That last startup-ism was lampooned last year in an episode of HBO’s Silicon Valley when dozens of startups paraded on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt to explain how they were making the world a better place: through software-defining data centers for cloud computing; through canonical data models that communicate between n-plugs; by revolutionizing the way you report bugs on your mobile platform. It’s a damn perfect parody, as evidenced by the fact that we have our own rah-rah maxim at Contently: to build a better media world.

The primary reason I came to Contently as editor-in-chief was my belief in this mission—that by giving brands  access to world-class creative talent and powerful software, we could help them become publishers in their own right and tell great stories instead of flooding the web with intrusive advertising. Ultimately, that would mean: a) less shitty ads; b) more great stories; and c) all of my journalist/designer/filmmaker friends getting paid to do what they love.

Two years in, is this a realistic vision? I think so. I’ve seen our own editorial efforts deliver incredible business results for Contently, from cold, hard revenue to brand lift. And I’ve seen Contently clients like Amex, Coca-Cola, GE and Marriott build internal media companies. I’ve watched the industry become more ambitious, and I’ve seen forward-thinking companies embrace content as the atomic particle that powers and permeates through all of their marketing efforts. I’ve seen journalists and filmmakers get paid well to do great branded work.

But while content marketing has positive momentum, it remains an experimental line item for most brands. It’s hard to do well, which is part of the reason most CMOs think their content is failing. Despite the good vibes, it’s easy to see the industry continuing to fall back on uglier alternatives—like the nearly $15 billion that’ll be spent on programmatic display advertising this year.

A world where intrusive advertising rules is one where no one wins—especially not consumers and content creators. And there are five main content marketing problems that keep me up at night, worrying that we’ll slink back into a dark age:

1. The Undervaluing of Editorial Skills

The rise of content marketing has led to a lot more editorial positions that have popped up inside brands, which makes sense—you need people to write and edit and come up with ideas for all this content! What’s troubling is how some brands have tried to fill these roles: by trying to turn marketing managers into editors, copywriters into reporters, SEO specialists into content strategists. There seems to be a blind belief that great editorial skills are something you can develop overnight, especially with the help of a few content-ideation and headline-optimization tools.

That belief is insane. Great publications with loyal audiences require remarkable editorial talent. And remarkable editorial talent is still quite cheap. If brands don’t start hiring talented writers, editors, and content strategists, it’s hard to see them competing with the rest of the media world.

(See our guides to hiring here and here.)

2. Prohibitive Bureaucracy

When it comes to content, most brands are running a race where their pit crew forces them off the track every lap.

Sure, when you’re creating a 30-second TV spot, you can afford to go through a 12-person approval chain and lengthy legal review. But not when you’re creating content every day. Editors need the freedom to experiment with new formats, different story types, and subjects that push boundaries. It isn’t just the lawyer getting cold feet, but also the brand manager mistakenly trying to force in product plugs, the comms manager killing every interesting quote with corporate banalities, and the VP of marketing who bottlenecks the entire edit calendar because he wants to sign off on everything.

So what does a successful content marketing operation look like? I’ve always been a fan of the model that Seth Godin suggested to me in an interview earlier this year:

I think the most important thing is to have an office that’s not in your building. I think what kills brands who try to be interesting is to have meetings where they’re not saying to senior management, “How can we be more interesting?” Instead, they’re saying, “How can we play this more safely?” That’s not what happens when you want to make a hit TV show or a website that people care about. You need editors, not brand managers, who will push the envelope to make the thing go forward.

So one easy way to do that is to set people up in an office down the street, only visit them once a month, and give them really significant metrics—not about pageviews, but about mattering. And give them the resources—not too much, just enough—to go do work that matters.

That kind of setup might be a little optimistic, but content creators do need some degree of autonomy within a brand if they’re going to succeed. (For another take, see John Hazard’s guide to brand approvals here.)

3. The Campaign Mindset

While doing research for my monthly “Best of Branded Content” column, I’ve come across tons of impressive one-off brand videos and microsites. The latter can be especially infuriating; these sites are loaded with dozens of articles and then left to die, a taxidermied ornament growing dusty in the corner of the branded content lodge.

