BROADCASTS.com

Rob John is a senior manager at the not-for-profit Content Marketing Association. Previously to joining the CMA, he had a stint working in the Middle East, spent six years at Global Radio working on national campaigns for well-known stations such as Heart, Capital, Classic FM and Smooth and worked for an award-winning content agency where he headed up the digital PR department Most recently Rob joined the CMA to help the organisation highlight best practices in content marketing and showcase them via their membership and awards. Podcast transcription. Stephen Davies: Rob, welcome to the podcast. Rob John: Thanks for having me. SD: So, content marketing. It's a relatively new term and relatively new industry so for people that don't know, what is content marketing exactly? RJ: We are in a bit of a transition with content marketing and we're getting over the hurdle because content is everything you create for an audience whether it's a video or something for an influencer to run with or a microsite that will house FAQs. That would all come under the content blanket so content marketing is something you created for an audience, preferably your audience. So basically that's how it has a lot of confusion around it because a lot of people might think, "Yeah we do influencer marketing" or "We do video" but you're creating content for your audience so you're in the content marketing industry. SD: And everything we do in this day and age particularly with online, digital and social is content. Is that part of your role at the Content Marketing Association, to educate the media on what content marketing is? RJ: Yeah definitely. Even in my brief time at the Content Marketing Association, I've been speaking to a lot of people who have been more traditionally in marketing for the last 15 or 20 years whether that be PR, advertising or marketing. What they've told me is that there's been a lot of change in how they come up with ideas. So it used to be a case where the editor or programme controller would give someone the brief and then the marketing team would go away, create a couple of ideas and then come back and pitch to the editor of the programme controller. Now it's different, these teams are made up of maybe an editor, a couple of people in the marketing team, maybe a PR team, a graphic designer and these ideas are being shaped from an earlier inception really. And I liken it to a CSR - people always say CSR works best when you get the people who care about the end goal from the beginning. We all know that CSR works best when you're in it from the beginning and you can actually shape the industry. And that's what the thing with content is, we've noticed with a lot of our members the teams are now made up of a lot more different people rather than the old form really. SD: Absolutely. You only have to look at what's gone in the PR, marketing and wider comms industry over the last ten years. More agencies have design departments, they have SEO departments, they have video production departments whereas ten 10/15 years ago that wasn't the case and everyone was kind of siloed to one particular discipline. But the media has fragmented so much that the old style of thinking and the old model wouldn't work in this day and age at all. RJ: No you're right and also, in terms of a revenue thing as well. Years ago you might have had a video production company or a company that created your infographics and now it shouldn't just stop there. If you're creating videos for someone now we're talking about how are you going to distribute them? It's not just good enough to create the video, you've got to have a team that works on the distribution side of things. Likewise for influencer marketing as well. That's such a hot topic and a lot of people withing influencer marketing has asked if it's PR or not PR. But if you take the influencer out of the equation and put a celebrity in,