To differentiate and elevate your content marketing, it’s a good idea to shake up your thinking every now and again – bust some myths - especially when it comes to thought leadership.

Myth #1: You can never have too many white papers

Often if a brand is developing a significant piece of thought leadership, the belief is the end result should always be a giant white paper.

The truth is, with more content generated last year than in the history of mankind – unless your potential customer is a superfan of the topic, it will be a tough job persuading them to deep dive into thousands of words.

Our experience in quality thought leadership has shown that developing bite-sized highlights and promoting those on the appropriate channels will gain a lot more traction and provoke a lot more click-through action, than a monster discussion paper.

Myth #2: Pumping out static, formulaic social posts is enough

A lot of brands resort to one trick on their socials – usually a static image with posting copy.

Such assets have a role to play but we’ve found using bite-sized blog highlights and quotes - and most importantly, highly-dynamic video to highlight what the thought leadership is about, gains a lot more engagement and also helps elevate the brand.

Myth #3: Inhouse experts talking on camera automatically engage

“Let’s do a video in the office to highlight our thought leadership,” say a lot of people all the time.

This is usually a missed opportunity. Creative execution and quality production can boost this kind of content dramatically.

This video 3rdspace created for the EY CEO Imperative research launch does feature an expert talking to camera – but we’ve shot it in a dramatic location that fits the brand, we’ve stylised the look and feel, and added in dynamic graphics to tell the story. You can see from the first few seconds how that makes it instantly more engaging.

Myth #4: All we need to do is tell them what we have learnt and what we think

True through leadership starts a dynamic conversation and utilises innovative ways of having that conversation so your audience is encouraged to explore the content further.

3rdspace use a mix of technical backends to do this – from LinkedIn Live streams where the audience can ask questions and comment in real time, to webinars that stream out of social channels with questions on all platforms being aggregated to the speakers, to a hybrid virtual event that allows for Q&A – but also break-out rooms. See NEC Immersion for examples.

Myth 5: Thought leadership can be disconnected from your values and people

The greatest way to raise the profile of your brand is to prove how you are adding value to society and telling the story in a dynamic way that makes people think, at the same time, showing (not telling) what your business does and featuring your people.

3rdspace worked with our client NEC, The National Gallery of Victoria and acclaimed digital artist Refik Anadol, to highlight what can be achieved when you combine humans with technology. The resulting video highlights the process that Refik goes through and how he uses big data and a giant canvas provided by NEC to create immersive art. jasaseo.link

The art is visually dynamic but the story of his process is the bit that makes you stop and think – inspiring you to find out more.

What other myths can we help you bust? We’d love to chat.

rob@3rdspace.com.au

3rdspace is a content marketing company whose purpose is to help purpose driven brands connect with the values of purpose driven consumers. If you’d like to chat about how your content marketing can better connect with your consumers by finding the place of shared purpose our team of marketing & content strategist, behavioural psychologists and creatives are here to help. 

Looking for more inspiration? Check out more blogs here

Download our Free Content With Purpose Handbook

Cutting through the overload of ordinary content clutter is a challenge we take to heart at 3rdspace. This was a first for us and a first for the industry too. We’ve just launched Australia’s First Travel Industry Gameshow!

Travel agents from across the nation turned out for the coveted battle for Globus family of brands’ Travel Champions title. The nation’s top travel agents took to the stage as TV presenter James Kerley put them through their paces, quizzing contestants on geography, travel and their product knowledge about the Globus family of Brands: Avalon Waterways, Globus, Cosmos and Monograms. It’s wasn’t a poll or a quiz. It was a real live Travel Game Show!

The Background

A large percentage of Globus Family of Brands holidays are sold through travel agents – they are a vital part of telling the brand’s story. We needed to find an innovative way to inspire them to want to tell that story and build their product knowledge about the Globus family of Brands: Avalon Waterways, Globus, Cosmos and Monograms. To do this we needed to firstly step back and look at the cultural context.

The reason so many people are attracted to the travel industry is not just that “they love travel,” but that they also love dealing with people and being well-informed about the wonderful places and experiences in this beautiful world. And most importantly, being involved in an industry that allows you to have some fun along the way!

The 3rdspace Approach

90% of the content in the entire world was generated within two years alone (Forbes, 2018). With no signs of stopping and statistics increasing each year, it becomes even more important to have a strong content strategy that brings the brand’s tone of voice to life in a way that is different from the competition and involves the audience.

The approach is still the same. Ensure the content lines up with our strategy and the Globus Family of Brands’ content mission that allows you to ‘Go Live It’. We also needed ensure it reflected the brand’s tone of voice. Most importantly in the execution, we really needed to think about how we could provoke action and involve the audience.

Sourcing the Contestants

An initial launch film was amplified to travel agents across the country, creating hype and driving them to a dedicated competition microsite where travel agents were required to answer a series of travel related questions to qualify to be a part of the game show.

Teams featured travel agents from all states and territories across Australia, including representatives from Flight Centre, Bicton Travel, Helloworld, Travel Managers, italk travel, Devonport Travel & Cruise and RAA.

