Maybe I’m suffering a mild case of cognitive frostbite after an extraordinarily long winter up here on the frozen tundra.

Or maybe I’m simply not recognizing or appreciating all the potential dilemmas native advertising presents.

But I’m just not overly concerned that various forms of “sponsored,” “advertorial” or — to put it simply — “paid” content might find their way into, or around the edges of, content streams produced by consumer or B2B media companies. Something tells me, when all parties are acting with self-interest, this currently hot marketing “issue” will mostly sort itself out.

You’re a media company selling native advertising

You’ve worked hard and invested significantly in building an audience by providing useful or entertaining content. To be commercially viable, you need to recoup that investment, plus a bit of profit. You do that either by charging the audience for access to your content, charging marketers for access to your audience, or some combination.

If you and your corporate marketer customers believe audience members might be more inclined to notice and respond to a piece of paid content than a promotional ad, you might set aside space within your publishing ecosystem for paid insertions of a post, an article or an informational video.

Assuming you don’t want to mislead your audience into thinking this content was produced by your team, under your editorial standards, you’ll label these marketer insertions in some fairly obvious way.

So long as you don’t cross a line, where your audience feels the ratio of proprietary content to paid is out of whack, or the credibility of your content is declining, less trustworthy or up for sale, you’ll be OK with them. They know you need to make money somewhere, otherwise you won’t be able to bring them the content they value. And so long as marketers don’t refuse to have their paid insertions identified as their content versus yours, you should be good with them, as well.

You’re a corporate marketer buying native advertising

Let’s assume you’re making an honest effort to attract and engage that same audience with your own relevant content. But as you look for ways to make the audience aware, one way is to “borrow,” if only temporarily, a channel owned by a media company.

If you do that, and some audience members find your content compelling, it’s a win for them, you and the media company. Perhaps they’ll now engage with you on an ongoing basis by subscribing to your e-newsletter or blog, or by registering for your upcoming webinar.

But if you attempt to trick the audience with content that only pretends to be well-intentioned and relevant, they’ll find you out soon enough. Most will abandon your content rather than consume it. Some will put a mental black mark next to your brand in their minds. Meanwhile, the media company will have your money for the paid insertion. You’ll have some audience members who are disappointed, perhaps so much so they scorch your brand on social media. You’ll really have nothing to show for the effort, save perhaps some relatively meaningless click-through or visit metrics.

So, if you’re smart, and a native advertising opportunity with the right target audience and a respected media brand presents itself, then it’s clearly in your brand’s best interest to make a good-faith attempt to deliver useful, high-quality content.

You’re consuming native advertising

You bump into a headline or a call to action that captures your interest. Whether it’s clearly labelled “paid” or not, as with any content, you’ll give it as much attention as it earns beyond that moment of initial interest. If you find it meaningful, you’re going to appreciate its producer for providing it, and maybe even appreciate the media company for hosting the forum in which you found it.

If somewhere in that content you are told (or deduce) that it was produced by a corporate marketer, you can decide whether the content itself is still relevant, or whether anything about it should be discounted or disregarded, given the source.

If the content is not clearly labeled as marketer-sponsored, then it’s possible the media company and the marketer managed to serve you with a promotional message, without you fully recognizing it. If you actually found the content entertaining and useful, you might not feel any harm was done. But if you do feel somehow violated, you can write a letter or email to the media company, expressing dissatisfaction. You might even cancel your subscription if you feel your trust in that media brand was severely breached.

Clearly media company leaders don’t like to receive those sorts of emails and letters. So most are going to find a way to clearly label marketers’ content as paid. And we’re back to the beginning of a virtuous, self-interest circle.

I get one of the big concerns about native ads: A media company — looking to either goose revenue or reduce the cost of creating high-quality, proprietary content — runs more and more marketer-paid content, but does so with no clear demarcation. That leaves the audience no obvious cues on which to form judgments about the content’s producer or that producer’s motivations.

But something tells me few media brands are going to put their reputations and hard-earned audience relationships at risk this way. And something also tells me lots of audience members, especially B2B decision makers, are savvy enough to recognize when they’re being fed an advertorial in editorial clothing.

And what about those relative few media companies and marketers who might engage in native advertising’s dark arts?

Well, it’s likely those media brands have already been opening their content channels to undisclosed marketer influence and involvement. And it’s likely those corporate brands are stuck in the mode of trying to trick customers vs. earn and attract them.

Those two things, sadly, have been going on since long before anyone coined the phrase “native content.”

