Lately, everyone in advertising has become a “storyteller” specializing in "engaging content."
This isn’t true, of course. But I understand why everyone’s making the claim: Digital is the only part of advertising that’s growing rapidly; social media is the red-hot center of digital; to make social work, you need conversation-starting (and sustaining) content.
Since 2008, we've been charting the evolving landscape of marketing and discussion the future of advertising at this blog. For the better part of the last decade, Story Worldwide (who keep the lights on here at Post-Advertising) has been helping brands unearth their story and tell it across a wide variety of channels, both on and offline.
Few editorial outlets put these ideas into action, in real life, alongside fellow industry colleagues. But last Thursday, March 29th, we finally brought Post-Advertising readers, Story leaders, storytellers, agencies and brands together to not just write, but actually prove, that the path towards and through the future of marketing is paved with storytelling. More about what unfolded after the jump.
Growing up, all I wanted was a black Pontiac TransAm that spoke to me and helped me fight crime through a shadowy flight into the dangerous world of criminals operating above the law. What I got was a 1985 Peugeot 505s with cigarette burns on the canvas seats and a tape player that didn't have a reverse button. Cars have come a long way since the "forward-thinking" days of Knight Rider. Cars not only speak to us, they can drive for us, give us directions, and show the kids some Dora the Explorer while en route to a ski trip in Vermont. And this is just the beginning.
This post originally appeared in our September issue of "Live Report from the Future of Marketing," our monthly Post-Advertising newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
Blogging has been a fundamental shift in marketing, ushering in social media and the post-advertising age; it's the cornerstone of inbound marketing. This regularly updated text-based content is the gasoline that fuels search engine optimization (SEO).
At Story we have a Facebook page with regularly updated content, we’ve written hundreds of blog posts here since 2008, we've published our own eBooks (with more to come), and we post daily updates to Twitter identities for both Story Worldwide and Post-Advertising. So take that into consideration when I tell you this:
Blogs and social media aren’t the be-all-end-all to content marketing.
We've spent a good deal of time at Post-Advertising pulling the curtain back on marketing and advertising practices that are on the wrong side of history. We try to expose those executions that desperately try to prolong the age when interruptive techniques and big budgets ruled the advertising landscape. We feel some sort of responsibility to reveal what's wrong with advertising today in order to teach our readers about the future of advertising.
However, it was time to take our badge off and pull out our sheet of gold stars (sorry, no monetary prize here) to reward those brands that are doing it right. These are the brands that have embraced Post-Advertising and focused their efforts on creating engaging content and igniting movements that spread.
Here are ten brands that stand beside us, ushering in the Post-Advertising age:
