Brand Newsrooms

A really interesting read from Taulbee Jackson about the pointlessness of Brand Newsrooms. It caught my eye (in the very excellent Digiday) because I had been taken with this idea ever since Chris Satterthwaite told me about it, which was probably 10 years ago. This was of course well before the Social Media phenomenon. Chris’ idea was that every week stuff happens that brands should react to, latch on to, spin off, in order to keep a consistent brand message fresh and relevant. He used the analogy of the Newsroom, a place where all the brand people and their communications partners should meet to review what they had done, what was going on and what they should do.

Although I have spoken about this to lots of people over the years, as I’m sure has Chris, I wasn’t aware that anybody had actually tried it. So now here is Taulbee’s blog post which implies several people have and that it doesn’t work. You can read the piece but in summary he cites several reasons why it doesn’t work, the first of which is quite controversial – brands are not in the content business and should leave it to the professionals. His other reasons for the foolishness of this model strike me as “been there, tried that” realism. The approval process for brand creative is too cumbersome and consensual (compare that to a hard-assed editor), brands are lousy judges of good content (he thinks these days only the audience is), and overall it implies an agility and speed that brands simply don’t have.

Interestingly he does not mention, at least not explicitly, the main concern that I always had, namely the rigidity of the brand budget and planning cycle. This kind of “fast on your feet, learn quick, fail cheap” culture requires you to be very vague not only about where you will spend your brand budget but when and how much. I reckon you’d need to keep about a quarter unallocated with the flexibility to overspend if you were getting the results. If a story is getting traction and pulling an audience a Newsroom will very rapidly divert a lot of their resource to it. I presume they keep a number of outside broadcast units and journalists on stand-by ready to fly to Korea, Syria or “wherever the story takes us” as CNN boast. Brands are not able to react that way unless they are owner-managed like, say, Virgin (or is the brand Branson?). I suppose that might be what Taulbee means when he says corporate-owned brands have all the flexibility of a three-legged elephant.

Nevertheless, I am left feeling that while he may be right, brands are not good at behaving like a content generating newsroom, they bloody well should be, especially in a social media world. They should be good at earning media through interesting, on-message, content and stunts. They should react to what is happening and what is breaking and, where possible, latch their brand on to this. Brands should be able to keep a big chunk of their budget unallocated – perhaps not unallocated in terms of the brand objectives, which can be set in advance, but to the activity that might best achieve those objectives. There should be consistency of purpose and message but not delivery. And in order to achieve all this they must meet often, grab the insights and learnings and apply them quickly, with a fast and decisive approval process.

Other brands do this – celebrities, sports franchises, news channels, political parties – why not the brands that are supposed to be the epicenter of great marketing? Is not the realization that they can’t the fundamental proof we needed that the traditional brand management model invented by P&G nearly 50 years ago is well and truly buggered?

I think Taulbee Jackson may be right, he speaks with authority, but it is wrong that the idea of a focused but fast-reacting brand newsroom doesn’t work. It should do and I would argue in this digital, technology, rolling global news stories, social media age it has to.

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