Yet somehow, and here’s the good news, the best, most well-intentioned media and corporate brands tend to consistently win and thrive. And their audiences tend to be honestly earned, highly valued, and consistently well served.

___

Full disclosure: I work for a B2B media and marketing company, so my employer is in line to profit if it chooses to offer what some people might consider “native” advertising opportunities.

If you haven’t been paying much attention to native ads as a marketing issue, there’s been no shortage of thinking and commentary to consider lately on the topic. Search for yourself, or check out this sampling of links:

• “Lessons from the Atlantic’s sponsored content controversy,” by Rob O’Regan, editor, emedia vitals
• “‘Native’ ads disrupt the digital advertising model,” Rob O’Regan again
• “Why sponsored posts are a waste of ad dollars,” The New York Observer
• “Forget ‘native,’ It’s About a Content Mindset,” by Brian Morrissey, Digiday
• “What’s All the Hype About Native Ads, Anyway?” by Ken Willner, All Things D

Better yet, please comment below. What’s your thought on native advertising? Grave threat to audience trust and brand reputations? Or much ado about something not so very new or worrisome?

Sometimes the medium is the message, but the medium ALWAYS shapes the message. This is the place where content and the design of content meet. Depending on what medium you’re working with, you need to think about how your story is structured, written and presented.

Who’s up for a little navel gazing? Let’s back waaaaay up and see what we can learn about the way technological evolution changes the way we consume and interact with content.

From Stone to Tome: The Written Word Through the Ages

The idea of changing content to fit the medium is as old as the written word.

• Single medium: Early carving or writing was on a single medium (e.g., stone, clay tablet, leaf). Writers edited the story to fit the medium, and readers interacted by, well, looking at it. If there was more to the story, they walked to the next obelisk or picked up the next tablet.
• Scrolls: Eventually paper, cloth, parchment and wood were stitched or extended into scrolls. It allowed long-form content in a portable medium; stories got longer, and readers interacted by unrolling it.
• Books: Books broke content into smaller chunks, but let readers jump around as they saw fit by flipping pages. Long stories fit well, but so did non-linear content like short story collections or reference material.
• Newspapers: The newspaper added the intellectual innovation of presenting multiple stories together, and having readers follow non-linear jumps to read more.

Tablets… scrolling… jumps. Sound familiar? Digital media take many interaction cues from their analog ancestors, but the actions readers take change as hardware changes.

Screen Time: Evolution of the Digital “Page”

We consume digital content on screens of a certain size, but we control it through a layer of technology. Even touch screens have invisible sensors that detect a tap or swipe and software that translates that into a display change. Depending what technology a reader uses, writers may need to change how their content is presented.

• Keystrokes: The content on the first personal computers was controlled by keystrokes. Arrow keys, numbered options and BASIC, DOS or similar commands called up content, scrolled through text and moved the reader from page to page. It was cumbersome and non-intuitive. Format options were minimal.
• Mouse clicks: Once graphical interfaces appeared, clicking on a mouse became the primary way to navigate content. Clicking links and buttons with a mouse was much easier than using keys. And since one click could bring up a full new page of content (as opposed to multiple clicks to scroll), keeping all content “above the fold” (visible in a single screen view) became popular.
• Scroll wheels: With the addition of scroll wheels on mice, users could now zip up and down web pages with speed and precision. It made the fold less of a barrier to readers, and opened the battle lines of the ongoing scroll vs. click debate in web design. Because of the orientation of the scroll wheel, almost all scrolling content is arranged vertically.

Unlike analog innovations, these technologies have been additive. Books displaced paper scrolls, but readers navigate content using keyboards, mouse clicks and scroll wheels in combination or interchangeably.

Touchy Subject: Content and Touch Screens

And now, with the advent of the touch screen, we’re seeing the arrangement of content and the ways users consume it change once again.

