BrandMAX: Brands should be careful to create 'interesting' content, says Gravity Road's Eaves

By Loulla-Mae Eleftheriou-Smith, marketingmagazine.co.uk, Friday, 23 September 2011 09:38AM

Mark Eaves, co-founder of Gravity Road, told the BrandMAX conference in London, that brands were under pressure to create "interesting" content when communicating with consumers.

Mark Eaves: co-founder of Gravity Road

Eaves said there was "huge pressure on brands to be finding something interesting to say every day," but that this pressure could create the wrong kind of content. He said: "Too often social media strategies culminate in a competition to win a chocolate bar on Twitter."

Eaves said that brands "have to aim high" by understanding storytelling and the subtleties of execution when creating content. He said there were two stages involved with creating brand content, the first of which involved "a great campaign idea that has been executed brilliantly".

He highlighted Yeo Valley and Nike as two campaigns that created enough assets within their activity for "it to extend on to its own ownable platform".

The second stage, according to Eaves, was of businesses taking a long-term strategic decision to invest in assets that would fuel the brand's power across owned and earned platforms, referencing a Unilever model that pointed towards turning its brands into media owners in their own right.

Eaves said he no longer saw a definite division between owned and earned media, because "they are so interlinked".

Eaves said Footlocker's Sneakerpedia site, which acted as a Wikipedia for "sneaker" enthusiasts allowing consumers to log, upload and box as many products as possible, was an example of a brand that had created a content platform and turned itself into a media owner in its own right.

Gravity Road is a content creation specialist launched by Eaves, former managing director of DrumPHD, and Mark Boyd, former head of content at BBH, in May, to develop ideas and platforms, both directly with advertisers and with agency partners.

This article was first published on marketingmagazine.co.uk