January 30, 2020
Belinda – Why is benchmarking and celebrating great international advertising strategies essential for the success of the industry as a whole?
Christine – Identifying best practice and identifying what makes great great is crucial to foster quality within the entire advertising industry.
Belinda – What is your top tip for creating a winning entry?
Christine – The best advertising often is surprising in its simplicity.
Belinda – What particular challenges are there in the automotive sector?
Christine – Products become more and more interchangeable; audiences are continuously becoming smarter and less patient, i.e. also less brand loyal. Across all industries, consistently appealing to audiences therefore becomes a bigger task.
Belinda – And what would you consider to be an essential component of a successful campaign in that sector?
Christine – A successful campaign is one that generates impact in terms of company sales and consumers’ minds. To achieve that it is crucial to avoid wasting the audience’s time: relevance is key!
Belinda – What’s the biggest change you’ve seen in content marketing since the awards began five years ago?”
Christine – Content marketing developed from a niche proposition to an integral part of the marketing mix.
Belinda – What do you think will be the biggest trend in content marketing in 2020?
Christine – From my PoV, personalisation of content along with voice elements will continue to be key areas of innovation.
Belinda – Which new innovation do you think has the potential to have the greatest impact on the consumption of content marketing?
Christine – Both personalisation and voice / audio have strong potential to impact on the consumption of content as both respond to evolving consumer requirements.
Belinda – How is data changing the way you design your content strategy?
Christine – The stronger introduction of data into building strategic responses to consumer needs has been a major shift in the recent past. Apart from upfront insights, continuous data help to eliminate what does not work and focus on what delivers actual value. Data also enable for better individualisation of contents.
Belinda – How can brands use content marketing to align themselves with particular values or topical issues?
Christine – From my PoV, content marketing is the best way to associate a brand with a topic outside of, but right next to its original territory / brand proposition. It takes a strong alignment between brand values and the content topic coupled with the ability to work out a compelling story based on that. Consumers will realise if the story does not work or looks constructed; credibility and a very good fit therefore are not an option.
Belinda – Can you sum up the holy-grail of content-marketing in one sentence?
Christine – I’ll give it a try: “connecting a brand and a relevant topic to derive meaning (for the consumer) & value (for the brand and the content partner) by emphasising the joint purpose in credible, impactful ways.
Belinda – What is the secret to implementing a successful cross-border advertising campaign?
Christine – This is about being aware of cultural differences and looking for what individuals have in common internationally – or should be looking at having in common, i.e. a bigger cause.
Belinda – What’s the key difference between targeting a domestic audience and an international one?
Christine – A domestic audience can be addressed with very specific local flavours. It can even be a very local concern that becomes part of the story. For an international audience, I would opt to look out for bigger, more overarching values to talk about.
Belinda – How can you measure the success of your partnerships during an international campaign?
Christine – The same way measurement would take place on a local base: paid media performance, “buzz” and earned impact along with performance within the own ecosystem – simply aggregated bottom up. [This takes a harmonized ecosystem, so is actually not THAT easy, but worth establishing that]
Belinda – What is the best content marketing campaign you’ve ever seen? And why did it stand out?
Christine – My favourite content marketer still is Nike. They beautifully and consistently tell the story of human empowerment and achieving one’s goals – in all shades of emotions.
After winning the World Media Award for Content Leadership and Innovation 2019, Christine will be joining our esteemed Jury this year. To find out more about our awards and how to enter, visit our How to Enter page to see all of the information you will need to enter.