• What’s old is new (in navigation): Touch screens replace the action of moving a mouse and then clicking with a single tap; the scroll motion of a wheel is replaced with a swiping motion; transitions can move up, down, left or right with ease. The addition of multi-touch (like pinch-to-zoom, or swipe with multiple fingers to call up a new function) adds to the nuance.
• What’s old is new (in layout): Interestingly, many content publishers are formatting their touch-centric content into print-like pages again. When you swipe or tap, it shows a full screen of content as a unit, allowing editors to again use multi-column layouts and artfully wrap text.
• Smaller screens, less room 4 wrds: Many touch screens are smaller than the screens on devices they replace, so font size and content arrangement need to adjust. Indented bullets (like this one), the mainstay of writing for a computer monitor, waste a lot of space on a vertical smart-phone screen.
• Thumbs get in on the action: Users frequently hold tablets in both hands, so a new navigation experience is using the thumbs to tap what are essentially “next/back” links at the edges of screens. Horizontal, screen-by-screen views on a tablet seem to be as natural as continuous vertical scrolls on a computer screen.
• Biology screws up swiping… up: Unless you’re a FREAK, your fingernail is on top of your finger. This messes with bottom-to-top swiping motions for anyone with nails of more than a quarter inch, especially on vertical screens. (Laaaaaaadies. And ungroomed duuuuuuudes.) Now you know why tablet developers love horizontal motion.

Standards are still fuzzy. Some content-heavy sources use horizontal navigation between chapters, sections and articles, and vertical navigation within a chapter, section or article. Others keep all swiping motions horizontal. All combine swiping with links that keep the old “click to jump” navigation method alive and well.

So What Does All This Mean?

Well, it means the medium matters. The good news is you already knew that instinctively. The bad news is nobody agrees that there is one magic formula that spans all the ways people have been trained to read on screen.

A few bits of advice:

• Google “responsive design” if you haven’t already. The old way of spanning devices was to create a web site for computers, a mobile site for phone browsers and an app version for app-enabled devices. Responsive design builds in the ability to “sniff” what device is displaying the content and modify the experience without separate versions.
• Play with a Windows 8 desktop connected to a touch screen. Some people love Windows 8 and some hate it. This isn’t an endorsement. To me, it’s a fascinating test bed for user input, since it is the only common platform out there today that lets readers use keyboards, mouse buttons, scroll wheels and touch gestures all at once. Try it yourself. See how your content fares.
• Try converting content for a tablet slideshow. If you knew users would see your content on a series of sequential screens, how would you edit and format it? CNN’s Bleacher Report sports site delivers a lot of its content in lists, one item (with visual) per page, and its responsive design changes “next” buttons on a computer browser into horizontal swipe navigation on tablets. How would your content translate?

OK, so it’s ambiguous. That’s all right. Doubt self-proclaimed “experts.” In the grand history of storytelling, we’re all like stone-carvers looking at a papyrus scroll for the first time. If we embrace the potential of new technology, we can help invent new ways to share our content.

Or at least we’ll have a few amusing failures to look back on — like Moses coming down from the mountain with a single stone tablet that says “Thou shalt not BACK/NEXT.”

Every industry, every profession and craft, has its own distinctive and often colorful nomenclature and slang. B2B marketers should make it our business to not only know the specialized terminology that defines our industries, but then embrace it, and enrich our content and promotional copy with it.

To the degree we do so, and do it judiciously and well, we’ll invite our audiences into closer engagement and community — with our brands and with one another.

Watts In a Word

Marketers and corporate communicators spend lots of time and effort seeking ways to make our content clean, lean and easy to understand. That’s generally a very good thing.

For example, David Meerman Scott has led the charge to eliminate gobbledygook from corporate and marketing communications. But the best examples of industry-specific lingo are not gobbledygook. Gobbledygook words and phrases are typically superfluous. Hype. Cliche. Devoid of real meaning. Lingo, by contrast, has specific meaning, context and resonance for an in-the-know audience within a particular category or profession.

If you’re interested in making content easier to read, there are any number of readability tests you can apply. This post is the most comprehensive I’ve seen in pointing out the wide variety of ”fog indices” you can use to tune content to a measurable degree of complexity or reading level.

But when I admire a well-played example of lingo, I’m not encouraging the use of polysyllabic, five-dollar words. In fact, when you come across great use of lingo, you’re more likely to need the industry-specific equivalent of an Urban Dictionary, not the Oxford Unabridged, to catch its meaning.

Lingo Unchained

I bumped into one-legger sales call in a terrific series of articles in the April 2013 print edition of Remodeling magazine (published by my Hanley Wood colleagues). Their series focused on consumer review websites, and how for home improvement contractors these sites can be a double-edge sword: Get a string of great reviews, play by the rules set down by each site, and it’s all good. But get a cranky customer or two who decides you’ve done them wrong, and woe is you and your online reputation.

One contractor lamented getting a negative review after he declined to visit a consumer’s home for what he knew would be a one-legger sales call. I needed to search Google for the meaning, but there it was: A term of art used by pros who sell large-ticket purchases directly to homeowners.

