#doug kessler

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Native advertising is an attempt to smuggle your branded content into editorial environments where audiences might click on it.

Response from Doug Kessler at Velocity Partners for a new report I'm putting together as part of communication programme that’s being supported by the IPA, ISBA, PRCA and Branded Content Marketing Association (BCMA). You can see Doug's full response here, and if if you'd like to contribute to the report you can find out more about what I am up to here.

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Insights from a Digital Madman: How Doug Kessler and Velocity Keep Hitting Homeruns

Doug Kessler wasn’t always the man known for Crap. The creative director and co-founder of London-based b2b content marketing agency was originally a traditional Madison Avenue copywriter. Doug honed his craft at Ogilvy, the global agency founded by the original Madman David Ogilvy. He took David Ogilvy’s lessons with him, first as a creative director in various US-based b2b agencies before throwing up his own shingle at Velocity with PR guru Stan Woods. More than 13 years later, Doug’s seminal content marketing SlideShare piece, “Crap. The Content Marketing Deluge” was posted, capping an already illustrious career in digital b2b marketing.

“Crap. The Content Marketing Deluge” was the third place finisher for our launch contest, The Top 50 Content Marketing Posts of 2013. The comments in the winning entry struck a nerve with many of our users. For example, Rod Hirsch, Head of Copy at Twogether Creative, perhaps summed it best: “Doug's nailed it. Thoughtful, thought-provoking and – I thought – better than anything else I've seen this year.” This prompted the ShareBloc team to reach out to Doug and Velocity. When asked what was so special about this particular piece that’s stumbled into the content marketing zeitgeist, Doug’s response was simple: validation.

“It’s been hugely gratifying and a real home run for us—way beyond what we expected. It was hitting a very timely issue—what content marketers were worried about at the moment and really still are. What’s going to happen when this all goes mainstream and everyone is doing it?” 

We went on to cover a few more topics in our interview with Doug Kessler. Here were his insights.

On SlideShare as his Preferred Medium

We are big believers in SlideShare. SlideShare is a great linear storytelling medium. “You’re asking the reader to click, click, click and go along with you. People who dump their decks onto SlideShare after they’ve used it for some other purpose are not really using it right. We always create for SlideShare.”

We also use Prezi, which is also a great storytelling medium. The big drawback of Prezi vs. SlideShare is the community aspect. Members of the SlideShare community will often discover Velocity decks on their own, which is something that hasn’t happened with Prezi yet. SlideShare’s embeddable feature also makes it that much more ubiquitous, allowing our most popular decks to proliferate organically.

We tell stories in our SlideShare presentations, rather than overwhelm you with facts and charts from a white paper or ebook, and that taps into people’s emotional consciousness. “I went into B2B because I liked making rational arguments to prospects instead of what I felt were manipulative, emotional appeals. But I've learned about the power of emotion in B2B – not as manipulation but as tapping into something real in the target audience that would resonate with our clients' messages. Turns out, none of us are 'decision-making units' – and B2B is an emotional place, too."

Here’s one of our favorite new pieces:

On the Future of Video

Video is a great emerging opportunity for marketers to share their stories but we’re still in the early stages. At its current state, video generally falls into two categories: really shoot-from-the-hip, low production videos from your iPhone to high-production, expensive, corporate-style videos. There is no middle ground and that’s the opportunity. 

For example, the Moz team does a great job with their Whiteboard Friday videos, which gives you a scalable, quick high-quality visual asset. While no format is standing out, we do like animation, particularly the stylistically low-tech motifs like stop-motion. Here's one that is Python influenced.

The Content Center of Excellence

Gartner says marketing is going to be the biggest driver of technology adoption. We are starting to see this now. There are lots of point-to-point solutions out there. The big players like Salesforce, Adobe and Oracle are already stitching together solutions. They’re not best-of-breed yet but eventually, I think the platforms will win out. However, there are still opportunities for some single-function tools to stand out. 

One area that’s missing in the technology landscape is something I’ll call the Content Center of Excellence. Some of our middle to larger clients have lots of great existing and new content, being developed and used across the enterprise. Few of them have a great understanding of what’s their best content and how it’s being used. There’s an opportunity for a central repository to house all this content.

The first step is to do a content audit. Tag your content pieces by type, where in the buying cycle it’s used, which personas is it targeting amongst other key characteristics. Once you’ve done your audit, you’ll know what works and perhaps more importantly, where are the missing gaps in your content library. Maybe you have great top-of-funnel content but don’t have good nurturing pieces. This also allows you to quickly repurpose content pieces, like convert a webinar into a blog post quickly. It also provides simple guidelines for your enterprise to follow, like a style guide for designers. We’re working with some companies that are in the alpha stages of this and the results are exciting.