All of this content is wasted because many brands are stuck in a campaign mindset. They’ll spend tons of money to create something shiny and awesome with an agency or publisher partner, but once that short-term opportunity ends, they don’t build on that momentum that can lead to a loyal audience over time. All of a brand’s content needs to be part of a cohesive whole, working toward clear goals.

4. Marketers Who Believe, “If You Build It, They Will Come.”

There’s nothing more depressing than when a content team inside a brand overcomes tons of hurdles, creates some amazing stories, and then gets labeled as a failure because no one saw them.

When launching a branded content campaign, you absolutely need paid distribution for your content. Even if you have a million Facebook followers and a million Twitter followers, only a few thousand people, at most, will see your work.

I’ve seen brands budget hundreds of thousands of dollars on the actual content and then stop spending when it comes time to make sure people see that content. That gameplan is nuts. It’s never been easier to target the right audience for your content—from CMOs to Drake-loving yuccies—as Jordan Teicher detailed in his excellent guide on distribution platforms. Outbrain will drive readers from top pubs for $0.30 a click. When we promote a popular post on Facebook, we commonly see a CPC less than $0.10, a figure that drops even further if you’re promoting native videos. After all the trouble you’ve gone through, why the hell wouldn’t you spend $1,000 to put your content in front of 10,000 new people?

The math in favor of paid content distribution is stupidly simple, especially as we move toward a platform-centric universe that’ll serve up hungry audiences to anyone skilled enough to catch their attention. And to take advantage of the system, brands need to start devoting significant chunks of their media budgets to content marketing.

Bonus: Marketers’ Ability to Show ROI

Ultimately, content marketing will never become more than a side project for most brands if CMOs can’t demonstrate impressive ROI figures to the rest of the c-suite.

Unfortunately, there’s still a myth in the industry that you can’t really tie content to business results. (And if I hear that one more time, I’m going to lose it and run screaming through Content Marketing World in an orange speedo.) As I wrote in my content measurement playbook, it’s very possible to tie content to every stage of pipeline revenue by carefully tracking the impact your content has on the bottom line with marketing and sales automation programs like Salesforce and Marketo. And you can prove brand lift with a shoestring budget. None of this is easy, but if a bunch of English majors like us can figure it out, trust me, you can too.

But the ROI of content will be a mediocre proposition at best if talented people don’t have the freedom to tell great stories and have the resources to get those stories out there. You can’t solve one problem without solving all of them, and I hope we do. After all, when it comes to startup catchphrases, Make the world a banner-ad-infested slum just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

This article originally appeared on The Content Standard. All comics by Martin Kozlowski

The post 5 Content Marketing Problems That Keep Me Up at Night appeared first on Relevance.

But how do readers feel about sponsored content? We got one answer in February, when Tony Haile, CEO of Chartbeat, revealed that only 24 percent of readers were scrolling down on native ad content on publisher sites, compared to the 71 percent of readers who scroll on “normal content.” It was a damning indictment of the quality of sponsored content at large.

We wanted to dig deeper into the problem that Chartbeat’s research revealed. While that data gave us a bird’s-eye view of how users behave while reading a sponsored story, it didn’t tell us how readers feel about sponsored content as a whole, how specific circumstances affect their behavior or reveal how perspectives change amongst different demographics. So we decided to fill the gap, asking readers some of the most important questions about how they think about branded content—from what’s conveyed by the term “sponsored content,” to how likely they are to click on it, to how heavily factors like age and education play into those behaviors.

Methodology

Between June 27 and June 30, we surveyed 542 U.S. internet users aged 18–65 with a 13-question online survey.

As the survey was answered by nearly our entire population target, the calculated margin of error was approximately one percent.

Key findings

Most publishers assume that readers know what it means when a post is labeled “Sponsored Content.” But the majority of readers can’t agree on one clear answer. While a plurality (48 percent) of respondents believe that “Sponsored Content” means that an advertiser paid for the article to be created and had influence on the article’s content, more than half (52 percent) thought it meant something different.