Whether they’re selling new furnaces, windows or siding, contractors soon learn that it’s critical to have both “legs” of a homeowner couple present during a sales call in order to close the deal. When a contractor knows only one of the two homeowners will be present, that’s a one-legger, likely to require additional, time-consuming sales follow-up.

The delightfully daring thing about the Remodeling editors’ work is they used this particular bit of lingo unabashedly. No italics. No quotation marks. No definition politely provided in parentheses.

Instead, they gave their audience credit for knowing the term, for being engaged and savvy members of a specialized community. At the same time, they gave outsiders like me credit for being willing to search out the definition, in order to feel like we too were in on the industry-insider, best-practices conversation.

What are some favorite examples of lingo in your category? And are you using them to enliven your content, differentiate your brand and captivate your audience?

This time the question was uttered by a skeptical CFO. A colleague and I were presenting recommendations to a B2B start-up. Almost before the word “blog” left my lips, the CFO’s face clouded over. He pushed back from the conference table, tipped back in his chair and gazed up at the ceiling, as though seeking guidance (or patience?) from a higher power.

“Do people really read blogs?”

If you’re a content marketer, it’s a question you’re likely to hear. It might come from a dubious CMO or company president. Or maybe from a time-crunched subject matter expert, from whom you’re seeking background on which to base your next post.

When the question does arise, try not to get defensive or nervous. After all, it’s a reasonable question. And the fact is, if your organization is blogging, you’re in good and plentiful company.

Instead, consider responding with a question of your own:

“Do people go online to search for information relevant to their wants, needs and questions?”

If your inquisitor answers “yes” (and, if they’re being honest, they’ll have to answer “yes”), proceed as follows:

“Then, to answer your question, yes, people do read blogs. We read them because blogs can provide information relevant to our personal and business wants, needs and questions.”

“Do People Really Read Blogs?” is the Wrong Question

There’s plenty of research to suggest blogs are both a popular form of consumer media and a smart business marketing tool. Here’s an infographic from Blogging.org which states that more that 300 million people in the United States view a blog monthly. Meanwhile, the team at HubSpot has done a lot of research and data gathering to suggest that, for businesses, blogging can be highly effective as a lead-generation tool.

The aim of this post is not to make a statistical case for blogging. Instead, this post is about making sure people who wonder about or doubt the value of blogging are asking the right question.

When someone asks “do people actually read blogs?” they might be confusing whether people read blogs occasionally, as an information source, or whether they consume blog content regularly or even frequently, as part of their daily or weekly media and information diet.

Let’s concede: Many of us don’t subscribe to a blog. We might read the Huffington Post. We might seek out posts written by a beat reporter covering our favorite sports team or music genre. We might even subscribe to a daily or weekly e-news and blog-post update from a trade publication in the industry where we work.

But many of us — like the skeptical CFO — don’t consider ourselves “blog readers.” And that’s OK.

Numbers of subscribers, even numbers of frequent readers, is not the only measure of blogging’s potential value. A blog is simply a platform from which a brand and its people can share know-how, start conversations, and demonstrate understanding and empathy for customers. If some of that information ends up being found relevant by someone looking for an answer to a business-related question, want or need, then the blog has served a valuable purpose. For the brand. And for the reader.

If that value exchange causes the reader to want to learn more about the brand, visit the brand’s website, maybe even subscribe to the brand’s blog or e-newsletter, then the blog has served a very valuable purpose. For the brand. And for the reader.

Being Present When Your Audience Goes Searching

One of my colleagues, Joel Ring, recently wrote this post on why business decision makers and metrics analysts often struggle to understand each other when studying customer data and key performance indicators (KPI). Today, if a corporate marketer finds herself having difficulty gaining insights from her company’s data, it’s possible she’ll enter this phrase into a search engine: “Finding insights in big data.”

If she does, Joel’s post will come up No. 1 in the organic results. Last time I checked, it comes up just ahead of content published by IBM and the Harvard Business Review. And if that marketer clicks through and reads Joel’s post, well, there’s a chance she’ll decide our firm might be a resource to help her with KPI dashboard reporting and analysis.

She might not subscribe to our blog, and that’s OK. We might not be able to claim she “reads our blog,” since she’s only done so once. And even that’s OK.

Because when she went searching for answers and information, she found, and got value from, our brand.

At its simplest level, blogging lets us project into the marketplace some of who we are, what we do and how we serve and help others. Then we get to discover if sharing that information will enable us to connect with, and add value for, someone. Ideally, several someones.

Do people really read blogs?

