“We live in a world of content overload. A world where every day 500 million tweets, 4.3 billion Facebook messages and 500 million hours of YouTube footage are sent, posted and uploaded. In this world, only brands that form more meaningful connections with people will prosper. It’s no longer enough to produce products that work. Brands need to know why people care, and what makes their brands meaningful.” – Yannick Bolloré, Chairman and CEO, Havas Group.
At a time when brands, their agencies and their media trading partners are embracing content marketing as a logical solution for brands to reach consumers in a “post advertising” world, some research indicates they are mostly failing.
Havas has been asking consumers how much of the content they see from brands is actually relevant and meaningful to them. Last year, their researchers analyzed 1,500 global brands and 55 different content actions in order to test 60,000 content combinations.
“Sixty percent of the content that brands are producing is not meaningful to consumers,” says Maria Garrido (SVP of both Havas and its parent company, Vivendi). In the U.S., “People wouldn’t care if 81% of the brands they use just disappeared” (the average was 74% of the brands globally).
Sources: Mandese, J. (2018, August 1). Havas Expands ‘Meaningful Brands,’ Studies Role Content Plays – or Not. MediaPost; Havas