What's happening in content marketing

The big highlight comes from the Cannes Lions International Creativity festival 2013. This is one of the world's biggest celebrations of creativity in communications. As of last year, in a show of how important content has become in today's communications, the event has included a category entitled "Branded Content and Entertainment". Last year's category was won with a two-minute film by Chipotle, the US fast-food outlet. See more here.

More competition

This year saw a far more hotly contested category with Scott Donaton, Global Chief Content Officer at Universal McCann stating: "There's a sense that we've gone from the feeling of kind of things that were one-offs or side projects to content as the centrepiece of marketing".

The Grand Prix winner was a campaign by Intel + Toshiba called The Beauty Inside, which features a central character called Alex, who was eventually played by over 100 people across 10 countries. The campaign told a story through six weekly episodes of a person who, although they remained the same on the inside, was a different person on the outside every day. The message was clear: "It's what is inside that matters". It drew over 70 million views on YouTube and hundreds of thousands of interactions on Facebook. To view the campaign, and a full list of results follow this link

The creators of the campaign thought content first, created something that is both interesting and compelling to the audience, and ensured a very high production standard.

More education needed

Elsewhere, Contently, an organisation that brings brands together with journalists, has launched a new publication that will focus on "Insights and Analysis on Brands, Storytelling and the Future of Content" (http://contently.com/strategist/). The Strategist is a publication that is written in-house by industry experts, highlighting the value of original and exclusive content. This demonstrates the scope of the content industry and the need for more education and resource as more focus is placed on this key aspect of marketing and communications.

Finally, in a further content investment, Netflix, the US on-demand internet streaming media provider, has struck a deal with Dreamworks Animation to acquire over 300 hours of kids' content programming. The deal will crucially allow Netflix exclusivity on brand new content around major franchises such as Kung Fu Panda and Shrek. There's no report on the value of the deal but it's thought to be very substantial - adding around 5% on the stock value of both companies. AFP reports that Dreamworks Animations hope to generate US$100m from TV this year and US$200m from 2015.