But that’s not where the confusion ends. Some of the most striking revelations include:

• Two-thirds of readers have felt deceived upon realizing that an article or video was sponsored by a brand.
• 54 percent of readers don’t trust sponsored content.
• 59 percent of readers believe a news site loses credibility if it runs articles sponsored by a brand.
• As education level increases, so does mistrust of sponsored content.
• And yet, respondents rated branded content as more trustworthy than Fox News, and nearly equally trustworthy as MSNBC, indicating that content has a mistrust problem overall.

This study raises a lot of questions for brands and publishers alike, as well as one for us that you may be asking, “Why would Contently, a company that works with publishers and brands that create sponsored content, publish this”? For starters, we consider our magazine, The Content Strategist, a pure editorial endeavor, something that’s helped us build the trust of over 150,000 monthly readers in a relatively short period of time. Our readers (and our clients) expect transparency and honesty from us, and that’s what we strive to give them. And since we cover the content marketing industry, the question “What do consumers really think about sponsored content?” was a fairly obvious one for us to investigate.

The second reason is that we believe that—when done well—brand-created or sponsored content can have a positive impact upon the media world, giving storytellers of all kinds the opportunity to do what they love and deliver true value to readers. But there were signs—despite the sponsored content success stories reported by several publishers—that poorly executed sponsored content was polluting the ecosystem. If there was a problem, we didn’t want it to be ignored. We always want to help publishers and brands give readers exactly what they want. And it does appear that sponsored content has a trust problem. Let’s dig into the results.

Results & analysis

As noted above, publishers’ widespread assumption that they’re communicating clearly and transparently when they label a post as “sponsored content” may not be true. When asked what they think a “sponsored content” label means when they see it on a news website, the answers varied greatly.

Ultimately, this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise; the term “sponsored content” means different things not only among different publishers, but also within the framework of a single publisher. For instance, Mashable runs two different types of sponsored content—one model where a brand merely underwrites a piece of Mashable editorial and has no influence on its content, and a separate model where they feature content created by the brand. And while the content of The New York Times’ inaugural “paid post” campaign was created by Dell, their recent paid-post longform piece for Orange is the New Black, “Women Inmates: Why The Male Model Doesn’t Work,” was written by Melanie Deziel, an editor at the Times‘ brand studio.

But even if readers don’t understand what branded content means, do they prefer it to the much-maligned banner ad? If you work in digital media, the answer may surprise you. Fifty-seven percent of readers said that they’d prefer that their favorite blogs and news sites run banner ads instead of sponsored articles.

Interestingly, this finding holds up fairly consistently across age groups. Though digital-first, millennial-focused sites like BuzzFeed have fully embraced sponsored content in place of banner ads, millennials aren’t any more likely to prefer sponsored content to banner ads.

Another fascinating demographic result: Respondents with graduate degrees were also the most likely to express a preference for banner ads.

But why do readers express a preference for banners? One reason, it appears, is a lack of transparency. Two-thirds of respondents said that they’ve felt deceived upon realizing that an article or video was sponsored by a brand.

When we drilled down into this data, the strong preference for banner ads by those with a graduate degree became a little clearer. Seventy-seven percent of respondents with a graduate degree reported having felt deceived upon realizing that an article or video was sponsored by a brand, compared to just 46 percent of respondents with a high school diploma.

It’s a fascinating correlation: As education levels increase, so too does the likelihood of a respondent feeling deceived by a piece of branded content.

Given these results, our next finding wasn’t surprising: Two-thirds of respondents are also less likely to click on an article sponsored by a brand compared to regular site editorial.

And as with preference for banner ads, the proportion of respondents who said that they were not as likely to click on sponsored content as editorial content increased steadily with education level.

Additionally, though younger readers are perceived as being more open-minded about sponsored content, the reverse seems to be true; the likelihood of clicking on a sponsored article actually increasing as age increases.

