’s, and that’s the tip of the iceberg.

The transcription of the video is available below. You can find David’s portfolio online at www.davidbonner.com. And, of course, he is findable at onideas.com as well.

Transcript:

Jason Falls: Welcome to Thismoment in Content Marketing from our friends at Thismoment where we are talking to the movers and shakers, cookers, and bakers in the world of content marketing. Who is creating compelling content? How, why, and what are the outcomes? I’m your host, Jason Falls.

And today we have another unique perspective on this world of content, David Bonner. David is the Executive Creative Director at On Ideas, an ad agency marketing firm in Jacksonville, Florida. He has led creative at a number of agencies and worked with some really amazing brands over the years. I personally have even worked with David at a couple of his stops, most notably when we worked together at Doe Anderson here in Louisville.

David, good to see you again.

David Bonner: Hey, it’s great seeing you Jason. Thanks so much.

Jason Falls: Glad to have you. So if memory serves, once upon at time you were naval intelligence. How does one go from being Mark Harmon to a creative director?

David Bonner: Great question. So the short story is I read this book called “What Color is Your Parachute?” So everything that book said like turn in your gun and badge and your credentials, and become an advertising copywriter. So that’s what I did.

Jason Falls: So if everybody goes and reads that book will they become an advertising copywriter?

David Bonner: That’s exactly what will happen, provides the exact same answer regardless of who you are. It’s almost like a magic eight ball. Is really what it is.

Jason Falls: Oh, very nice. So apparently it turned out well for you.

David Bonner: It did, thank heavens, because if not, I’d probably still be living in my parents’ basement.

Jason Falls: Well you know, there’s not bad things to being in CIS, I suppose. But nice choice I suppose.

So when I knew you here in Louisville at Doe Anderson, social was just starting to emerge for sort of the bleeding edge brands. Most brands were afraid of it. You’ve been leading ad creatives during this evolution over the past eight to ten years. How has marketing changed?

David Bonner: I think you were the beginning of the internet really, Jason, is what happened. You and Al Gore, that’s how all this started. So really, we owe it all to you.

Increasingly, I think the agencies have dropped the Kool-Aid and they get it, and they understand that engagement is so much more important, and having dialog is so much more important, and everybody who is watching this, that they get it. Now getting there has been, that’s been the dog’s breakfast.

I’ve now gone through three different agencies where we’ve transitioned into that digital world. So we’ve taken traditional and moved them over. And that, on the other hand, has been absolutely horrific. It’s just been train wreck after train wreck. And eventually people understand it’s a little bit like putting architects and engineers in the same world together. So you have to construct something not only that’s beautiful but works, and it has meaning to it, and it’s going to affect your lifestyle. So I think that’s what’s happened over the years.

Jason Falls: So I had this running theory that content marketing is really ad creative for the digital era. If that’s accurate, what does that mean about classically trained creatives?

David Bonner: Well, it means that they have to realize that they’re no longer at the center of the universe. I think it’s that Copernican shift that happened in the world is that the heroes in this journey are customers and that it’s all about them, not about how many one shift pencils you have.

Jason Falls: Wow. So in my experience then, kind of rolling off that same question, there’s always been a line drawn between, at least in the ad agency world that I’ve worked in, there’s been a line drawn between creatives and everyone else. Is the democratization of media the fact that anybody can now create content, whether it be visual or written or what not, and publish it? Is it blurring that line between creatives and everyone else? And is that a good or a bad thing?

David Bonner: Yeah, you know I don’t know exactly what the cause is exactly. Certainly we’ve been through this extraordinary revolutionary sort of shift. Regardless, it’s a better thing and regardless that mass collaboration, whether it’s mass collaboration with an agency or mass collaboration within the world, it is toning up our ideas and making sure that they’re more relevant, that they’re more robust, that the ideas work, and that they’re working and they’re optimal for everyone. So we have that constant check now in the world to make sure that the ideas just don’t appeal to a small group of white guys who went to Yale, but now it has to work in the real world.

So that’s a great thing. And collaborative ideation, and collaborative sort of vision, and iterative storytelling, and all that is just so fantastic. It’s just working really wonderfully well. So I love where we’ve evolved to.

Jason Falls: Well, and how do you then in managing a group of creative people that collaborate, whether it be art directors and copywriters who are more traditionally trained, or sort of the digital PR social content folks today, how do you keep them focused on the ultimate task at hand and not sort of infighting for who leads the creative ideation?