Research says they visit blogs more than 300 million times each month. Assuming some of those posts end up ranking high in organic search results, then yes, people really are reading blogs.

So maybe the question isn’t: “Do people really read blogs?”

The better question might be: “When people go searching for something relevant and valuable to read, will they find your blog?”

The next time you look up from your computer, hours have passed, you have no idea where the time went, you haven’t left the site since you can remember, and somehow you’re missing a shoe.

Where I’m from, we call this “archive binging.” It’s commonly brought on by diving into the backlogs of a webcomic, or getting hypnotized by a blog with a pleasingly specific premise.

There’s a term for such addictive websites, too, coined from the mouseover text of this comic: “browser narcotics.”

For marketers, It’s worth taking a moment to analyze what’s going on here. Even if your content has nothing to do with Internet gimmicks, you want to draw in your readers and retain them as long as possible. Let’s look at a few leading browser narcotics and see if there are any lessons to borrow.

TV Tropes: Pack in the links and use examples

You know that moment when a movie scientist or TV doctor whisks off his or her glasses to deliver bad news? TV Tropes lists countless examples of people pulling this move, whether parodied or played straight, across every form of entertainment, including real life. (The page also discusses subcategories, like removing your shades before spouting off a one-liner, and related tropes, like when the nerdy girl pulls off her glasses to reveal that she’s been beautiful all along.)

It’s essentially Wikipedia for storytelling devices. And, like Wikipedia, it’s easy to find yourself falling down the rabbit hole of opening new tab after new tab.

How does this happen? For one thing, the content is densely linked. Nearly every sentence can connect you to another page or two — in a very natural, unobtrusive way. If you have questions about any of the terms or references, they’re all just a click away.

The sheer number and variety of references also guarantees that nearly anyone will find something they can relate to. This is the power of examples: those little moments of familiarity and recognition make reading a web page feel more like a conversation.

Cracked: Know your audience

Cracked.com is a humor website aimed primarily at 15- to 25-year-old video gamers, which is to say: Its language and jokes are not necessarily worksafe. But a big portion of the articles are lists of offbeat historical or scientific facts. The result can be surprisingly addictive.

Cracked understands its niche: if you want articles about poisonous animals, weird bugs or real-life mad scientists, it’s got you covered. And whoever compiles the “Read more” links has obviously done their homework.

The editors understand that people who read “5 Shockingly Advanced Ancient Buildings That Shouldn’t Exist” will also enjoy “6 Amazingly High-Tech Ancient Weapons” and “6 Ancient Sports Too Awesome for the Modern World.” But they also take a moment to write a unique, funny lead-in text every time, connecting these ideas in a way that subtly argues for you to keep reading.

(The argument seems to be working; Cracked.com averages 300 million page views per month.)

TED Talks: Fun, digestible info

I probably don’t have to explain TED Talks to you; its 1,050 videos have collectively earned more than one billion viewings. I also probably don’t have to explain how easy it is to segue from one clip to the next for hours.

TED offers tidbits of fact and insight, all with a candy coating of visuals and famous guests. However, I’d argue that a big part of its success is what’s under the candy. Watching TED Talks can be fun, but it’s still informative enough to seem like self-improvement. A TED archive binge makes you feel good, like you’re getting smarter with every click.

Don’t be afraid to inform. If people are at your site, presumably they want to know more about your product or industry. But keep each post or video short and snappy. You may never gain TED’s widespread appeal, but you can establish yourself as the go-to expert in your niche.

Speaking of keeping things short and snappy, it’s time for me to wrap this up. I hope you’ve learned something about archive binges and browser narcotics. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have 15 open tabs to read…

Have an idea for a future link? Send it to us here.

1. There’s a Slurpee for that: 7-Eleven asks fans to help it build a better app.
2. Does democratized culture drown out greatness? PressPausePlay to find out.
3. Singing the blues: a denim upstart uses video to tell its Made in the U.S.A. story.
4. Twee’s company: Prada joins forces with indie darling filmmakers for a content splash.
5. The Super Bowl of Satire: the best of April Fool’s Day’s brand hoaxes.

Motion graphics are another such clearing in the information jungle. Motion graphics videos are essentially moving infographics. Here’s one promoting Charles Duhigg’s book, The Power of Habit. With motion graphics, objects, images and backgrounds move and interact in a way that tells a story, illustrates a process or makes a point. It’s a visual way to simplify complex relationships or bring abstract ideas and concepts to life.