Trade Support

Industry trade site KarryOn was excited to come on board as the exclusive trade media partner for this truly unique event and helped to build anticipation and excitement for the event right up to the night. With access to a limited number of passes to the chic pre-event party at Urban Winery and seats in the studio audience, KarryOn ensured travel agents knew it was the hottest ticket in town!

The Gameshow

Our ten teams headed to our purpose-built TV game show set in Sydney, ready to compete in front of a live studio audience of industry peers, to become the Globus Family of Brands’ Travel Agency Champions.

After a gruelling six rounds of tough questions, it was Pat McKinnon and Liam Lavery from Flight Centre Ballarat that took home a trophy; winning an amazing night out for their whole agency and most importantly, the prestige of being dubbed the best in the business.

Following the team competition, it was time to determine who would take out Globus Family of Brands’ Travel Consultant Champion. Five individual consultants were randomly selected and invited to “Come On Down” from the studio audience to battle it out against the top five contestants from round one.

Round two saw some intense competition but ultimately it was Rowan Muller from Flight Centre Marion that triumphed, scoring themselves a luxurious river cruise for two with Avalon Waterways.

The Response

The feedback and engagement within the travel industry has been fantastic, including take overs on industry travel blogs, a massive wave of entries and hyped conversation on industry social sites. A dedicated amplification plan ensured our event content would receive extensive coverage across the travel industry with social amplification providing even greater scale during and post the event.

Globus Family of Brands Director of Marketing Chris Fundell said “3rdspace had the answer and we absolutely loved working with them for their non-traditional approach. They knew just how to capture the attention of our audience in a way we know will have a lasting impact, communicating our key messages in an extremely entertaining way.”

Like to hear more?

We look forward to partnering with ambitious and brave brands like Globus to create more innovative projects in the future. This is an example that we hope may inspire you to do your content marketing differently to the rest of the pack. If you’d like to know more about how it came about, drop us a line.

Often brands jump at the chance to use new technology without thinking about the bigger picture. What’s this content trying to achieve and why are we doing it? Is it just making new content using new (ish) media platforms, just for the sake of it?

 

Here at 3rdspace we’re all about content with purpose, every time a brief comes across our desk – We ask how this content will add value to peoples lives and what is the best way to bring that content to life to have true impact.

 

One such buzz platform, is that of Virtual Reality. It seems like everyone these days is trying to get a piece of the VR pie, often without thinking about the WHY, and just jumping on the train to give it a go just because everyone else is, to add that string to their bow. VR can be an incredible storytelling tool, if used in the right way, to really share a story in an immersive way, that was previously impossible. It’s with this in mind that we decided to use VR to create a highly emotive series of VR experiences for Vinnies as part of the CEO Sleepout, working with our partners at PWC.

 

On any given night in Australia one in 200 people are homeless – that is a total of 105,237 people.

 

It’s heartbreaking to read these statistics, but with Vinnies and PWC we felt we had to go beyond the statistics to enable people to understand the impact.

 

We produced a series of three VR experiences around Domestic Violence, Homelessness and Mental Illness, collaborating with PWC’s content production team, so some of Australia’s leading CEOs could be placed in the middle of a situation in a fully immersive and somewhat confronting situation.

 

Feedback on the night can only be described as highly thought provoking, and poignant as the CEO’s were brought into real-life scenarios facing many Australian’s every day.

 

For us, this is the powerful way for VR to be used to its full advantage, an immersive story  that creates a lasting impact. We’re looking forward to making more content that utilises this technology, where appropriate and we are very honoured to be working alongside an organisation of passionate people that are committed to creating positive change.

 

Thanks to all at Vinnies and PWC on this very special collaboration.

Tribes. They’re everywhere.

As humans, we want to get around people who get us. It’s in our nature. We want to feel like we belong and that our participation is important. We all want to know that we can make a difference and that our actions count.

It was once thought that the internet would be the great equaliser; that (unparalleled) widespread access to information would economically liberate the masses, but ultimately homogenise us culturally.

Social media has proved otherwise.

Not only have we seen more tribes than ever before, which connect over cross-cultural and geographic boundaries, we’ve seen more innovative ways to organise and mobilise these tribes.

We’ve raised millions of dollars for ALS research through an ice bucket challenge, which enabled a huge scientific breakthrough. We’ve brought home Nigerian girls who were kidnapped by rebel forces, all without leaving our homes.

However, there is a downside -- well, for marketers anyway: our clients are now demanding social campaigns with as much scalability as the ice bucket challenge. With next to no budget. Because social media is free, right?

Due to the success of grassroots campaigns plastered all over social media, a kind of availability bias ensues: because we are inundated with information about the movements, it makes us all feel closer to the problem and the solution than perhaps we really are. This, in turn, it makes it easy for our clients envision their campaigns gleaning a similar level support and making a similar level of impact.

While it’s very much possible to shape an advertising campaign around a social movement, that doesn’t mean that every social campaign calls for a social movement. It’s got to be the right fit, otherwise it’s going to flop. You can’t fit a square peg into a round hole.