David Bonner: Yeah, you know recently I’ve gone back to read John Wooden’s book, [inaudible 00:06:01] The Success Pyramid. And Wooden was all about team. And it was about doing the little things together, and we’re all working together to make sure . . . I don’t know whether it’s Wooden or it’s a little bit like a garden in some ways and keeping the garden healthy, and it requires planting the basil next to the tomatoes to make sure that the bugs don’t get all [inaudible 00:06:26]. You know, it’s like this really weird sort of Gaea approach to saving the world, one creative department at a time, is that we all work together and that we’re all symbiotic to one another.

Jason Falls: How important is it when you interview a copywriter, or an art director, or a social content person, to understand digital social and or sort of the creative process from the other perspective?

David Bonner: Yeah, I think regardless of whether it was back then in the dark ages five years ago, or whether it’s today, I think there still needs to be this absolute curiosity and this absolute interest in others and the absolute interest in whatever it is that ends up on your desk for that day, and that’s what makes this world so interesting.

So those people who have that innate curiosity and that innate, I would say, growth mindset, that Carol Dweck sort of growth mindset, is all about discovering something new and bringing it to the world in this really new relevant way. So if they still have that spark and that glimmer in their eye, then that’s good.

Jason Falls: Excellent. David, where can people find more about you and On Ideas on the inter webs?

David Bonner: On the inter webs you can find us at onideas.com, pretty easy. And I’m certainly on LinkedIn and a couple of other places, although increasingly I’m being secretive out in that world. So you’ll have to look for me pretty closely. I’m at davidbonner.com.

Jason Falls: Excellent. David, thanks so much for taking some time with us.

David Bonner: My pleasure. Thanks, Jason.

Jason Falls: And thank all of you for joining us for another episode of Thismoment in Content Marketing. Check out other interviews in a pretty nifty content marketing tool in of itself over there at thismoment.com. See you next time.

The post Thismoment in Content Marketing Episode 6: David Bonner appeared first on Thismoment Content Marketing Blog.

A 60 Second Content Tip —My favorite story of a company pushing back against content marketing goes like this: A blog platform sales executive was talking to a B2B (business-to-business) CEO about using blogs to lift search results and drive more online leads. The CEO refused the offer by saying, “we’re a wholesale tire company, and we don’t write or produce content.”

The salesman decided to prove him wrong. He asked, “how many salespeople do you have?”

“Around 100,” the CEO replied.

“And how many of them have phones or email addresses?”

“All of them.”

“And how many of them answer questions from customers and prospective customers via those phones or those email accounts?”

“All of them. That’s what they do, all day.”

“About how many questions does the typical sales person answer in a day—let’s make it simple—how many via email?”

The CEO thought for a moment and said, “Probably 10-15.”

So, the salesman concluded, “You have 10-15 pieces of written content per salesperson per day across a team of 100 people? By my count, that’s 100 to 150 pieces of content per day. That’s enough content in a single day to fuel a company blog for five months.”

Soon thereafter the CEO bought the software and launched a company blog.

According to the Content Marketing Institute’s 2015 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends report, 50% of B2B marketers are concerned with producing content consistently. In other words, they are worried that they don’t have enough content. Not true, you likely have a lot of content.

60 second content tip of the day: Everyone is a content producer. Everyone is a content marketer. Don’t let denial be your excuse and look for content everywhere.

The post 60 Second Content Tip: You Have More Content Than You Think appeared first on Thismoment Content Marketing Blog.

Content marketing is more than tactics

Content marketers often think about blog posts, videos, images, Tweets and the like. But, content marketing is so much more than tactical execution. Strong content marketing is an extension of the business idea. It’s a strategy that cultivates the kind of audiences you need to sell to in order to be successful.

I caught up with Chris Bergman, CEO of ChoreMonster, a software company that allows parents to gamify the household chores for their children, turning family work into family fun. We talked about how content marketing has more benefit to bear on a business than just fodder for web search engines and social networks.

ChoreMontster has two primary audiences: parents and their children. So their content walks a fine balanced line, and every piece of it screams “brand.”

Bergman worked in several startups and as a photographer before venturing out with the ChoreMonster idea, he can be found on Twitter.

Video transcript:

Jason: Welcome to Thismoment in Content Marketing from our friends at thismoment.com. We are here to talk to the movers and shakers, the cookers and bakers in the content marketing world, who’s creating compelling content, how, why and what are the outcomes.

I’m your host, Jason Falls. This week, we have another great guest. Chris Bergman is the C.E.O. of ChoreMonster. If you haven’t heard of ChoreMonster, surely to goodness you certainly will start hearing more about them soon, because they are almost literally blowing up. They’re not literally blowing up, because that would require Fire and E.M.S. people. But they are doing a fantastic job of captivating an audience out there. We’re going to talk a little bit more about that. We’re going to talk to Chris about content marketing from a couple of different perspectives.

