5 Lessons From The Inventors Of Content Marketing

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash.

As I’ve mentioned, I was around when sponsored content was invented, though I wasn’t really.

As a graduate of the George Santayana School of Marketing, it’s my duty to tell people that sponsored content wasn’t invented by Red Bull, or by Chris Whittle’s 13-30 Corporation in the ‘80s, or by Mobil in its ‘70s advertorials. There are examples of sponsored content in the 1930s, in the things Heinz did in The New Yorker and Plymouth did in Life, and if I went back further I’m sure I could find more.

For all the talk of a strict division of the editorial and advertising sides of the house, content-for-pay has been a fact of life almost since there’s been a free press. 

In a way, it’s refreshing to see brands be so above-board about sponsored content. Now, if we could only be that mature in discussing “fake news.”

(As a public service, the George Santayana School of Journalism would like to remind you that the straw man of a lying press has been around almost since the invention of movable type. The invective’s merely a little sharper these days – and the sources of that invective are different.)

I digress. The 13-30 Corp., where I worked in the early 1980s, was one of the first companies dedicated to creating and distributing controlled-circulation sponsored content. We did college publications sponsored by the U.S. Army and Nissan; health publications sponsored by Johnson and Johnson; travel publications sponsored by BMW; and many others.

A lot of top-notch writers and editors got their start at 13-30. Editor Keith Bellows wound up editing National Geographic – and one of 13-30’s best writers, Maryellen Kennedy Duckett, became one of NatGeo’s best. Another editor, Mark Ingebretsen, filled similar roles at Better Homes & Gardens.

Photo by Water Journal on Unsplash.

It’s fair to say that 13-30 made up some things as it went along, but it also provided some ground rules for sponsored content that we overlook. Namely:

Editorial Standards Need To Be Really High

I wrote for 13-30 like I was writing for The New York Times. I chased down leads, confirmed and reconfirmed my facts, cited all my sources, and submitted my copy to a rigorous fact-check process. A “legitimate” publication never put me through anything I didn’t go through at 13-30. Sponsors knew they were getting clean, accurate content – and we knew we had to give it to them, because they were paying 100 percent of the bill. 

Don’t Assume An Audience

13-30 publications were highly targeted. Nutshell and America were distributed through college housing offices and student unions. 18 Almanac was distributed through high-school counseling offices. Destinations was available at BMW dealers. 

That sounds like guaranteed distribution and guaranteed readership – and we certainly pitched it that way to the sponsor – but we never took readers for granted. We earned their attention by being factual and entertaining (see below), the way any good content would. The fact that we had made it almost impossible for readers not to read it never played into our thought process.

How much current content-marketing content could compete toe-to-toe with traditional content? A small percentage – but we felt we could have charged for our content and done just fine. 

Entertain And Inform

13-30 packaged information innovatively to maximize readership and impact. One of its concepts was the “service core” – a middle section crammed with in-depth information on a given topic or destination. 

Often the service core was set apart from the rest of the publication by paper stock, ink color, typography, or some combination. The idea was to draw in the reader with light, entertaining features, give them a heavy dose of useful information, and then send them out with entertainment.

Entertain, inform, entertain – it’s a great formula for almost every sort of branded content. Start with that template, fill in your particulars, and who knows? It might break up the creative logjam I know you’re feeling with your branded content.

Know Your Stuff

Hey, even in the golden age of print you couldn’t fake it with a college audience. We had to be 100 percent authentic with them … and then we had to turn around and be equally real with nurses, expectant mothers, business execs, and BMW owners.

Photo by Philip Strong on Unsplash.

We’ve said it before: There’s no substitute for knowing your stuff and knowing your audience, and then communicating to them the way they want to be communicated to. True then, true now, probably true forever.

Experiment With Delivery

To reach their target audiences, 13-30 periodicals dabbled in innovative formats. I worked on The Wallpaper Journal, a broadsheet designed to be placed on bulletin boards in college dormitories. 

TWJ anticipated another of Whittle’s efforts, Special Reports, multimedia content delivered in medical practitioners’ offices via dedicated kiosks with video screens.

Whittle also created Channel One, a for-profit TV network beamed into schools, and The Edison Project, a for-profit school concept that included advertising content.

You can argue that some of Whittle’s concepts put advertising messages into places where ads shouldn’t go, but the flip side is that Whittle has never been afraid to create new forms of branded messaging and extend it into new channels.

Does that mean MetLife should be branding football stadiums and elementary schools? Nope; but it does mean that when it comes to branded content everything should be in play – for discussion purposes, at least.

Trust The Experts

Big brands with big-time New York advertising agencies came to 13-30 to create branded content; they didn’t trust their agencies to do it. Why? Because we did it right. Agencies tended to go heavy on the branded and light on the content; we knew the right mix, we had a staff of professional writers and editors, and we were able to create the right tool for the job.

Nobody likes dealing with a squillion agencies, but with content it’s good to trust a specialist.

Want to know more lessons learned from 30-plus years of creating branded content? Contact us.