The key to a great motion graphics video is an experienced and capable motion graphics designer. It’s a technical process that involves a lot of elements that all have to work together. The designer is at the center of the process, from storyboarding the script to delivering the final files.

Here are five important best practices to keep in mind when planning your own motion graphics video:

1. Keep it simple. One way to do this is to take a problem-solution approach. Set up your theme by asking a question or posing a conundrum, then spend the rest of the script answering it. If you plan on using live talent, remember they will most likely be reading from a teleprompter. Chunk out the copy in digestible bites, keep your sentences short and use language that paints a picture. All this will facilitate a smoother, more natural delivery.

2. Include transition frames in your storyboards. Transition frames illustrate how you plan on moving from A to B to C. An example would be zooming in on a letter to begin a new visual sequence, or moving the camera down to introduce a new visual. Working out your transitions frame by frame will avoid all kinds of problems in the final edit. In general, the more detailed your storyboards, the better the outcome.

3. Visualize the information. In a recent client video we developed (used for internal employee brand stewardship purposes, and not linkable for public viewing), we began with an infographic in the shape of a pyramid that contained different levels of information. Throughout the video, we used animated type, graphics and icons to keep the information moving and interesting to the eye. We also had the talent interact with all these elements, swiping her arm to slide copy on and off screen, holding words in her hands, etc.

4. Use on-air talent if possible. Motion graphics can be abstract and cold, so using a live narrator or ‘host” can warm things up and make your video feel a lot more human. If you can, go with an experienced on-air talent — someone who can read from the teleprompter while gesturing and moving through the frame in an easy, natural manner. (This is harder than it looks.) If you use an employee, “cast” for someone with strong on-screen presence, and allow time for some extra takes. Getting it to sound right AND look right is a 10 on the degree-of-difficulty scale. Be sure you “choreograph” how and where you want the talent to move before you start shooting. Consider stage direction part of your scripting and storyboarding process.

5. Wardrobe and hair matter. If you’re using a green screen, your talent should wear clothing that stands out against it. Greens and dark blues don’t work so well. Also, hair can be a nightmare to outline and clean up, so get a wardrobe artist with green screen experience if you can afford it.

In my next post on this topic, Part 2, I will interview a talented motion graphics designer to get an insider’s take on the production process. We will discuss everything from editing to music selection.

We use our eyes to absorb the content that shapes how we perceive an idea, or motivates us to behave or react in a certain way.

Consider your first impression when you meet someone. Chances are before they’ve even said one word, you’ve formed a perception, even an opinion, about them.

Or think about walking into a new restaurant. Everything from the decor to the appearance of the waitstaff has already affected your mood — before you’ve even read what’s on the menu.

This concept holds true in marketing communications. So why leave the visual aspect of your marketing as an afterthought, or neglect it altogether?

If you’re in the communications business, you are constantly looking for new ways to cut through the clutter. Often, we use words. But just as often, images and design will be what pull the viewer in for a second glance. And it’s within that second glance where opportunity lies. The opportunity to deliver that key piece of information. To trigger awareness. To shift attitudes and perceptions. Reinforce your company’s message and image. Cause a buyer or influencer to make a decision.

Stock photos and graphics can be useful and have their place in marketing and corporate communications. But the next time you really want to turn heads and open minds, consider tapping the power of visual marketing. Of investing in original, strategically concepted imagery.

The following examples, from Uwe Stoklossa’s inspiring book Advertising: New Techniques for Visual Seduction, illustrate just how important and valuable it can be to invest resources and creative energy in developing original imagery to support your marketing communications. Each image operates on two levels, in a way which demands that all-important second glance. And each illustrates how a single image can convey a message in a compelling, unique, highly successful way.

But don’t take my words for it. See for yourself.

(Click image thumbnails for a larger view).

After all, brands — like people, plants and other living things — can only thrive with adequate nourishment.

That’s why surveys such as the U.S. Digital Marketing Spending Survey from Gartner are so potentially valuable as benchmarking tools for corporate marketers.

Let’s concede from the start that Gartner’s research, done in November and December of last year, was conducted among marketers who work for enterprise corporations. Specifically, the survey focused on U.S.-based businesses with more than $500 million in annual revenue. The average among companies covered by the survey was annual revenue of $5 billion.

Still, the survey spanned six rather varied industry categories: financial services, health care, high-tech, manufacturing, media and retail. Key findings are stated not in actual-dollar terms, but as percentages. So theoretically, the data can serve as relevant benchmarks for businesses of almost any size, in any industry.

