When it Comes to Content, Don’t Build a Walmart When You Really Need an Amazon
PostAds Group, the leading global content production consultancy, and StudioNow, the leading curated creative network and scalable marketplace, jointly offer marketer-direct production strategy and executional services for global marketers. David Corts, President & COO. StudioNow, offers his insights on building production scale via StudioNow’s curated creative marketplace.
The big news in recent weeks is that, in an attempt to play catch up with Amazon in e-commerce sales, Walmart is acquiring Jet.com for a whopping $3.3 billion - representing the largest e-commerce acquisition in history. With $14 billion of e-commerce sales last year, Walmart has quite a way to go to match Amazon’s $107 billion.
One key point made in the WSJ article covering the news was that, “Jet has said it aims to offer shoppers lower prices than Amazon or Wal-Mart by teaming up with a vast marketplace of sellers rather than building up its own inventory.”
Amazon itself generates close to half its sales from its marketplace of sellers, so what lessons can be learned from this model when it comes to creating content for today’s brands?
Ask almost any marketer how they are creating content today and you’re likely to get a different answer each time. They might be bringing more capabilities in-house. They might be relying more or less on their agency, adding specialist agencies, or experimenting with “decoupling production” at the holding company level. They might be working with a large consulting company - like Accenture - with vast off shore resources, or working more directly with tech companies, media companies or a start up.
Regardless of the answer, you’ll almost always hear two things: 1) it needs to work a lot better and 2) over the last 10 years “everything has changed!”
Things certainly have changed in the content space - the same way that, in retail, consumers now shop on their phones, wanting to buy billions of dollars of product that you can’t always stock in a store or a warehouse. Similarly, today’s consumers of content live on their phones, their tablets, their social networks, and their OTT channels on their Apple TVs. Marketers have to deliver way more content, in multiple formats, on dramatically tighter timelines, and, by the way, the budgets aren’t any bigger.
The technology driving these changes doesn’t slow down. It only accelerates. As a brand marketer, agency, or holding company, simply consolidating production, exploring “decoupling”, or just hiring loads of FTEs “in-house” is the equivalent of building a brick-and-mortar SuperCenter.
Just going for economies of scale is not a long-term solution and will fail in the end. By the time you build and implement it, everything will have changed again. Today’s devices, platforms, formats, ad tech capabilities, consumption patterns and everything else are in a constant state of flux.
In today’s world, you simply can’t “stock” enough creative inventory.
Consider where we’ve seen the most investment and innovation driving this change over the last ten years. We’ve witnessed massive improvements in chipsets, cameras, and equipment to create content and the devices to consume media. We’ve seen extraordinary advancements in distribution and communication platforms, broadband networks, and the ad tech to target our messages. But for the most part, we still make our content the old fashioned way.
So how can you actually make this content before it’s targeted, distributed and consumed? What is the right process to create better, faster and cheaper content right now? Just as importantly, what is the creation process that is designed to adapt in real time to this constant state of flux? How do you create a process that handles the constantly diversifying, rapidly growing, and constantly changing content needs of an organisation? One that scales? One that controls cost? Maintains quality? Collects and shares critical data? And a process that is actually sustainable for all parties contributing?
At StudioNow, we’re big believers in marketplaces, and more specifically the “gig economy”. While we may see some consolidation among services up and down the stack, we think that the right creation process is one in which the creative supply side is a decidedly “unbundled” one. We’ve seen this approach transform not just e-commerce but industries like transportation, finance, hospitality, healthcare and beyond. In a world where the content demands from enterprises is in constant flux, only a supply side of creative talent that is equally as dynamic, morphing, and growing can satisfy it in the long run.
Just like Walmart has learned, a closed supply chain isn’t enough. You need a marketplace.