To effectively harness the power of the social tribes, your campaign requires a few key ingredients:

  1. Disruption: your cause needs to inherently challenge some kind of status quo. As we have seen, this works particularly well for social causes, where the tribe is driven by a moral or ethical imperative. This also means that you need to propose a better way forward, and clearly outline how easy it is for people step up and make a difference.

 

  1. Connection: you need to bring people together on a social level. They’re united by a common cause, but it needs to be a real cause and they need to opt in. The people who actively opt in generally want to feel like they are part of something bigger than themselves, and as an individual, are an essential part of an important group. The impact of mobilising the tribe also depends on the strength of the call to action from the leadership team.

 

  1. Commitment: in order to make change, you need time and consistency. The group needs to see you, their leader, in the trenches day in and day out, fighting to make a real change. A two-week campaign period with two content pieces does not a social movement make.

 

You also need time to recruit supporters to your tribe, aka build up your following  -- after all, there is strength in numbers, and you’ve got to make some noise to get noticed.

So, how can it work?

Recently, 3rdspace partnered with ITF to fight a real injustice. We rallied together our own special tribe who called for Levis to provide better working conditions for the dock workers of Madagascar, who earn as little as 16 cents an hour shipping denim all around the world.

The result? We got Levis to commit to change in just three days.

Here’s how we did it.

Pay for a personality, or create your own?

That is the question.

You’ll notice a couple of pieces of 3rdspace work recently, that uses "a face" for the content.

Our content piece for Pepsi Max to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Top Gun utilises the talents of Chaz Mostert, one of the drivers Pepsi Max sponsor.

The content campaign for NRMA is fronted by the loveable Deirdre, NRMA’s Do it Your Selfer, a character that is unique to the brand.

Both have had fantastic shares and positive sentiment for each brand.

It highlights a challenge many marketers face - to use a known personality that will likely bring instant credibility and social reach to the brand, or create a character that optimises the essence of your brand. Both have merit. Here’s a few thoughts that may help you make the decision on what’s best for your brand.

The Pepsi Max team have done a great job with their sponsorship of Chaz, finding an innovative intellectual property to reinforce the relationship that’s not a sticker on a helmet. The content taps into a wider audience outside of motor racing, and his personality and presence on camera really brings the brand essence to life.

What we learn from this is, if you’re going to do a personality endorsement or sponsorship, build a strong relationship with the talent, find out what the talent is into outside their core known skills and build a story that has wide appeal. Chaz’s fans have loved the clip, and even Holden drivers gave it a like and a share.

If you’re going to create your own personality, the content strategy and back story have to be developed thoroughly before the camera rolls.

NRMA haven’t just used loveable Deirdre as the face of a product campaign, they’ve been open to extending the story and involving consumers in the conversation.

Her personality and how we add to her back story with the content helps build longevity, which is where the challenge is for brand custodians. With so many changes in the market place and within the business they work for, marketers are always tempted to create something new, and walk away from the hard work they have put into developing a character. Other campaigns and characters can come into the mix, but if you have a character who is building a connection with your audience, think about how their story can evolve with your brand.

To share some thinking from my days running media brands, we would allow 2-4 years to build up a personality, knowing it takes time to build a deep emotional connection with the audience. Whether it’s a new show, a media personality or a character for the brand, make sure the personality you create is planned out, just like you’d plan out a campaign. Map out the journey for the character; have them not just selling a product, but living their purpose through the content.

With the right content strategy and innovative evolution of the characters story, your content can pay off bucket loads.

---

Rob Logan is the founder of 3rdspace – where brands with purpose create content of value.

Content Agency 3rd Space has recently started working with the lovely people at Crust Gourmet Pizza. In our first campaign, Crust needed a localised solution for South Australia to prompt brand awareness and trial.

So…. we employed two new delivery drivers for them. Meet Travis Boak and Tex Walker, the two local rival AFL captains.

Our solution embedded the brand in the parochial and passionate minds of South Aussies, who being a two team town, LOVE their footy!

The value offer: The Captains’ 2 for $30 Deal.  All customers have to do is jump online, order the deal and pick their captain for the chance to have one of the boys deliver direct to their door.

The timing has been perfect leading into footy finals, not only with the two captains being the new Crust ambassadors, and also the fact that pizza is the natural go-to food for watching the footy.

We kicked off the campaign with a short clip of the two Captains delivering Crust Gourmet Pizzas to fans across Adelaide, with plenty more deliveries and surprise content still to come: https://www.facebook.com/crustpizza

The campaign seems to have ticked a lot of (pizza) boxes for Crust – Surprise, Celebrity, Passion, Finals, Rivalry, Fun and so far, the most commented and shared social campaign on Crust Gourmet Pizza’s Facebook page - so we’ll tick the engagement box too.

Save

3rdspace acknowledges Traditional Owners of Country throughout Australia and recognises the continuing connection to lands, waters and communities. We pay our respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures; and to Elders past and present.
3rdspace 2022 © All rights reserved | Privacy