Chris, thank you for joining us, and welcome to Thismoment in Content Marketing.

Chris: Hey, thanks for having me, man. This is good.

Jason: Glad to do it. You can immediately see Chris’ company leads with content, because he has ChoreMonsters on the wall behind him. Great product placement.

Chris: Thank you. It just happened to be in our conference room. That’s all.

Jason: That’s great. I’ve been there. I’ve actually physically been there. The atmosphere is cool and the whole company sort of eats, sleeps, and breathes this type of content. To catch people up who don’t know what ChoreMonster is, tell us what ChoreMonster is and what it does.

Chris: ChoreMonster is actually the most ridiculously fun and motivating framework for families where every home becomes a joyful place. Kids gain points, turn them in for real-life rewards, and then they also get to collect monsters for completing chores. For every chore they complete, they get a ticket to the Monster Carnival and have a chance to win one of a hundred different interactive monsters.

Jason: You’ve gamified the household chore experience.

Chris: Yeah, absolutely, definitely. I think one of the things that we do really well is this dual layer gamification where we have extrinsic motivation from the parents and then intrinsic motivation through the app with our content specifically.

Jason: We were talking offline before we started recording. When I think of ChoreMonster… Obviously I’ve just been an observer from afar. I haven’t really been deeply involved with what you guys do. But when I look at your content in terms of your blog, which I think is magnificent and is a great magnet for parents, and your Facebook and your tweets and all that good stuff, I see something that I think a lot of people forget about in the content marketing world. I see an absolute pure extension of the brand of the DNA of the company.

In my mind, I’m guessing, and I want to ask you this question, content marketing for you is not necessarily this outward stuff that we promote. It’s not a tactic. It’s actually a strategy from top down on who you are. Is that accurate?

Chris: Yeah, absolutely. We have a unique challenge in that we’re serving two different audiences. We’re serving parents and kids separately. So we have to think about how we communicate to those audiences very differently for a multitude of reasons. One, personality types, and two, we have CAPA regulations that we have to adhere to as well.

When we think about connecting with our user base, we take a couple of different approaches. For parents, they’re kind of used to blogs and Facebook and things like that. We definitely have a strategy to connect with them through that sort of content. But with kids in particular, we need to connect to them on their level. For us, that level tends to be dumb eight-year-old humor and it works really well.

Jason: My kind of humor. Actually I’m probably more into the 12 and 13-year-old kind of humor, but I get it. I get it.

Chris: Ours is a little clean but also probably a little more smelly than yours would be my guess.

Jason: Okay, yeah. I remember the fifth grade lunchroom table. Yeah, that was a magnificent place. I had a guy named Matt Justice who still lives here in Louisville. I see him every now and then. I haven’t yet told his kids, when I see him at Chick-fil-A or whatever, your father used to be able to drink an entire little pint thing of milk and belch for 120 seconds straight.

There you go. That could be a good idea for one of your monsters. They can be the burping monster.

Chris: Oh, yeah, absolutely. We’ve got a couple of those already I’m pretty sure.

Jason: That’s good, that’s good. Is it safe to say then from a C.E.O.’s perspective – because you’re not the content marketing director, you’re running the damn company – content is more about giving people something to feast on, engage with, and do while they’re interacting on site or in-app versus something that is just, “Hey, come see us”?

Chris: For us, content’s more about retention and engagement than it is growth. We grow organically in general just through word of mouth and the actual function of our app being that kids beg to do chores, and moms tell other moms that all the time. They’re like there’s no way that’s true. Try it. We dare you. Then sure enough it works to our own surprise.

Jason: That’s a good marketing strategy. I dare you to use my app. That’s fascinating.

Chris: For us, it’s about how do we continue to create a behavior loop inside the app, and how do we make sure that we can engage with our audience regularly and create consistency across the platform. It’s very much centered towards retention, towards engagement, towards coming in and seeing what’s going on on a regular basis.

Jason: Do you have a staple of writers to go along with your engineers? How is your team made up that drives all this content?

Chris: For us, we focus primarily on animation. We have the 30-second cartoons that we create on a regular basis. We have some writers in-house that do writing for that. For us, the bulk of our company is creative – animators, illustrators, designers, people like that. Obviously we need the engineers as well. Yeah, the real challenge is how do you tell a joke in 30 seconds and make it funny to a 9-year-old. We kind of fall back on farts. That’s the easy way to answer that question.

