No One Wants to Read About Your Product

I’ve always believed in the content I've produced, but it hasn't always been easy to feel like the content mattered. Back when I was a beat reporter, I believed in the stories I wrote simply because I was the one gathering the facts and putting the pieces together. The sad fact, however, is that as the reporter assigned to the local school and city council beats, the pieces weren't that interesting. They also didn't carry much—if any—meaning for anyone outside a very small part of a much larger world.

Now that I think back, I can really only think of one time in my career as a journalist where I was able to tell a story with wider appeal—and it happened by sheer happenstance. It was back in 1995, right after the Oklahoma City bombing. As it turned out, American terrorist Timothy McVeigh had spent a good amount of time learning about explosives in Kingman, Ariz., a small rural town where I was working as a reporter. So for a few brief weeks, I dug up morsels about McVeigh’s training and printed them for the world—not just the 15,000 people of Kingman—to read about. Some of my stories even made their way to Reuters and the Associated Press. But it wasn't too long before the Kingman angle of the story had run its course, and soon I was back at city hall listening to people debate about the town’s latest zoning and traffic ordinances.

Fighting for column space and exposure while writing for newspapers and magazines was always a challenge. Like all reporters, I was always trying to find new ways to capture the reader’s eye and maintain his or her interest. Was there a story angle that would help me jump from the bowels of the paper to the front section? Could I shed light on something common in a way that told an uncommon story?

In addition to being hampered by the limited beats I covered, I wasn't a very good storyteller back then. So it was rare to break through and deliver something that I felt overly proud to have penned. But while I struggled to find ways to engage readership, I cringed at how easy it was for companies and brands to buy their way into the pages where I told my stories.

Advertorials were a notable source of revenue for publishers in those days—and still are—but they infuriated me. They made my stomach turn because I felt they cast a pall of fabricated sales language over my team’s journalistic integrity. Written without story lines or connection to the publications they lived in, these paid-for product placements lacked any attempt to disguise their blatant obviousness, and I thought the readership deserved better.

It’s been a long time since my days as a reporter, but my focus on how those early-day advertorials made me feel have never been stronger. Why? Because much of my time over the past 15 years has been spent developing branded content—a modernized version of the advertorial. While I’m not paying to place the content anywhere, most of it does have an ulterior motive—it wants the reader to spend. And because of that, I’m overly mindful that I need to give something back in return. I refuse to take the easy way out by stringing jargon-laced phrases together and talking up a product or service that someone with a much higher pay grade would like to sell. Not only do I know how it feels to read something like that, I know that content like that doesn't have its intended effect.

Perhaps that’s not completely true. It’s possible that some advertorials work. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that telling a story is a better approach. Those advertorials flash in my mind like neon signs whenever I sit down to write or edit content. They serve as constant reminders that regardless of the topic, my job is to tell a story, provide insight and engage in a way that a slick product write-up can’t.

How can I be sure? I can only speak from personal experience. For example, the branded content I work on at Nielsen could very well be shaped to focus on the company’s products and services. By adhering to a strict strategy that takes the opposite approach, I've been able to engage readers in ways that product sell sheets never could. Again, how can I be sure? For starters, a recent agreement to begin licensing Nielsen content.

Earlier this year, after working to shore up Nielsen’s digital thought leadership (branded content), I approached the leading content marketing firm in the business and asked if it would license the articles I was producing. While the company typically licenses content from traditional news sources, Nielsen’s digital content was strong enough—despite being branded—to find its way into the company’s menu of offerings. In fact, the firm tells me that Nielsen is the only branded content it offers to third parties.

I have never written to generate a sale, and I never will, but I will admit that it feels pretty good to work on something that does its job—engages people, gets them thinking—and maybe even gets them spending.