© 2016 Mara Einstein
Published for the book trade by OR Books in partnership with Counterpoint Press. Distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West
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First printing 2016
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ebook ISBN 9781944869168
“There is no need for advertisements to look like advertisements. If you make them look like editorial pages, you will attract about 50 percent more readers. You might think that the public would resent this trick, but there is no evidence to suggest that they do.”
—David Ogilvy, founder, Ogilvy & Mather
“Nobody comes to Buzzfeed to look at the ads, but they’ll come for the content. When the advertising is content—good content they’re willing to click on and engage with, and share if it’s good—that’s the future for publishers.”
—Jonah Peretti, founder, BuzzFeed
To David, for listening to me,
for believing in me, for loving me
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION • WHY ADS DON’T LOOK LIKE ADS
1 • FROM MASS TO MILLENNIALS
2 • WHAT WE SHARE & WHY WE SHARE
3 • NATIVE ADVERTISING: PUBLISHERS AS MARKETERS
4 • CONTENT MARKETING: MARKETERS AS PUBLISHERS
5 • THE DIGITAL SELL: BIG DATA, PROGRAMMATIC BUYING, AND LIVING BY THE NUMBERS
6 • THE [DIS]EMPOWERED CONSUMER
7 • ADVERTISING OURSELVES TO DEATH
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ENDNOTES
“Ads are baked into content like chocolate chips into a cookie. Except it’s more like raisins into a cookie, because no one fucking wants them there.”
—John Oliver
On October 14, 2012, Felix Baumgartner attempted the impossible—to dive from outer space going faster than the speed of sound. Wearing what looked like a battery pack out of a 1950s sci-fi movie, millions of people watched as this Austrian jumped from a space pod surrounded by darkness to land safely in a sunlit field 128,000 feet below. Successfully traveling at 844 miles per hour, this leap was a triumph of technology and one man’s fearlessness that became the talk of the world, a twenty-first-century version of Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon.
Years of planning had gone into this. Technologies were developed, test jumps executed, and millions of dollars spent. Numerous television networks were asked to be part of the project, and many turned it down. You can’t really blame them. This project was dangerous. Weather conditions had to be perfect. The network and production crew had to be ready at a moment’s notice. And there was the real possibility that the network would show, live, a man jumping to his death. Discovery Channel took on the challenge and aired this daredevil’s plunge, creating one of the highest-rated programs in the network’s history.
But this exceedingly risky endeavor wasn’t a NASA mission or a physics experiment out of Carnegie Mellon. It was an extreme event called Stratos that had been developed and paid for by Red Bull, a producer of energy drinks popular with teens, young adults, and college students cramming for finals. Marketed with the tagline “Red Bull gives you wings,” the product is all about communicating that the company is on the cutting edge of pop culture.1 So cutting edge that the only clues to commercialization in the video are subtle displays of the Red Bull logo that fit seamlessly into the content—on the space pod, on Baumgartner’s space suit, on t-shirts of people watching in the crowd below, and so on. The camera never lingers on these symbols and the viewer’s attention is on the fantastic achievement about to occur, so unless you know to look for them they are easy to miss.
Incredibly, then, all this work, money, and even risk to a person’s life were nothing more than an elaborate, exceptionally well-executed piece of advertising.2
Stunning events with arresting visuals like Stratos are part of a growing advertising phenomenon known as content marketing, a straightforward-sounding yet ultimately vague way to describe the means through which advertisers get people to spend time watching or reading “content” that the advertiser has paid for. The “content” masquerades as “news” (or entertainment) and, when executed to perfection, results in successful stunts like the Red Bull leap from space. This trend has become so pervasive that marketers are starting to proclaim that content marketing might soon become the only type of marketing left. Chances are, though, that you’ve never heard of content marketing, and that’s exactly the point.
A key aspect of this marketing tool is to engage consumers without their realizing they’ve taken part in a promotional initiative. Red Bull did this brilliantly. In praising the Stratos jump as one of the best advertising campaigns of the twenty-first century, a senior executive noted in industry magazine Advertising Age: “The beauty of it was that it didn’t feel like you were being sold something.”3
Red Bull—and now almost every consumer marketer on the planet (close to 90 percent)—uses content marketing. They use it because it works. In this case, 37 million people watched a short YouTube video, while others viewed longer more detailed versions, or edits in different languages, or a documentary on Discovery, or as the lede news story in print or on television—free media for the brand that totaled in the tens of millions of dollars in the U.S. and conservative estimates suggest that this totaled more than six billion Euros worldwide in the first three days alone.4 This space jump is a small part of the company’s larger marketing plan in which traditional advertising is shunned in favor of sponsoring extreme sporting events, funding unknown musicians, and developing cutting-edge technology. Content about these experiences appear on the Red Bull YouTube channel, a site that in 2015 topped more than one billion views, and they are presented through documentaries, magazines, and reality series produced by Red Bull Media House. But the goal is not only viewership, it is sales. And the Red Bull content initiative paid off handsomely. In the first six months after the Stratos jump, sales rose seven percent to $1.6 billion.5
One small step for man . . . one giant leap for Red Bull.
CONTENT CONFUSION
Even with twenty-plus years of marketing experience, I didn’t initially realize that this was an advertising ploy. I watched the jump as others had, and I never once thought that I was being sold an extreme energy drink. I thought I was watching news.
That