Say Media differentiates itself by proposing new relationships between content and advertising. By building a model around being both a content provider and a media seller, its church-and-state divide is not as thick as others in the space.
Say Media’s Canadian-born president, Troy Young, is coming back to his homeland next week to speak at Dx3, a two-day digital business conference in Toronto. His presentation, Beyond the Banner, may startle a few sacred cows in the online advertising space as he speaks about IAB standards and advertisers’ desire for long-term audiences without similarly long-term investments in content.
Why is your session called “Beyond the Banner?”
I want to talk first about why we’re so obsessed with the idea of dividing attention between editorial content and advertising in the age of the internet and where we’ve gone wrong. I feel like we’ve spent fifteen years digging out from under IAB standards and the market they’ve got built around them.
I also want to talk about content marketing. You can’t move anywhere in the marketing world without having a conversation about what content means to marketers. We’re all looking for people to pay attention to us. Everyone’s looking for long-view platforms for their brands. Content marketing is everything from a sponsored post and custom content and publishing to the social stuff attached to that.
You say “digging out” from under the IAB. What’s wrong with standards?
The notion that we can take a 300 x 250 piece of content, lay it on top of content that the consumer really wants, and hope that that was going to create an industry is pretty naive… In other media, [getting attention] is done logically. In print – a linear medium – you just divide a page. But the internet is unconstrained. How long is a “page?” How many columns is a page? So the industry has been really struggling, thinking things like “Let’s make the banner expand.” It was never really thought-through.
Underneath it all, the challenge with advertising is that it’s a standards-based business and everyone’s trying to differentiate by not adopting the standards… They want their formats to be different from the other guys because they’re not differentiating around their media content.
Have any thoughts on what makes for good content marketing?
I like the guys who are long-term content marketers, like the Amex’s of the world who’ve made commitments to projects like Open Forum, or Kraft, which has always talked not about food products but recipes. On the other hand, for the people trying to create entertainment, it’s really hit and miss. I think that what people are coming around to seeing is it’s a long-term commitment. We have to think about service broadly as marketer in the on-demand era. It’s hard to avoid interruption as a tactic long-term, but isn’t that the goal?
