Content is King
January 13, 2017What makes a great piece of communication?
Creativity is partly about ideas – single minded ideas. But really it comes down to creating great content. Today Wildfire discusses the idea that “content is king.” If you want great things from your communications, you should treat your content like expensive royalty. Big ad campaigns like war chests and invest in the legendary stories of your branding like stories of “Alexander the Great.”
Well we don’t all have war chests. But hey a little bit of creative magic can help that advertising piggy bank go a long way spent on the right elements of any campaign or creative job.
Over the years Wildfire has worked on thousands of concepts and hundreds of clients. Some big with big budgets and some small with no budget to speak of. This has made us resourceful and agile. Yet regardless of the budgets and the confidence of our clients, being able to be artistic and creative comes done to the content you create.
Computers and Adobe creative suite has given rise to many things you couldn’t actually do years ago. The power of photo retouching and special effects has allowed many more clients and artists to come to the table and explore the imagination and power of creativity.
“Yet all communication, regardless of medium, comes down to two simple things …Words and images! or Audio and Visuals!”
So the quality of your communication is not just artistic ability or in the designers hand. Sure a good operator can work wonders on some stock shots and some bland copy to make the communication sing. A good designer can create a gorgeous design environment to allow a concept to take on a profound meaning and engage an audience. But there has to be greater story behind the content. It is important for the designer or copy writer to immerse themselves in the clients business truly understand the sales funnel. Make the design relevant to the audience and entice the audience with queues and easy and deliver an identity of brand within the structure of the design. In some ways story becomes in part your unconscious strategy and audience – “gets it.”
It’s about producing the photography, writing better copy and designing more eye-catching and more informative graphics. It’s about illustrating the idea in a way that is not generic, not formulaic and definitely not looking cheap or dated unless that is the desired effect. In a world now driven by computers and imagery your communication and your content has to be fresh and timeless and developing that content has to be the first priority of any client. You can’t skip corners or take short cuts with content. If you do, you can’t blame the designer for the end result looking like a “desktop published” nightmare piece.
If you put zero money into photography, or just use “google” to get low-res images and ask for 10 minutes retouching to make it work. If you put little thought into your copy and use clip art for your graphics, you will get a student folio piece. Or worse still, something that your kids can do with all the latest “photo Apps” and technology available to them today.
“Poor design or skipping on budget and creative process is like building a house without the architect or plan. Or in other words, shooting a movie without a storyboard and script. Cutting corners is never an easy road to take and the results are way less satisfying.”
Hey sometimes we know you have to do what you have to do! We at Wildfire have been there too many times to know this and we are dead certain clients will ask us again to use poorly sourced shots and make do within an expectation. But we really try to encourage clients to invest in their productions. Investing in content is not a job-by-job thing. Content should be designed to work for the branding and the overall campaign of a product. So doing better photography, doing great photo retouching and designing bespoke infographics is essential in developing your communications.
If you want “Wow factor” you have to give the creatives time to create or get going and create great content. Book a photographer, book illustrators, put into the design, typography and photo retouching and start creating well branded content to furnish your advertising and communications. 
Content no matter how well designed casts the work into a myriad of results. You suddenly get either; the Good, the bad or the ugly. The great, the not so great and possibly something that after it’s all said and done no one wants to own. There has to be story and strategy behind everything we do. It’s harder to maintain but it gets better results.
In reflection of this, creativity and building content is always a partnership. A poor partnership, uneducated client or a client that doesn’t trust the design team will always seed a poor result. Clients have to be willing to either “trust” the branding, invest in an “elegant solution” or a “knock out” result. Design and the impact of the communication is really determined by this content in every outing and the inter-connectiveness of the design is all important. This is why Styleguides and branding is so important. Where a lot of clients go wrong is when they want to design and get bogged down in the trenches and not directing from afar. So like any great partnership every works on different tasks and roles to build a cohesive brand.
“If you build “great content” you build great design. But further to this you actually further your market opportunity and your audience engagement.”
If you skip on photography, write boring copy or buy generic stock shots … you get mediocre advertising and mediocre results. At the end of the day, all you are really dealing with is the “Audio” and “Visuals” of the communication. You have to get both right and executed well to get great results. Forget that these “Images/Graphics” and “Copy” are for a website or a newspaper ad. They have to be resized and scaled for each medium but you don’t go to a webs designer to build content. You don’t go to a newspaper to design communications. You go to an Advertising agency to get a communication solution and then once the communication is right build your website and your advertising. Design will only be great if the content is great – because design is often dictated by the quality of your content. Without quality content there is no chance of dressing up the design. It will always come out like mutton dressed up as lamb. That trick isn’t fresh it’s just tired and unwanted. At the end of the day “tired and unwanted” becomes the subtext you are projecting on your audience, so be mindful of what you are putting out.
“Content will dictate the terms of the design. It will ‘elevate the design’ if done well like a king rising to power and ‘kill the design’ like a poor angry dictator done badly.”
At Wildfire we professionally recommend all our clients to have a good hard look at their collateral and do a “collateral audit”. In this process, we look at the history of your communications and plan building great new strategic content. Not just one off ideas, but build a library of visuals and graphics that communicate your branding in an engaging and memorable way. We plan photography and more than enough to cover all your mediums from magazine advertising, website content to Facebook and much more. We look at video content (if you have any) and how we can create animated videos for your growing web platform or SEO projects. We look at Info graphics and visual ways to communicate and explore through brainstorming presentations and at times doing market research to investigate how that content is relating to the audience.
It doesn’t really matter if you are a multi-million dollar business or a sole trader. If you want to get the edge on your competition you must create content and invest in content. It’s not about the advertising or brochure. It’s about the photography and the copy and the graphics. This has to be developed in unison and readymade to be infused in any form of media. Content building should be the most expensive part of the process. Design once branding Styleguides are in place will become the least expensive over time.
If clients and teams are getting bogged down in one-off projects, struggling with poor content then this stalls the creative flow and everyone in the design partnership – client and designer alike will hate the process. Be energetic and plan creative explorations. This will ensure you have the right mix of ideas to direct your content and put things in a proper process. You need to use content to tell your brand story with richness, depth of character and confidence.
We know at Wildfire a client has great expectations of our creativity. But we are only as good as the brief and budgets given to us. So in saying this, Wildfire also has it’s professional expectations of the client. We may give advice but if the advice isn’t taken then it’s hard to foster a good B2B working relationship. The best relationships are equal partnerships with healthy realistic expectations that last well into the future.
Think about your content. Invest as much as you can in your content, because our design and Wildfire’s process will become easier and clearer and your communication far more effective when you realise how important content is in delivering and executing the ideas that we pitch and create.
We are passionate about your business, whether you are reading this for curiosity, for understanding remember “treat your content like a king”. Give it the budget that it deserves. It will be the best investment creatively that you will ever make. This is the real reason behind the expression – “Content is King”. It maybe the reason all artistic endeavours have royalties attached to them. No not really, but we hope we made you think just a little about the content in your communications. Give it the respect it deserves and choose your content wisely.
If in doubt strike up a conversation with Wildfire. Enjoy!
