The American Marketing Association of New York spoke with Deloitte Digital’s Alan Schulman about the pressure on brands to create content at the speed of culture.

TRANSCRIPT:

Lisa:
0:03 The speed of content creation and distribution is a massive challenge for
marketers today.
00:09 The American Marketing Association caught up with agency and consulting veteran Allen Shulman who’s now at Deloitte Digital to talk about
00:18 process and organization change to create content at the speed of culture.

Alan:
00:22 From a marketing perspective, one of the things that’s changed drastically is the speed at which you’ve got to get content to market.
00:31 And the reason is because in the old model, where you can interrupt people within the programming that they were watching—we’ve now found
00:41 that that’s no longer relevant because people can skip those messages and people can avoid those messages whether they’re on TV or whether they’re online or whether they’re on your phone.
00:50 It’s become ever more important in this attention economy for marketers to know how to get your attention and to do so with content that frankly he comes fast, is relevant to the culture and relevant to the conversation that’s happening right now.
01:06 We’re in a new age now. Whereas before we were going for share a voice and share of mind, more and more marketers realize that it’s about share of culture and share of conversation.
01:17 To be in the conversation and be in the culture, you have to be in the now and to be in the now that means you need to create more content faster and get it out there so that you can, in fact organically draft off of the conversation that’s out there in the culture
01:33 To do that that means you’ve got to take a hard look at your marketing organization take a hard look at your marketing operations and figure out are you set up to create content at the speed of culture agility.
01:49 Now is something that we recognize isn’t just about how you build digital products and services agility is how you run marketing.
01:55 First of all, you have to be good cross-functional collaborators. You have to take those core crafts of design, copy, and code have them in a proximity with one another.
02:07 Then bring in other things that typically from a content workflow perspective would slow you down.
02:13 That’s things like legal approval, regulatory approval; these are the things that typically hamper marketers from getting content to market quickly.
02:23 If you look at some of the more progressive marketers who have adopted a newsroom style of content workflow, they’ve got digital, they’ve got copy, they’ve got legal, and they’ve got PR right there in the proximity of one another
02:41 so that when content has to be created and put out there, that they’ve got themselves set up for content at the speed of culture.
02:48 I think for agencies the implications are huge. For content at the speed of culture it means they’re going to have to become more nimble at how they create.
02:58 The old days of give us your brief, we’re gonna go of behind a curtain for three weeks and
come back and go “ta-da,” here’s your lightning and a bottle idea are over.
03:08 I think it’s become a muc more collaborative process almost like brand as publisher, functioning almost like a newsroom or a magazine would.
03:18 There are really three components to what I would call content at the speed of culture.
03:21 The first is, are you getting agile insights in from your data and analytics people? Data’s like oil. It’s only good when you refine it and turn it into fuel, right?”
03:33 Then, do you have scaled content and video capability so that you can make content fresh daily?
03:38 It’s a matter of can you get cross-channel content in a more agile way.
03:42 The third component is once you distribute, are you set up to measure quickly? And that’s, you know, that’s the area where we’re seeing all kinds of new measurement platforms that I think do a really good job of getting you more real-time measurement on content.
03:55 It’s not about measuring one channel at a time, it’s about can you get out there and measure more channels simultaneously so that you can iterate on that content?
0-4:05 So that’s what we call content at the speed of culture today.

Lisa:
04:08 Timing is everything.
04:10 The right content to the right person right on time is content velocity; content at the speed of culture.
04:18 That’s brilliance in marketing.