Ten key quotes from the CMA Summit

Anna Watkins, MD Guardian Labs

Content has to be good! The average human attention span has now dropped from 12 seconds to 8 seconds in recent years – that’s one second less than a goldfish. In a cluttered world, the boring is ignored, and unfortunately there’s a lot of dull branded communication in the world. It’s easier than ever for consumers to opt-out of our advertising; people are choosing not to spend time with our branded content, and as we know adblockers are a major problem. Nearly a fifth of British online users are using an adblocker. 107 weeks of video uploaded to YouTube every hour; 30 billion pieces of content shared on Facebook every month. All well and good to have likes and shares, but they don’t pay the bills.

Shaul Olmert – CEO, Playbuzz

It starts with engagement. We’re all very busy, but we consume more content than we ever did before, we have 24/7 access. At the same time, we’re not as patient as we used to be; there’s no specific time of day where we give 100 per cent engagement to consuming content. So how do we make meaningful engagement? We need to find a way of creating engagement, making something people want to click on and give their attention to, but don’t immediately click away from.

Michael Sadicario – Chief Revenue Officer, Storyful

Interesting to see how a lot of the brands today put so much effort into one campaign, one piece of content. Brands should be more like publishers – put content out on a more regular basis if possible – there are obviously challenges with this, such as cost, but we need to think about putting more content out more regularly.

Conny Calcher, VP Marketing and Consumer Experiences, LEGO Group

Users’ core experience is very important – our ‘experience philosophy’ is about creating unique experiences that are seamlessly connected and which fit our brand. It needs to be a seamless journey for the consumer, with moments of dialogue. We’re very much against addressing the content approach with a tonne of content which we just push out – we want our messaging to be a two-way process, with users’ opinions valued – much more authentic

Darryl Newton, CEO and founder, Factory Media

As a modern media business we cannot operation in isolation from other channels. We’re a media business who understands audiences – content is still king, and it’s the key driver.

Tom Curtis, Head of Beyond Advertising, MediaCom

We need to think about all content, not just branded content. It’s almost impossible for us to imagine where it’s going to go. Computers have moved from hyper-real to real. It’s all about quality; we need to focus on this in the future. Tech will get better – cameras, phones, everything. As an industry we can help this process by creating far better quality content. I think in the future we should be able to inform people that this content is from a brand: we don’t want to hide it, it’s not a bad thing.

Esther Allen – Customer Marketing Director, Liberty

It’s not just focusing on mobile, it’s about optimising content across all of the devices we can. Content must be totally seamless across the whole lot, particularly from a mobile POV, content becomes more bitesize and must be immediately engaging.

Read the full article here

Source: The CMA

More like this

When content, data and tech collide: Guardian Labs on changing audience behaviour

Enders Analysis CEO: £5bn content marketing industry “the most important story in the sector”

Your first step to joining FIPP's global community of media leaders

Sign up to FIPP World x