Brands Have To Create Magnetic Content, At Scale, In Real Time

Marketers should not be chasing their target audience among the millions of people online. They need to generate content that consumers value and are drawn to.

In future, consumer attention will become not just fragmented, but atomised.

That was the view of Geoffrey Ramsey, CIO and chairman of eMarketer, speaking on the first day of the Dmexco Conference and Exposition in Cologne, Germany.

Ramsey quoted eMarketer research showing that not only has mobile fragmented the digital audience, there is huge fragmentation of time and attention on mobile itself.

“Then there’s cross-media distraction. Eighty-five per cent of Americans access the internet while watching TV. But 75% of the time, what you’re watching on TV has nothing to do with what you’re looking at on your mobile.”

Add to this the growth in ad-blocking and the scepticism of audiences, particularly millennials, and Ramsey argued that brands had to create what he called “magnetic content”—content that pulls audiences towards it, rather than forcing marketers to look for their target audience among the millions of people online. But he conceded that to create the sort of content consumers value, requires creativity, “and the bar is very high.”

“The second challenge is to create and deploy this content at scale, in real time.”

In the Opening Summit, moderator Randall Rothenberg, president and CEO of the IAB, made the comparison with Amazon.

“The Amazon experience is great, but they own the whole experience,” he said. “How do we deliver an experience like that in the fragmented media space?”

Lisa Utzschneider, chief revenue officer at Yahoo!, argued that, for media owners, it had become about understanding marketers’ ambitions. “What are your goals, what does success look like, and how do we make this additive for consumers?”

For more of CMO.com’s coverage from Dmexco, click here.