Jason: Well, yes, burp and fart jokes work every time. In fact, I have a nine-year-old son and a six-year-old daughter, so I’m kind of right in the middle of where you’re focusing. If I want to make them laugh at dinner, I typically just say the word poop and it does the trick every time.

Chris: That kind of works, yeah.

Jason: It does. Tell people why they should use ChoreMonster.

Chris: A couple of different reasons. One, your house becomes much cleaner. We’ve had 10 million chores completed on the platform so far, which is pretty incredible. That’s a lot of clean bedrooms.

Without getting too psychological and clinical, we talk a lot about executive function skills for kids specifically about independent motivation and them starting to understand prioritization of things they have to complete. We focus primarily on that inside the app. If you really want to give your kids a head start on how to be an adult, this is a great way to do it, a great way for them to understand and learn how to manage their own adult life when they’re nine years old. It gives them independence and empowerment in a way that you’d be really, really surprised to see.

Jason: Wow, sounds like you’ve invented the coolest thing ever on the whole planet. I assume you get that a lot, right?

Chris: Thanks. Only from our users.

Jason: Only from what? That’s who you need it from.

Chris: Yeah.

Jason: Very good. Chris, where can people find you and the app on the interwebs?

Chris: Yeah, choremonster.com. You can register on the web. We’re available on iOS, Android, Kindle, Windows 8, and we’ll be available on the Nintendo 3DS in March as well.

Jason: Fantastic. All of this from a guy who… When I met you, you were hacking away at a photo startup. You’re a photographer, right?

Chris: Yeah, yeah. I have a lot of different things that I’m interested in. Right now, the primary one is making sure that homes are joyful places.

Jason: Wow, that’s a hell of a mission. Hats off, man.

Chris: Thanks.

Jason: That’s good stuff. He’s Chris Bergman with ChoreMonster. Go to choremonster.com and sign up and get your kids cleaning your house for you and all that other psychological benefit stuff, too, which is cool. Thank you, Chris, and thank all of you for tuning in for another episode of Thismoment in Content Marketing. Check out other interviews and a pretty nifty content marketing platform over at thismoment.com. That’s it for now. See you next time.

Chris: Cheers.

The post Thismoment in Content Marketing Episode 5: Chris Bergman appeared first on Thismoment Content Marketing Blog.

This year, the most intriguing Super Bowl ad was from McDonald’s. Certainly, we all wish we had their budget, but regardless of spend, McDonald’s provided a lesson about extending ad campaigns through social engagement, which doesn’t have to extend the dollars.

McDonald’s “Pay With Love”

McDonald’s “Pay With Love” advertisement extended their TV ad into restaurants where customers could indeed pay with love. And as we saw, they then shared that experience with social networks.

But then McDonald’s added its proactive extension to the campaign by announcing on their social channels they would be giving away one of everything advertised during the Super Bowl. All fans had to do to enter was retweet their posts about each of the other sponsor’s commercials.

While the two ideas could have existed separately, the “love” being paid by the brand did connect the ad with the social extension of the giveaway.

Extending an ad campaign doesn’t have to be done solely with hashtags. In 2008, I helped extend Jim Beam’s first television commercial in a decade with a video contest that garnered a Sammy Award the following year.

We took the commercial concept, a humorous parody of the perfect girlfriend, and challenged brand fans to create their own version of the perfect girlfriend or boyfriend. We gave them access to graphics, fonts, and even sound bytes from the original ad and challenged them to film a new iteration.

That effort resulted in a nearly six-month extension of a relatively short television media buy, over 500 content video entries and over 90 million online brand impressions through website visits and social shares.

The Key To Extending Your Advertising

While ad campaigns can live on in social and other avenues of online content for weeks, months and even years, there needs to be an intention behind it in order to be successful. Fans won’t just like your television, print or even radio ads and talk about them — at least not on the vast majority of cases. It’s when you devise a plan to extend the campaign that true virality happens.

As you plot your next ad campaign, ask the following questions to help inform your efforts to extend through social platforms:

• Can we motivate our fans and followers to add to the campaign through ideas, images or other assets?
• Is there an idea or platform larger than our brand that people will identify with and interact
• If people follow our persuasion in this campaign, is there something we can do to reward them?
• Can we tie purchases to a matching charitable effort?

The more you can develop advertising campaigns that have a natural engagement point beyond the ad, the easier extending the idea to the social web will be. The trick is looking at the campaign as more than just ads. Step back and think about extending the message and storyline to many channels. Sure, you can start with a hashtag idea, but don’t stop there. The only limits are your imagination.

The post Extending Ad Campaigns Means Extending Your Thinking appeared first on Thismoment Content Marketing Blog.