(This is one piece of self-reported data that would be particularly fascinating to compare with user behavior. Chartbeat and BuzzFeed, are you listening?)

When readers do click, how likely are they to trust what they click on? A little more than half of respondents said that they generally don’t trust content from brands. Amongst those who said that they do (at least occasionally) trust sponsored content, preexisting trust in the brand, and not the publication, was the biggest factor in doing so, by a factor of 23 percent to 19 percent.

Unsurprisingly, given our results above, respondents with graduate degrees were nearly twice as likely to distrust sponsored content as those with high school diplomas.

For publishers, all this brings up a big question: How is sponsored content affecting the way readers think of them? Are they losing credibility? The majority of respondents—59 percent—said that news sites are losing credibility when they run articles sponsored by a brand.

And the likelihood of feeling that way increases as education level increases, which may be troublesome to publishers like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal that like to boast a highly educated readership.

However, this is one area where millennials were more lenient, with only 49 percent of respondents aged 18–29 saying that a news site loses credibility if it runs sponsored content.

Ultimately, however, this may not just be a brand problem or a native advertising problem, but an issue of reader trust with agenda-influenced publishers overall. We asked respondents to rank how often they trust of content from brands, content from MSNBC, and content from Fox News on a scale of:

• 1 – Never
• 2 – Not usually
• 3 – Occasionally
• 4 – Often
• 5 – All the time

Then, we averaged those scores. Despite all the cynicism and mistrust of sponsored content, stories from brands were deemed more trustworthy than content from Fox News and were barely edged out by MSNBC.

Finally, we asked a couple of baseline questions about content quality, in order to provide some context for how much people view sponsored content relative to other types of advertising and non-sponsored content. The following two charts show weighted averages of people’s rankings of comparative quality and straightforwardness between various methods of content advertising versus a few controls. What emerges is an interesting (and cynical) spectrum:

It’s no surprise that people find newspaper and magazine stories of higher quality than your average mommy blog post. What is surprising, however, is that sponsored content and owned content on brands’ websites rank in between those two publishing bookends. Print advertorial is seen as higher quality than online sponsored content, though in the next chart it’s seen as less honest. And interestingly, banner ads are seen as very transparent. Too bad transparency isn’t linked to click-through rate.

(It should be noted that we did not ask for respondents to specifically rank BuzzFeed’s journalistic content. So the above stat represents the average perception of the average BuzzFeed post. All those quizzes and Reddit photos are probably bringing that average down.)

Conclusion

Sponsored content is booming, but it’s clear from our survey data that brands and publishers still have a long way to go to earn readers’ engagement, attention, and trust.

How sponsored content should be labeled has been a hot-button issue, and that two-thirds of respondents reported having felt deceived by sponsored content shows that publishers and brands need to do a better job of indicating when a story came from a sponsor. The data also reveals that misgivings about sponsored content become more pronounced with education level, which is troubling for many publishers actively selling a highly educated, high-earning audience.

Another underlying issue may be self-promotion. In May, a Kentico Software survey found that 74 percent of the general public trusts educational content from businesses on a particular topic, but “even signing off an otherwise objective blog post or newsletter with a product pitch will bring the content’s credibility level down by 29 percent.”

It’s also worth noting that there have been many sponsored content success stories. Meredith Levien, The New York Times‘ executive vice president of advertising, recently announced that readers were spending as much time with their sponsored content as their regular editorial, and that some pieces were greatly outperforming New York Times editorial. Last fall, Mashable Branded Content Editor Lauren Drell wrote that readers were spending more time with Mashable’s branded content than its editorial. “Time spent on branded content is 50 percent higher than that of the average Mashable article, and CTR on display ads around branded content is 2x that of the average article,” she wrote. And brands like Virgin Mobile and Mini that run extended sponsored content campaigns on BuzzFeed see a brand lift of upwards of 350 percent as a result, reports BuzzFeed’s case studies.

None of this means that sponsored content is dead in the water. It just means that it’s time to get it right.

The post Sponsored Content Has a Trust Problem appeared first on Relevance.