On How Velocity Serves Clients with Established Content Marketing In-House Teams

Early in Velocity's life as an agency, we realized that we had two kinds of clients: confident ambitious ones (who we did great work for and enjoyed) and more timid, traditional, corporate ones (who we struggled to please and who seemed to want mediocre work). We wanted to use content to attract more of the former and actively alienate the latter.

So we put out The B2B Marketing Manifesto, our first piece with lots of attitude and energy. And the people who came forward and said, "I loved that Manifesto, let's talk about our marketing" were ten times more likely to be our kind of marketers.

So the idea that content could be a magnet and a filter – that psychographic targeting was even more important than demographic targeting - was a revelation. And it transformed our business.

Some of our clients already have large content marketing machines in-house. They do a great job pushing out quality content but sometimes, the team converges on a worldview and the content becomes stale. We differentiate ourselves to our clients because our fresh perspectives are learned across multiple clients. We can marry that with our clients’ view and surprise and delight their customers.

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What will change: Social will dissolve into marketing; no-one will talk about it as a standalone discipline. There will be no social media events. Facebook will be dead. Google will be broken up by regulators. The NSA will actually own the most popular social channels. And we’ll all have ports in our heads for faster upload/download. What won’t change: People will still care more about themselves than they do about brands. We’ll still have to earn our way into their lives and their conversations.

Doug Kessler, Creative Director, Co-Founder, Velocity Partners Ltd (dougkessler)

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Solid content, built for SEO, that includes traditional strategies

Sometimes it seems like all that came out of the negative SEO buzz last year, was Google looking like holier-than thou protectors of “real” content, and us looking like a bunch of drivelling dogs usings every tactic in the book to coerce folks sending a linkback or share.

And how will most folks respond? Doug Kessler says, “with crap”. Alternately titled, “The Marketing Deluge”, Kessler is concerned with the way that SEO strategists are taking indicators from Matt Cutt’s anti-spam team as a reason to inundate their sites with content, any content, with the bottom line being: the more, the better.

This in turn creates what Kessler identifies as a “marketing defense system”–that once the taste of crap is in their mouth, web-users will be even more reluctant when they find dense content, making the really good stuff even harder to get out there.

His solution? Creating great content brand intelligent, useful and entertaining content that is always (to protect the brand) worth consuming. And all but guarantees that if someone REALLY likes it, they’ll REALLY share it.

Yes, there are a lot of myopic strategies out there for building links and getting shares, many of which are total crap. Point Blank Seo put out an exhaustive list of strategies that are sorted by time, dependencies and link value, and I won’t mention anything here in regards to specific topics that they haven’t already tackled.

And yes, it’s true that we do need a more comprehensive and–I dare, say—organic approach to networking between sites.

With all that being said, I sort of feel like I’m in a classroom with Haley Joel Osment.

“…that’s 27, so…I’m not really good at math, but it gets big, really fast!”

I don’t want to belittle the point, because Kessler does demonstrate some forward-thinking and makes the crucial point that will only be furthered by my examples below, that this requires a hell of a lot of research that needs to be tracked.

And, Kevin Spacey legitimately has a boy-genius on his hands.

But how can we both organically develop our network and at the same time, get measurable results/links?

Are the two mutually exclusive?

Will Reynolds

At LinkLove, last year, CEO of SEER Interactive provide a sobering, self-help guide for beggers. And as an alternative, he suggest stalking. In a slideshare, Wil talks about identifying big people in their field, setting goals, and creating a stalker dashboard that allows you a glance at what they do, how they do it, and opportunities for outreach. Using RSS everywhere to organize bios, social media feeds, keywords, and alerts Reynolds demonstrates how you can use trendsetters as a model for your own SEO content strategy and and the same time, expand your network. This puts research into “people” at the core of your strategy as a supplement to more traditional link building strategies.

Even if you’re not prepared to tackle these big dogs, the research is invaluable. Rand Fishkin suggests that start-ups can build more valuable relationships with people at their own level by using a simple technique, email, in a larger, overall strategy, that being outreach, to get more links. And the emphasis is on generating, rather than sourcing links.

Rand Fishkin

Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz suggested in a Whiteboard Friday post that SEO strategists do this by finding a network of people you like who are also web savvy and ask in an outreach email if there’s anything that THEY would like to promote, and then ask to reciprocate within 2 months. He then proceeds to demonstrate how this is done in a simple but effective outreach email, breaking it down into five parts: an open with a personal and friendly greeting, a show them in an introduction that you know, like, trust and care about them, the body of which asks for giveback (see whiteboard) to reciprocate your help close with a wink that shows the connection, and finally a sign-off.

Both of these strategies demonstrate a commitment to content as a chance to make lasting connections with other companies, manufacturers and clients erstwhile acknowledging the importance of more traditional approaches using anchor text, link building and guest blogging.