If you agree with that premise, take a quick look at what might be the survey’s two most important findings. Important, that is, if you’re wondering whether your brand has the marketing resources it needs not to merely subsist, but to thrive.

Finding No. 1: On average, companies spent 10.4 percent of 2012 revenue on “overall marketing activities.”

For the average company covered by the survey, the $5 billion enterprise, that’s $520,000,000. “Overall marketing activities,” as defined by Gartner, include marketing salaries and both traditional and digital marketing expenses.

Few of us will have the privilege, or the responsibility, to manage a nine-figure corporate marketing budget. But let’s put that 10.4 percent benchmark in a more mainstream — or main street — context.

Let’s say you manage marketing for a $20 million firm. Is your organization seeing its way to budgeting 10.4 percent of annual revenue for marketing? How about 5.2 percent? 2.6 percent?

Finding No. 2: Digital marketing spending averaged 2.5 percent of 2012 revenue.

Among the activities Gartner aggregates under ”digital marketing” are online advertising, email marketing, search marketing, video, analytics, social media, the company website, and content marketing. In other words, a whole lot of what today’s marketers are doing on a daily basis.

Now, back to the survey’s average $5 billion company. If it spends 2.5 percent of revenue on digital marketing, it’s investing roughly $125 million annually. How does that carry over to our for-example $20 million firm? More like $500,000 annually.

Is Your Brand Starving for Lack of Marketing Budget?

Enough math, because that’s not the point of this post.

The broader point is simply to make you aware of the Gartner survey as a possible resource for benchmarking. If you’re struggling for a basis on which to advocate for sufficient marketing resources, perhaps you can factor these data points into your thinking — and into any discussions (disagreements?) your organization’s leadership has around marketing spend.

If, as a percentage of revenue, your organization spends only half or even one fourth of what much larger companies are spending on marketing, then it probably means one of two things:

1. You’ve got to be 2x or even 4x as smart and efficient as the marketers who work for the world’s bigger brands, or…

2. No matter how hard, smart and efficiently you work, your brand — at some fundamental level — is undernourished.

Granted, no marketing leader or team probably ever has all the resources they might wish in order to do all they possibly could.

Still, it’s food for thought to ask whether your company spends around 10.4 percent of revenue on marketing and 2.4 percent on digital marketing. Or even a healthy fraction of those figures.

Or is that sound you hear your brand’s stomach growling?

If you’re open to sharing, it would be great to hear what percentage of revenue your organization invests in marketing, to provide additional benchmarking data for other corporate marketers. Comments, and data points, welcome.

If that question comes at you out of the blue, that’s exactly how a disaster will come, if and when it does.

And if you think talking about content marketing and disaster planning in the same sentence sounds overly dramatic, consider:

Today most organizations are feeling pressure to accomplish more with less. That means inside many businesses, nonprofits and associations — including some very large ones — responsibility for day-to-day management and coordination of big, strategically critical content marketing programs resides with just a few people.

Sometimes just one.

Meanwhile, research from the Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs tells us brands are investing ever-increasing percentages of their marketing budgets — and, therefore, their opportunity to build the business and brand — in content.

Now put those two trends together: If your organization is investing more and more of its resources and aspirations in a marketing strategy owned and understood by a relative few people — maybe only one person — risk management experts would say that’s a recipe for disaster.

When Bad Things Happen to Good People — and Brands

This issue is a personal one for my colleagues and me. In the past year, we’ve seen two clients — each a delightful and passionate professional, the B2B content captain for their respective organizations — depart their posts suddenly. Overnight. No glide path. No chance for thoughtful transition planning. Instead, here today, pulling the levers and pushing the buttons. Then, sadly, gone tomorrow.

Content marketing isn’t like traditional promotional marketing. Once an advertising or direct mail campaign is developed and in market, it might run for weeks or months, relatively unattended. Content marketing — and let’s include social media management here — tends to be a more daily, hourly, even real-time work flow and concern. There are calendars to keep. Cadences to maintain. A steady flow of creative deliverables to review. Metrics to monitor and analyze. Comments, positive and negative, to consider and respond to. Communities to nurture and cultivate.

So what happens if something unfortunate and unexpected happens to one of the few, or only, content captains in your organization?

It stands to reason you should have a recovery plan. Or, if you prefer, a content marketing continuity plan. To have it thought through, written down, and appropriately shared among the right internal stakeholders and external partners. And to even have rehearsed the plan — just in case.

Disaster Recovery Plan Outline

There are disaster recovery consultants and plan templates out there, but the traditional focus tends to be on sustaining business and IT operations in the aftermath of natural and man-made disasters — floods, fires, tornadoes and the like.

