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Taming the Monster: Rethinking the Role of Content

Creating new content is a necessary, ongoing investment for large companies today. No matter if you are creating all those pieces in-house or through a supplier—it will demand more and more of your time and energy.

Meet the content monster. Perhaps you already know each other? It is never satisfied. The monster will crave more content, it will crave targeting, different languages, different formats for each platform, each country, each audience. It will need more today than yesterday. It will multiply its needs and demand more and more content from you until you are consumed. If you don’t have a strategy to tame it and make it an asset, that is.

Here is the hard truth: No brand can possibly create from scratch all the content that is needed to feed the customer’s voracious appetite today. There isn’t enough time, money nor resources.

Creating video and branded content at scale

The challenge lies in scaling. The ever-increasing demand for video comes with an audience demand of personalization. Your British customers will need a different piece of content than your Japanese, German or Australian customers. You don’t have to be international nor “glocal”. Even on local level, content multiplies fast if you, for example, update different social media channels daily. Or if you need content for display advertising. Or if you need banners for your website. Or if…

Michal Kalinowski/
CEO Chimney Group

So, how do you get around the problem and tame the content monster? The trick is to rethink the production process and build an asset base for each of your markets.

Transcreation is a method to centralize the production of content in several languages, formats and with different tweaks. More specifically, versioning allows you to create different variants of the same video or still during the production stage, while adaptations allow you to create thousands of films or banners from one or a few master files.

Step 1: Co-creation and collaboration stage

This is the step where you set up a strategy, plan for which pieces of content that can be used for different needs: on different markets, to different target groups or on different languages.

A country can have one official language, but its inhabitants definitely speak more. This approach helps you communicate effectively and personally with your customers within the constant communication clutter.

Step 2: Production and adaptation stage

The next step is content production. After each piece of content is created, they are versioned and adapted for each market’s needs. Every piece of content is customized to fit each target groups or markets formats, platforms, language (text and voice-over) and offer. One single piece of content can be re-used to how many markets or purposes that you want.

Step 3: Channels and distribution

Let’s say that you are presenting a video for ten different target groups. Each target group may need content suited for multiple channels (YouTube, TV, Snapchat and so on). Easily, this builds up.

To create order, you will need an asset base for each target group, or market, with easily accessible and country-specific content. The asset base makes the day-to-day work easy for everyone involved.

Actually, once you get to know the content monster you will find out that it’s easily tamed. You just need to put some effort into planning, and you need a great partner. Do you want to discover more about Chimney’s strategy to tame the content monster? Watch this video and get in touch!

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Michal would love to hear from you! Contact him at michal.kalinowski@chimneygroup.com