Based on Kyle Monson‘s keynote address at the Mesh digital conference, brand journalism – when brands tell their own stories using audience relevance, timeliness and transparency as publishers do – can be a powerful tool, but is certainly not a fit for all brands.
According to Monson, a founding partner of Knock Twice, a PR and advertising company with offices in San Francisco and New York, if a brand is in crisis or rebrand mode, wants to connect with a niche audience or has a long sales cycle, then brand journalism can be a smart strategy. But if a company isn’t ready to be transparent and put itself out there, it should take a pass on this subset of content marketing that has become a growing area of interest to marketers.
For starters, he explained how helping brands incorporate a journalistic style means creating audience relevance with timely content that is transparent and honest. The truth element is especially important, said Monson. “Not all content marketing goes in that direction,” he said.
Monson’s own background is in journalism – he previously wrote for Newsweek and worked his way up the editorial ranks at PC Magazine before joining JWT in 2009. Prior to his arrival at JWT, it had created the “Ford Bold Moves” campaign.
This documentary gave the car company a chance to reinvent itself amid the massive challenges it faced at the time. While Ford came to JWT looking for an ad campaign, Monson said the agency believed it instead needed a “corporate reinvention,” one that would tap into the “innate fandom” that Americans have for the Ford brand. The result: documentary filmmakers were used to tell the real story of Ford’s workers, designers and history while it attempted to make its comeback. This type of effort “resonates with the audience and lets the client own up to where they are,” said Monson.
“Every content campaign has to establish trust,” said Monson. That can be tricky, especially when you’re trying to get an audience to confront their inherent distrust of a brand.
Getting brands onboard with the idea of becoming journalistic is very difficult, Monson admitted. He tells his clients that “it’s going to be a bit of a slog” since the payoff won’t necessarily be immediate. Brand journalism isn’t for those looking to get one million impressions overnight. He’s worked on campaigns where it’s taken a year to set up a strategy because the journalistic process is much different than making a TV commercial or putting out a press release.
Brand journalism requires brands to “flex muscles they haven’t used before,” he said. And hiring a journalist to join a brand isn’t a quick-fix solution. While he was called “the unicorn” at JWT because he said he was expected to come in and fix everything with his editorial background, there’s an adjustment period for journalists entering the client world. From learning a different business language to realizing that clients hold the power in meetings, there’s a learning curve. What journalists do bring to the table, he said, is skepticism. There’s always got to be someone bringing an objective eye to an advertising meeting to question assumptions.
Addressing the value that content marketing can offer brands, Monson said it can really shift perceptions.
On the flip side, he said, audiences now get exposed to a lot of content marketing “and most of it is garbage.” To differentiate, Monson recommends making sure that content marketing has a human tone and doesn’t sound like it’s been through rounds of lawyers and copy editors.
He referenced one of the more well-known campaigns he personally worked on while at JWT: “It’s Everybody’s Business,” a web series presented by Microsoft that examined the strategies various companies had used to deal with big business challenges.
Speaking with Marketing after his keynote, Monson reiterated his belief that brand journalism isn’t a solution for every brand. It’s a great way to make more engaging content, reach specific influencer sets or help shed an old image during a brand transformation, but for brands that “don’t have anything interesting to say” and aren’t ready to take a transparent approach (he figures 80% of brands fall under that category) it’s not the right strategy.
