Brands have responsibility to serve up relevant content, say marketing execs

Brands have a great responsibility to serve up relevant content to consumers and should re-evaluate whether they need to interrupt intimate moments when delivering ads and videos on mobile, according to marketing experts who spoke at Bloomberg Media’s “Marketing in an Interruptive World” event.

Toys ‘R’ Us EVP and Global Chief Marketer Carla Hassan was among the leaders offering valuable insights during the discussions last week, and she stated that is vitally important to make consumers the top priority during the formative steps of a content marketing campaign, as engaging with them should be the number-one goal.

Hassan said that it is actually detrimental to a brand’s image if it doesn’t target an audience in ways that are “meaningful and relevant.” She also stated that while marketers now have vast stores of big data and tools to call on to produce high-quality creative, they must deliver content that resonates in the right place at the right time, especially in today’s constantly connected online landscape.

“I actually hate the word digital, and I don’t like to use it because I think everything that we do — if you really start with the consumer, that’s their life,” Hassan told Adweek after the panel session. “Their life is mobile. Their life is digital. So, we have to come up with solutions across the board and across all the channels that talk to them. If we start with them, we’ll be able to deliver content that’s relevant to them in all the spaces they play.”

Kimberly Kadlec, Visa’s Senior Vice President of Global Marketing, also touched on the importance of delivering the right message on mobile devices. She said that while the vast majority of marketers understand that “user experience is paramount,” they should also be aware that any content served up on smartphones should “mean something to that person,” and the end user should want to be engaged at that moment.

Kadlec told Adweek: “Really, truly understanding the intimacy of that [mobile] device and how much time it spends alongside a human being is incredibly important.” She added that pressure-testing content is also vital to ensuring that it’s meaningful.