owned media

Content is hot! What used to be a relatively small cadre of bloggers and YouTube enthusiasts has become a major marketing arena. There is a slew of specialist agencies producing branded content and major media outlets offering native advertising.

The good people at WARC are keen to encourage people to start thinking early about planning themes for 2013 and so have asked me (along with a few other ad bloggers around the world) to put down a few thoughts on the subject. 

A few weeks back Matt Locke wrote a rather excellent post about "The New Patterns of Culture: Slow, Fast & Spiky". He talks about nostalgia for a bygone broadcast era of limited channels that had defined a culture characterised by a broad spectrum of the niche and the marginal and a tightly defined mainstream.

A "media" model composed of paid, owned and earned efforts is nothing new—however it’s useful to think about this landscape in tandem with the different ways we interact and engage which are enabled through technology. There are essentially three forms of digital engagement which can often overlap (engagement in a single initiative can include all three types) but each form can tend to dominate the experience. It’s important to remember that the type of engagement is contextual to what a participant wants to accomplish.