Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Content is King but is it the Court Jester too?



OK we all know the saying that content is King but it has to be a couple of other things too. It has to play the part of Court Jester and Concierge. I know odd coupling but if it fails to entertain us we will never notice it. If it fails to help us we will be annoyed by it.

TV content can (depending on the brand) still get away with being just the Court Jester. TV has to be interesting and entertaining. The Super Bowl is coming up and that is the mecca (supposedly) of entertaining content. The Super Bowl ads I did a few years back were just that, entertaining. They created a buzz around E-Trade, this was the strategy and it worked. E-Trade is one of the old school .com's that is still around and still pretty strong. People talked about those ads, they competed with Budweiser, and with Bud they topped the USA Today polls. They were great Court Jesters.

Web content on the other hand still needs to be entertaining but it has to solve problems and be helpful as well. What I'm looking for on the web is sometimes different than what I want on my flat screen. I get annoyed by purely informational ads and boring content that appear on my screen while I'm cruisin the web. They had better be helpful, cool or entertaining and not too sales driven or I get pissed at the brand itself.

Just because you want to say it to the consumer does not mean they want to hear it. The days of talking at the consumer has been dead for a while now. You learn that lesson or you go out of business.

So let's modify the statement. Content must be interesting, entertaining and helpful to be King.
Content must be part Court Jester and part Concierge.

We all know what happen to unhelpful Concierge and unfunny Court Jesters. One gets no tips while the other loses his head.

Neither is good for us marketing advertising folk.

Good luck.