The digital marketing is undergoing an immense shift. While traditional marketing campaigns used to be striking and unmistakable (think the iconic presidential poster with emboldened “YOU”), there is one factor that is of the utmost importance in the current digital marketing space – consumers don’t want to know they’re being marketed too. Never more so than now has the truth ‘people love to buy, but hate to be sold’ been more pertinent.
“Content marketing is the future…of the world”. Why? Because it fulfils all the purposes of what marketing endeavours to do; it incites to high levels of engagement, conveys the brand’s image and feeds the consumer regular messages and reminders of the brand without being invasive and frankly, annoying. Content marketing has revolutionised digital marketing because of one earth-shattering reason: it flipped the formula. Nobody wants what comes too easy or is forced upon them, like ads typically are. By creating captivating content that isn’t forced upon one’s screen as an ad, but rather appears as an intriguing YouTube link, remarkably the consumer will voluntarily go to it. From there they are engaged and fully immersed in the brand’s messages without the subconscious strain of being annoyed about having an advert forced upon you.
Polo Ralph Lauren have mastered this technique. Their YouTube content team creates, well, ads, that do convey messages of their new products but do so in a visually appealing way – they tell a story. Further, instead of appearing as an ad before another YouTube video where you’ll probably skip it, they post it as independent content. The result? 3.3 million views, and a whole lot of engagement…
An Amateur's Perspective 