Warwick Boulter: The future of content marketing

By Warwick Boulter (left), CEO, Collaboro

Should marketers be left-brained or right-brained? Numbers or ideas people. Creative or Quantitative. Ruled by algorithms or imagination?

As technology has developed to aid marketing analytics, automation and process, the ability to dissect data has become a necessary evil (depending into which camp you fall), impacting on the day-to-day marketing role and content marketing in particular.

But how will this evolve and what will the outcome be for content?

We expect that there will be a time in the not too distant future, where a marketer can create content so bespoke that it speaks to an individual member of their target audience, through a process that is almost completely automated, creating a huge return on the investment to produce that content.

But the question remains, that as the technical tools to aid marketers become more sophisticated, will the marketing job spec of tomorrow be searching for an analytical-wizz to stand at the helm of the mar-tech ship, or a creative person, whose strategic thinking and big ideas fill in the emotional intelligence void, that a machine will never be able to achieve.

Scott Brinker, Co-founder and CTO at Ion Interactive and guru of all things mar-tech, stated that “marketing has fundamentally become a technology-powered discipline”, enough to send shivers down the spines of all the creatively-inclined marketers out there.

But let’s explore this in the context of the next evolution in content production: intelligent content.

The rise in intelligent content adds a further layer to marketing technology and one that has exciting futurist implications. Amongst many other components, it encompasses highly sophisticated methods and strategies in meta tagging image, video and written content so it can be easily organised, found and used.

Brands have specific keywords and filing systems that are relevant to the business. An airline, for example, may name their files according to aircraft models, employee roles, pilots or cabin crew, global destinations they service and general aviation jargon.

A fast food restaurant may name and save according to restaurant locations, menu items, customers, cooking, specific offers or occasions.

This is bespoke keyword tagging and essential to any good content management. Intelligent content takes tagging to the next level, opening the doors to brave new worlds in terms of how brands can produce personalised content for our audience.

Imagine taking a 1 minute piece of video advertising content, and within that content, individual elements can be tagged from location to weather, to objects, animals, people even emotions, making each component highly searchable.

Now imagine a brand has hundreds of pieces of content, each with different elements, all tagged using scene, facial and emotional recognition. The brand now has the ability to search for particular parts from all these videos and amalgamate them to create a bespoke piece of footage, in infinite numbers of compilations.

This is what will lead to a time in the not too distant future, where a marketer can create content so bespoke that it speaks to an individual member of their target audience, through a process that is almost completely automated, creating huge return on the investment to produce it.

Upon initial inspection, you may conclude this means the future of the content marketing role to be tech-led, but this is not necessarily the case.

As more brands shift their marketing capabilities inhouse, first Foxtel launched inhouse agency, Felix, then Optus’ Yes Agency and more recently Carlton & United Breweries (CUB) following suit with Speakeasy, all in the quest for more streamlined processes and flexibility. The scaremongering media would have us believe that we’ll all lose our jobs to bots in the next 20 years, while the sensible voices argue that AI could never replace creativity and abstract thought, and this is the crux of the matter.

The future looks automated, robotic and tech-heavy for the marketing industry, with the exciting capabilities introduced through concepts such as intelligent content, but the flipside is that this frees up space for us humans to do what we’re good at. Whichever side of the brain their strengths might lay.