ORLANDO—For brands trying to engage with consumers, “making less matter more” is a much better business strategy than simply creating tons of content and not being channel-specific in the process, says IBM Chief Content Officer George Hammer.
“I don’t think we should try to mimic business models that aren’t necessarily thriving,” Hammer adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Association of National Advertisers Masters of Marketing conference.
“The media and publishing world themselves are trying to figure out how to evolve. I don’t think the right model is actually trying to be a publisher where KPI is quantity at scale and trying to be in everyone’s lives all the time.”
A better approach is to determine whether brand-generated content has a purpose, an audience need and desire plus brand purpose and an ability to help drive KPI’s, according to Hammer.
For IBM, it’s about “making less matter more, as people want to have fewer but higher quality impressions, engagements, experiences with brands.”
The company tries to figure out the right number of engagements, which could be between four and 10. “It might not be fifty, it might not be a daily publisher per se that maximizes our relationship with the audience, because we’re only creating stuff that matters to them.”
Hammer led one of the conference’s three kickoff sessions titled The End Of Advertising As We Know It: Now What? One of the session’s talking points was “The key is to stop selling and do a better job of connecting.”
Asked about his work with the ANA’s CMO Growth Council and its client-centricity vertical, he says that driving the most effective ways of engaging with consumers needs support at the C-suite and board levels “to really drive the change. But then it’s mostly a people and change-management exercise than a technology based thing that needs to happen.”
Hammer doesn’t doubt the power of television as it continues to evolve and shift. “If it wasn’t powerful, you wouldn’t see digitally first companies actually going into TV. It just is a medium that needs to be explored the right way. Just like any medium.
“If we just focus on making great stuff, the channel, no matter what channel it is, will continue to perform. If we focus on just making a bunch of stuff and lower budgets, then we’ll ruin the experience and every channel will continue to erode.”
This segment is from CMO Growth Council presented by the ANA and Cannes Lions. Beet.TV coverage is sponsored by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. Please find more videos from the series here.
