(VIDEO) Should Brands Make Content People Would Pay For?

Yes; these days, brands are enthusiastically creating "content", the material publishers used to call editorial, in a bid to blend in and influence consumers.

But what is the real place of "content" in a marketer strategy? And are they prepared to to the next step - to create content that's so good people would pay for it?

If brands really want their content to be consumed, should they aim for standards so high that their work demands payment? It's an interesting notion - one OMD chief innovation officer Ben Winkler shared a Beet.TV discussion panel.

"In the end, there's only really two kinds of content - you either pay for it or you don't," he said. "When clients talk to us about creating content, I say, 'Are you willing to put the time, investment and resource in to creating content that people would pay for?'

I say, 'Think about the kinds of content that you pay for - HBO, Netflix, sometimes even New York Times'. Then they tend to back off a little bit - they go, 'Okay, maybe we're not ready for that'."

Fellow panelists Jordan Bitterman and John Montgomery said they think data can fuel creative renaissance for advertisers.

"(Data) can be reinvested back in to some sort of creative product," saidMindshare NA chief strategy officer Bitterman. "We have a lot of white space left in which we can create great content due to data. We've just hit the tip of the iceberg on this."

GroupM Connect NA chairman Montgomery added: "We can use data to tell stories. We know who's seen episode one of the ad - we can serve episode two or three. We can tell much longer stories."

They were questioned by Tobi Elkin.

This video is from Media Future Conversations 2015: Unblocked - Valuing Human Attention In A Content-Driven World, an event presented by true[X] in association with Beet.TV Please find more event videos here.

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