The Content Revolution

The wealth of content available on the Internet, and the numerous niche websites and newsletters that provide it, can offer marketers intimate access to otherwise difficult to reach demographics. Simon Anderson, managing partner at Unique Digital, explains how best to capitalise on the new technology…

“Once upon a time e-journalists were the club perfume sprayers of the publishing hierarchy”, announced Urban Junkies, the new vanguard of online magazines. Now that’s all changing.

This year has seen an increase in both the number and quality of online magazines, which target the classic cash-rich, time-poor urban yoofs and professionals.

Titles like Flavourpill, Urban Junkies, Into The Storm, Phamous69, ArtKrush, Coolhunting, Tunetribe and Showstudio focus on culture, music, art, gossip and fashion using a mixture of websites and weekly email newsletters to send filtered quality content directly to their discerning audience.

This of course isn’t a new trend, weekly email newsletters have been around longer than the internet. What we’re seeing now though, is so many of the UK’s leading freelancers, trend forecasters, art directors and graphic designers coming together to channel their skills into projects that are individual and challenging, providing a freedom not found working for traditional magazines or newspapers.

These new magazines offer marketers, brand planners and media planners excellent vehicles to reach traditionally difficult audiences. These sites are also distinctly different in the advertising they offer and how they like to work. With emphasis on partnerships rather than placements, the advertising is integrated into the content, it isn’t about brands being lazy and simply looking for cool by associations.

With few overheads and no printing costs to pay for, e-magazines are more selective about whom they associate with, often collaborating on the design and layout to make a more dynamic web-page for their target audience.

Brands such as Diesel, Sony PSP, Audi, L’Oreal, Absolut and Nokia in the UK and US are seeing the benefits of click through rates of 4% to 8% – figures unheard of by other forms of online advertising. These figures show the power of targeted content in delivering results.

Targeting and content have always been two of the perennial problems with the Internet. The sheer scale of the Internet is both its biggest strength and weakness, making targeting tricky, and the risk of spreading content too thinly.

If you add to this the difficulty the Internet has always suffered in attracting the best talent in every field including journalism, advertising and marketing. Making it exciting to watch the growth of these well-written and targeted titles, often run by new talent who have either been attracted to the channel from traditional media or are fresh out of university.

Now this new talent and thought has to be utilized by the more traditional Internet properties. You could argue that the general level of traditional Internet content is rather average, since the bubble burst in 2001 the development of content has suffered greatly. For example, a football fan visiting all of the leading football sites would find exactly the same content delivered via managed feeds. The growth of the Internet in terms of actual users and increase in media consumption, however, has been exponential. This has not been reflected by investment from the major media companies, if you visit many of the main web sites and portals they have hardly changed over the last four years.

This could be the reason why so many people are now getting their news, culture and information from such wonderfully diverse online publications.

Take the painfully funny celeb-bashing Popbitch or its beautifully twisted counterpart Holy Moly, whose content alone would scare off almost every potential advertiser. But that’s the point. They don’t take advertising, the whole point of their existence seems to be to stick two fingers up at us all and themselves.

It’s this irreverence, the evanescent nature of the internet that makes these web publications so successful. Email the editor straight away, post a witty comment in a forum, and then nothing to recycle afterwards – for the first generation to have sat their A-levels in an internet age, this is the way forward.

Almost every target audience is present on the web whether you are looking to market to the seventeen year old urban youth, the silver surfing over sixties or the high flying city boys. So maybe, the key to successful publishing and marketing online is quality and relevance. If you can produce quality content that your chosen audience really wants, then you’ll reap all the rewards and build a loyalty that is hard to be matched via any other communication channel.