When a Publicis Media client wants to run a campaign including branded content, people from Spark Foundry's content shop will join strategists, account and ad buyers to plan the campaign. As the content enters production, whether it's picking talent, being on set or reviewing final cuts of a video, Spark Foundry's various social, publishing and digital experts will be involved.
Big media agencies are increasingly adding content specialists to wrangle these content campaigns. Spark Foundry takes the lead on content creation at Publicis. Dentsu Aegis' Carat USA has a team of around 30 content experts to manage such campaigns, typically from project management, production and journalism backgrounds. Horizon Media is moving in this direction, too. Publishers are starting to see a rise in mid-sized agencies adopting such roles, too; one said half the agencies they deal with has someone in that role.
Brands are also driving the creation of this role at agencies that in the past wouldn't have thought these lower dollar-value campaigns were worth the extra expense, said a senior content executive at a major brand who wasn't authorized to speak on the matter.
In the past few months, these roles have gotten involved even earlier on in the process. At Carat, they'll join the client meeting when the agency makes its recommendations, instead of later on when the publisher is brought in, as it was done in the past. Driving the change is that the agency realized that as it learned more about consumers, there was a greater need to develop more finely targeted campaigns, said Angela Steele, chief strategy officer of Carat USA.
"We can target them better, but that means content needs to be more closely linked to those individuals," she said.
From the publisher perspective, there's a lot of good in this. They get more contact with someone who understands the client's perspective and who can help sell the campaign to the client.
"It makes sense because creating content isn't part of their experience," Annie Granatstein, head of The Washington Post's WP BrandStudio, said of agencies. "Sometimes people on those teams are very helpful because they do speak our language and that makes things go faster. We're used to working with agencies that have absolutely no background." Granatstein said she would like to see agencies involved even earlier on in the process.
But sometimes the agency liaisons don't actually have a creative background, they're just someone from another part of the agency who was picked for the job, publishers say. Having more people in the mix has also led to tension with publishers when agencies insert themselves into a process previously controlled by publishers.
"Some view themselves as content geniuses," sniffed another publisher content studio exec.