The Business Of Content

Content is King. It’s a saying you’ve heard countless times… long before Social Media empowered individuals to create and distribute their own content.

Content is the new marketing. Whether Marketers are thinking like publishers or whether brands are hiring/working with community managers to help them get results. If you can think about consumer engagement at that level, things begin to become slightly less foggy. The idea that you don’t have to wrap your messages and blast them out around the original content, but instead you can create and produce the actual content and keep people engaged and connected as you see fit is – in a way – a whole new dimension to the media and marketing business.

It’s something that the traditional media people are still tinkering with as well.

While attending this year’s Google Zeitgeist conference this past September in Phoenix, I had the pleasure of watching Ari Emanuel (fans of the TV show, Entourage, should know that the character, Ari Gold – played by Jeremy Piven – is based on Emanuel) and Patrick Whitesell, the co-CEOs of WME Entertainment, discuss the state of the entertainment business. It’s fascinating to hear from these super-agents to the stars (movie, TV, books and beyond). There is a truly amazing subtext to the conversation (which you don’t really have to read too deep between the lines to uncover) in this presentation, as they discuss the value of content and the distribution channels around them… and how they are changing.

This is 27 minutes well-worth your time…