If one were to take a shot every time someone from around adland mentioned a fragmenting media landscape or shortened attention span, one could get rather drunk, rather quickly.
Those two phenomena are a cocktail that has puzzled agencies and marketers alike. There’s a need to tell bigger stories, but less time to do it in. However, News Corp believes that its Medium Rare content marketing agency might be the perfect tonic.
While Medium Rare has existed in one form or another for more than a decade, News Corp has started to bring all of its offerings together at the recently launched Frontiers roadshow. Following News Corp’s D_Coded event earlier this year, Frontiers aims to connect Australia’s agencies more closely with News Corp’s editorial and commercial bosses to find better ways of working together to produce results for brands. An overture to Melbourne’s indie agencies started this year’s proceedings and it’s continuing on to NSW, VIC, and QLD over the next two months.
At Frontiers, News Corp is pitching what it calls the Total News Experience—a blend of paid, owned, and earned media to deliver smarter and more effective marketing outcomes powered in large part by its Intent Connect data platform. But it’s also pitching the idea of standing out in a world, or indeed a sea, of sameness. Being able to stand out in today’s world, according to Nick Smith, Medium Rare’s managing director, requires flexibility and a keen eye to spot what consumers are doing.
“The beautiful thing for our teams that work for Coles or CommBank is that they have their own content teams at Medium Rare. Day in, day out, they see what consumers are thinking, saying and doing in response to our content. They’re also working with the brands to take what’s happening in the consumer world and match that with a business objective,” he told B&T.
“If consumers are getting into a trend around food and they want to place some particular product, it’s how we meet in the middle and create the white space for the brand. Outwardly, it looks quite fun and intangible but it’s very strategic and there’s a lot of planning in place.”
Smith should know well what “outward” fun but inward seriousness looks like. He had been the publisher of Vogue and the editor of GQ before helping to set up Medium Rare a decade ago.
“Honestly, when I came back [to Australia] and I was offered the job to be a leader across the agencies, I’d never though I’d have been producing nachos videos for Coles, I was used to approving covers for Vogue, doing shoots for GQ and going to events. But I had this passion to give us meaning as to why we should have a seat at the table in agency villages,” he said.
Now, thanks to changing media consumption accelerated during COVID, Smith believes that brands need longform, high-quality editorial style content more than ever.
“It was a turning point. There was a proliferation of content-based platforms, such as TikTok and Instagram, where everyone became a content creator and consumers realised that they could critically analyse brands and see the difference between what a brand was saying and what it was doing,” he said.
“We saw this rise of consumers getting meaningful relationships with brands because it was about telling them something, rather than selling them something. That’s where we found a rich territory for our agencies. Advertising is still a very powerful way to get your message out and you have to if you’re launching a new product, campaign or need to get something out very quickly. But for a long-term relationship, being available with your own content when consumers want it is very powerful sitting alongside that.”
As showcased at Frontiers, NRMA Insurance’s recent ‘Help Our Highway’ campaign and Coles Great Lengths For Quality are two of News Australia’s shining examples of the power of positive influence and creativity and storytelling through content. Both companies’ top marketers, Michelle Klein and Amanda McVay, respectively are inductees on B&T’s CMO Power List.
But CommBank, with its Brighter content platform, is perhaps the top of the class. It should be no surprise given its CMO, Jo Boundy, is formerly of Qantas and carried lots of learnings from its in-flight mag to the bank. Boundy is also a longstanding member of the CMO Power List.
“She knew the power from Qantas. We had built a really engaged audience through the magazine, but then also the Travel Insider digital ecosystem. When she went to CommBank, she said to me ‘Everyone’s expecting me to do the tear-jerker ad. But what we need to do is show up legitimately, helping consumers with their day-to-day real life challenges and helping them save for the future,'” said Smith.
Medium Rare built the Brighter ecosystem across Print, TV, OOH, Social and Web. Its show, The Brighter Side, aired on Channel 10 and received impressive results with 92 per cent of viewers said the information provided on the show was easy to understand, 81 per cent had put into practice one learning from the show a month after the show aired and 85 per cent said they want more of The Brighter Side show and content.
“What I love about Brighter is it makes money accessible. It’s about giving people financial confidence, which we know they need—particularly in a cost of living crisis. The response we’ve seen, particularly to the TV show, has been phenomenal,” Boundy told us as part of the CMO Power List.
For Coles, Medium Rare used human interest storytelling to show how the grocer was supporting real stories of Australian farmers and suppliers to support the ‘Great Lengths for Quality’ ATL brand campaign. Again, the results were impressive: achieving more than four million views, smashing the channel benchmark of 60,000; nearly two-fifths of viewers watched the content from start to end and it had above channel average engagement on YouTube.
But did they make any money?
Smith said Coles had a “robust” content ecosystem in place already and its Coles 360 retail media arm was an existing way to monetise its audience. But the play, Smith said, is as much about reputation as it is revenue.
“Big brands like Coles, CommBank and Qantas, they’re moving from metrics around trust to reputation. It’s the thing that everyone is trying to maintain or improve. There is an understanding from the consumer of what’s going on at board level, what’s happening on the stock exchange and their profitability with what’s going on in-store,” he said.
“Projects like showing the quality of Coles and how it’s supporting its suppliers or something that does push positive sentiment and move the dial in terms of reputation, the return on that is five times the investment.”
These are decidedly long-term plays, too. Smith said that Medium Rare was “only two years” into its relationship with CommBank. Its work with Qantas stretches back much further five times as long.
“Medium Rare has moved out of being a performance-based mechanism—saying you have to use a supplier’s product within a recipe, for instance. Australians are going to go straight back to Coles and make sure they get the exact product in the ingredient list so they know the recipe is going to work. We’ve already built up the functionality of some of the big, robust content ecosystems to push products. What we are seeing now, with the continual segmentation of the media environment, is that to get a reputational message out, you can no longer just put a CEO on TV because the reach isn’t that huge… And that can come with its own problems,” said Smith.
But in the content world, you need to stand out, not just be present.
“You’d go to some of the financial institutions’ websites and in terms of the content they were delivering around financial wellbeing, it was all similar. To meaningfully show up, you need to lean into actually doing something that is surprising, but also of high quality. With AI scraping from everywhere, but being very choosy, it will be more about the quality of the content that it’s going to pull in and recommend. Gone are the days of the boring SEO stories,” said Smith.
Doubling down on distinctiveness is essential to cutting through and generating results in this new world of higher quality long form content, according to Smith. And if you don’t already stand out, you might need to get your house in order there before moving on. The Frontiers roadshow is ongoing, so we’ll need to wait for the full reaction from agencies. But Smith and Medium Rare’s work certainly stands out. And in today’s world, that might be worth more than you think.
