Fairfax Media has launched its own content creation studio, Made, with the publisher hoping to work with brands and agencies to not only create content, but also work on the strategy behind it.
Director of content marketing for Fairfax, Simon Smith, will lead the studio and he told AdNews that the publisher has been looking at its content marketing strategy for some time, and now it's capitalising on marketing demand with the creation of Made.
“Its exciting for us, we've been looking at the content marketing piece for the last eight to 10 months now at Fairfax, and looking at how do we offer that as a service to clients and agencies allowing them to become better story tellers,” Smith said.
Plenty of brands are doing it, plenty of brands have a story to tell, but they're not necessarily telling it well. So we think we have an opportunity to talk to brands, clients and agencies, and to work collaboratively on using content as a really nice way to engage audiences and customers.”
Smith believes that 2015 is well and truly going to be a boom time for content marketing, and unlike last year where brands and agencies were looking to establish their own content studios, both brands and agencies will now look back to publishers to manage content marketing strategy and creation.
“We're seeing the swing back to publishers,” Smith said.
“There are brands that have gone fully into it, brands creating fully fledged newsrooms, and we know how expensive it is to run a newsroom when you're trying to produce daily content.
“But for a lot of brands and clients its not their core business. If you're a bank, you're a bank, your not a publisher, if your an automotive company that's what you do you make cars. Content is our DNA it's what gets us out of bed, it is our core business so therefore we think we're very well set up to take that to market.”
Smith as well as the publisher's commercial director, Tom Armstrong, have been doing just that, taking Made to market in a series of agency roadshows over the past few weeks.
Armstrong who has had his role within Fairfax redefined to bring content marketing under his remit told AdNews they've received a lot of feedback from brands who want to get more into the content marketing space, however have found it more difficult than they first imagined.
“A lot of the feedback that we've had from CMOs, is that brands want to get into this space, but creating good content that people want to read and want to see is actually quite hard to do, and that's the expertise that we can tap into,” he said.
“We have a whole team of people that do that on a daily basis, that's their craft. We know there’s demand for it, and we know brands previously have been a little bit underwhelmed by their results and have found it quite difficult to create it and we think that's space where we can create a lot of value.”
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