Get ready, marketers, there’s a new industry model in town, and it’s built for the age of extreme media fragmentation, cultural noise and artificial intelligence.
Connected content is an emerging “creative paradigm” that is “multi-layered and multi-dimensional where an integrated ecosystem of signals, reactions, adaptations and responses continually shapes how a brand is experienced over time,” as laid out by Omnicom Media Intelligence, the agency’s research arm, in a new report.
Put simply, connected content is a model to better integrate fragmented media, commerce, creator marketing and other channels into content creation and development for more effective campaigns, according to Omnicom Media Group Chief Intelligence Officer Joanna O’Connell.
“It’s understanding all of the complexity and how consumer behavior underpins everything we do, because that’s the world that brands are operating in,” O’Connell said.
“We’re kidding ourselves if we think that, as marketers, we’re controlling all of the signals,” Omnicom Production North America CEO Alissa Hansen said. “Before, we had a fairly designed user journey, fairly defined channels. We could set the agenda, the strategy, the creative, the platform, and we could learn from it. Now consumers are putting as many signals out there as we are.”
Connecting the dots
A challenge for marketers trying to navigate the connected content landscape is that many of the signals they’re seeing point to consumers who are fatigued by non-engaging and non-relevant advertising. Per Omnicom’s research, 80% of consumers said a bad ad is worse than no ad at all.
“Most consumers — nearly everybody — aim to ignore ads. And they’re quite successful at tuning ads out,” Pamela Marsh, managing director for primary research at Omnicom Media, said. “For the consumers who are noticing the ads, there are so many formats that are annoying to them, and there are some formats that can turn that annoyance into [active] avoidance.”
Yet, relevant advertising and contextual connections can have a positive business impact: 84% of consumers connect with ads they believe are relatable to their personal experiences. Seventy-six percent are drawn to ads that seem relevant to the content they are consuming and 78% report feeling connected to ads that appear at the right moment. Perhaps most importantly, 30% of consumers believe a better-quality ad experience increases their likelihood of purchasing products.
In that context, an ad that runs during a mass sporting event like the World Cup should naturally look different from one that might run during a Netflix binge-watch, Hansen explained.
“[A sporting event] is a great way to capture people’s attention and their emotional availability in a shared experience. And that’s a moment where you go big,” Hansen said. “But that’s not the same moment as when they’re leaning back watching ‘Bridgerton’ and they get a shoppable ad for something that’s reflective of the wardrobe style of one of their favorite characters.”
The approach is less “spray and pray” and more “catch and release,” Hansen said. In the case of connected content, the marketer is catching signals across four dimensions — consumer, commerce, culture and category — and releasing relevant content that’s “attuned to that opportunity,” she added.
Embracing fluidity
While that may seem like a spiral to endless versioning, what’s really required is a shift in thinking about how creative is developed and deployed. The current model of campaign development is still built for legacy systems. There is a central idea that is usually expressed in an anthem or hero commercial, and then it is broken down into smaller bits and pieces to run in other channels.
“It’s simply taking an expression of the overarching asset and atomizing it into tiny little pieces that can go on TikTok or that can go in Amazon or some retail environment,” O’Connell said.
However, pulling from just one dimension can be limiting.
“You need to consider all of them to deliver on the [promise] to fit the purpose and feel right in the moment, every moment,” O’Connell noted.
Taking a different approach will require some rethinking and retooling from the industry. The current model views creative development as an endpoint. Once the elements in support of the big idea have been created, they’re passed over to media for execution, and then results are reported back through. In a connected content model, the process is much more fluid and aided by systems that are constantly learning and improving, including AI.
“It’s almost more like a living, breathing, constantly adapting and evolving model based on how consumers in the world actually behave,” O’Connell said. “It’s a move from single agents doing single, siloed things to connected agentic systems across different dimensional layers … like a starburst.”
That approach can’t be managed entirely by humans and requires technological investment and learning to bring the model to life.
“Moving to a system of continuous learning, change and adaptation — you cannot do that without these technologies,” O’Connell said.
Still, large movements begin with tiny steps, and some changes are simple. For instance, marketers could begin looking at creative and media as co-equal partners that are briefed at the same time and encouraged to work together throughout the development process, O’Connell explained. Undertaking a simple audit can be another move in the right direction.
“Understand where there are gaps in your current creative production process, where it breaks down, where it might be siloed,” O’Connell said. “Seeing those gaps is how you identify areas of opportunity, and that’s when you can build a roadmap of what [a connected content model] could look like.”
These adaptations need to be made sooner rather than later, because the tools to enable connected content are already available, and they’re only going to get better.
“Culture moves too fast. People move too fast. Second-screening is real,” O’Connell said. “You can’t just rely on basic consistency if your goal is to be right in the moment, every moment.”
