Content Marketing World 2013 Recap: Painting Cleveland Orange!

If you saw a lot of orange in Cleveland last week, it was because Joe Pulizzi brought his Content Marketing World conference back to Cleveland. From the airport signs that noted Cleveland as “The International Home of Content Marketing” to the giant Content Marketing World logo at my hotel (the Hyatt in the old Arcade), it was hard to miss. What’s Content Marketing World? Only the world’s largest and most anticipated content marketing conference. Who’s Joe Pulizzi? Only the godfather of content marketing and all things orange, the owner of Content Marketing Institute and a proud Clevelander! Cleveland should be proud of his love of Cleveland and his ambition to hold his conference here. It has a huge impact (both financially and from an exposure standpoint) on Cleveland.

This was my first time attending. I’d been told by friends how good this conference is and had high expectations. It met every expectation and even exceeded them. I’ve been lucky enough to talk to Joe quite a few times both through social media and in person. Based on those conversations, I wasn’t surprised he exceeded my expectations. It’s just the enthusiasm that he exudes for content marketing. For this recap, I’m going to focus on a few of the keynote speakers he brought in. Don’t take that to mean the breakout sessions weren’t also excellent. The ones I attended, with well-known speakers like Ann Handley, Marcus Sheridan, Jeff Rohrs and more than I could list here, all brought a ton of expertise.

Joe started things off with a video that showed him running through downtown Cleveland to the Convention Center stage. He welcomed us decked out in his traditional orange suit – complete with orange shoes. After giving us the state of content marketing today, he welcomed Jay Baer to the stage. Jay’s based his presentation on his book, Youtility: Why Smart Marketing is About Help Not Hype. I won’t go into too much detail as I’ve written a review of the book. Youtility is marketing that is so useful that customers are happy to pay for it.

He gave us examples of companies using content marketing to be helpful instead of promoting their products. What I love about the concept is that it makes so much sense. There are so many applications of this concept that can easily be implemented by companies of any size. It requires a slight shift in strategic thinking. Instead of thinking “me first”, think about what your customer needs and how you can meet those needs.

Jonathan Mildenhall blew us away presenting Coca-Cola’s growth through liquid storytelling. In fact, I tweeted the following: “Not tweeting as much during the Coca-Cola .@mildenhall keynote because it’s just fascinating!” Explaining that amazing things can happen when you listen to consumers, Coca-Cola made a case for change. They grew from one-way storytelling to dynamic storytelling, including building its social purpose. Coca-Cola modernized the old “Share a Coke” commercial in Australia by customizing cans with recipients’ names. He also worked on a campaign between Africa and India with a Coke machine that had a camera. Consumers in Africa could see those in India and vice versa. The machine would tell them to do things like dance or each place their hands in the same spot.

He talked about having the ability to fail, even describing one of his failures that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. But, that failure led to a dynamic online campaign. They created an online graphic novel that allowed visitors to choose their characters’ adventures. This brought home one of the key themes of the conference: creating brave and challenging content. He acknowledged that most of us don’t have the luxury of Coke’s budgets. But, companies must allow us all to take risks and fail. Companies that don’t have the opportunity to fail, don’t have the opportunity to risk and fail. Mildenhall represents what most of us in that room wish we were able to do. I came away inspired to be more creative and to think bigger. The hard part will be to harness that inspiration into ideas that are realistic and applicable to my job.

Wednesday’s keynotes began with Don E. Schultz from Northwestern University. This may have been the most thought-provoking session of the conference. He showed evidence that brand preference has been declining for the past decade. That decline correlates with the increased use of social media and decreased use of traditional mass media. As Schultz put it, social media creates communities, not markets. Social media and digital tactics are great tools, but we have to incorporate them into the full marketing plan. The top purchasing influencer is word of mouth. Then, traditional media, including TV, radio, newspaper, etc. Internet finally shows up a bit further down the list. Content marketing gets us back to true storytelling and understanding what information customers need.

Finally, the closing keynote…none other than William Shatner! So what does he have to do with content marketing? Quite a lot actually. He talked about many of his current and soon-to-be-released projects. He’s got a music CD, two new shows about wine and motorcycles, and a partnership with watchmakers. He’s a busy guy at age 82! But what ties all these projects together are the stories about each of them he told. You could see his genuine enthusiasm. When asked about self-promotion, he said he sees it as simply working on projects he’s interested in. This to him wasn’t self-promotion, but enjoyment. He understood a while ago the impact of marketing to people in ways in which they don’t realize they’re being marketed to.

So, there you have it…two jam-packed days. I’m sure everyone in attendance took away many of these messages, as well as many others. You can’t replicate the inspiration that comes from being at a conference like this in a blog, webinar, podcast or live stream. Cleveland should be very proud of Joe Pulizzi for making this happen in our city. For those that haven’t attended yet, I can’t recommend it more. I can’t wait until next year’s conference and I hope to see many more people – both local and new to Cleveland!

For those of you that were there (or have attended in the past), I’d love to hear your thoughts. What did you take away from the conference? Please share it below! As always, thanks for reading and please share with your friends if you like my blog and sign up for the emails!