Truffle Pig: Content Marketing Evolved
It’s a marketing triple entente. Advertising giant WPP, mega-bucks Millennial-magnet Snapchat and the MailOnline have joined forces to form a global digital content agency: Truffle Pig.
The announcement was made on board the swanky MailOnline Yacht during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, where John Steinberg (CEO, Daily Mail North America), Martin Sorrell (founder of WPP) and Evan Spiegel (co-founder of Snapchat) took a select audience through their new venture.
Here are the takeaways:
- Truffle Pig will focus on native advertising
- This means they will specialise in socially sharable stuff, namely video content, images, GIFs and infographics, as well as developing audiences on social media for brands
- There’s an emphasis on delivery. Initially the test grounds for content delivery will be the MailOnline, Elite Daily and Snapchat
- They’re going after Millennials in particular. Snapchat, with its established base of younger users, will play a key role in reaching their targeted demographic.
“It’s an evolution not a revolution”
WPP and the Daily Mail are the safe, solid foundations; established clients to give Truffle Pig a strong launch, expertise in advertising and news delivery and, in the case of the MailOnline, a deep understanding of creating shareable, compulsive content (let’s face it, we’ve all fallen prey to the sidebar of shame).
Steinberg describes Truffle Pig as “an evolution not a revolution,” an incremental improvement in how content agencies should operate. Having advertiser, content creator and distributor working together as one will surely refine the blueprint on how digital agencies work internally. But the exciting side of things, the delivery of the content, is where Snapchat has the potential to make a real impact.
Earlier this year Snapchat became an advertising platform for brands. If you have the app downloaded and check your snaps now, chances are you will have a branded snap waiting for your long-press. Accepting branded content was a major step in monetising the platform. Truffle Pig represents the next stage, adding news content and opening up the service to even more brands.
And it won’t just be the way content agencies work undergoing a process of evolution. If Spiegel gets his way the Snapchat platform will continue to evolve to suit its new business purposes. Particular emphasis has been placed upon use of “the vertical format” aka. vertical video. This is full-screen video viewed on smartphones and devices. The team at Snapchat are already devising ways to maximise this screen real estate, including the ability to host multiple video feeds on the same screen at the same time.
Increasingly news is being placed in the hands of the consumer. We have become more discerning about the content we consume. The news we choose is curated to our interests and viewed on the platforms we prefer. Facebook has implemented native advertising for years and has an integrated news project in the works, Apple is planning to launch its own news curation product, and now Snapchat has been recognised for its potential to place content.While video is having its day in the sun Snapchat is poised to be an important format for audience/newsroom collaboration. You need only look at the events in Charleston last week to see the potential of Snapchat in frontline reporting, an aspect that will undoubtedly feed into their work with WPP and the MailOnline in the future.