Here’s the Wikipedia entry on that type of disaster planning, along with a great overview article by Geoffrey H. Wold, author of several books on the subject.

When it comes to a content marketing recovery plan, triggered by the sort of human “disaster” of which I’m speaking, we marketers might be wise to start figuring out our own plans. Plans based on hands-on, common-sense understanding of what goes into a executing a big content program. And perhaps using some of the traditional disaster recovery plans as a guide.

So, a rough outline of a disaster recovery plan for content marketing, with much credit owing to Geoffrey Wold’s 10-step process:

1. Obtain top management commitment

If you’re the chief marketing officer (CMO), you can set the tone and urgency around developing a continuity plan. If you report to the CMO, but are the captain of your organization’s content marketing, sit down with your CMO for a serious conversation about what might happen if, heaven forbid, you’re suddenly no longer in the captain’s chair.

2. Establish a planning committee

Besides the content captain, identify at least one or two co-captains who — if they aren’t already — can be trained over time to fill (or share) the captain’s role temporarily if disaster occurs. Someone who understands your content marketing technology infrastructure (i.e., content management system, marketing automation system, email service, etc.) should also be on the committee. Appoint a member who understands your organization’s broader business continuity and IT disaster plan. Sales also might need to be represented. And don’t forget your content agency. They can be tremendously helpful in maintaining continuity — provided you’ve brought them in and made them a true partner early on, before disaster strikes.

3. Perform a risk assessment

Where can things really go wrong if your organization’s content captain is suddenly not available? Make sure all core program strategy and calendar documents are stored on a server or in a folder accessible to other committee members, not only on the captain’s laptop. Document any commitments made between the content captain and content contributors or subject matter experts (SMEs). For example, if your captain pledged that a key SME will get a $5,000 bonus for her various contributions this year, don’t leave it at a handshake agreement.

4. Establish priorities for processing and operations

Think about your overall cadence and content mix, and work through a few scenarios where you might need to dial back on volume or adjust the mix, if only temporarily. If daily blogging is absolutely core to your program, then maybe you’d back off slightly on the pace of webinars if you need to get through a rough patch without the captain. If the monthly e-newsletter with the “CEO perspectives” article is something your brand just never misses, then decide who’s going to fill the captain’s role in making sure the newsletter never skips a beat, and the CEO’s column gets written.

5. Determine recovery strategies

Some of the best recovery strategies are formulated before the disaster. For example, instead of planning content on a monthly basis, maybe your next planning cycle should look three months out, so you’ve got more topics and assets in process and “in the can” further in advance. That will help you get through a potential disaster.

6. Perform data collection

This isn’t exactly what traditional disaster recovery planners focus on when it comes to data. But for content marketing purposes, make sure you’ve captured and appropriately shared all key user names and passwords — for the blog CMS, the web metrics software, the marketing automation platform, the stock photo site. While you’re at it, don’t forget to capture contact information for SMEs and other partners. Make sure somebody besides the captain understands the KPI dashboard report (i.e., how it comes together, what it means, which KPIs are most K, what historical benchmarks you’re striving to beat, which goals and commitments have been communicated to upper management). And make sure someone else understands, and has authority to manage, the content marketing budget.

7. Organize and document a written plan

Yup. If it’s not written and communicated, it’s not a plan.

8. Develop testing criteria and procedures, and 9. Test the plan

Next time the captain goes on vacation, why not put the plan to a test? See if you’ve got the approval processes in place to maintain continuity as content assets come in for client review and approval. Have a co-captain lead the planning huddle or present the monthly KPI dashboard to senior management. Bring the agency partner on-site for a week, or a month, and experiment with how they can help fill content creation and coordination gaps in the absence of a key player on the client side. Based on the learning, revise and evolve the plan as needed.

10. Approve the plan

Make sure key contributors know you have a plan. It will reinforce just how much strategic importance the organization places on the content program, and how valuable their role is in executing that program.

Also, make sure your top marketing management has read the plan, and has a copy close at hand. Don’t be surprised if they started out thinking you were being overly dramatic about this whole disaster recovery thing, only to decide having a continuity plan is a smart idea, after all.

Your brand is investing big in content.

Your customers and prospects are basing their perceptions and decisions, in part, on your content.

Your captain, if he or she is a good one, has committed mind, heart and spirit to making the content program a success.

If something happens to remove them from the captain’s role, they would want your content program to not only recover and continue, but thrive.