Brand Journalism Goes Global
While in Paris recently, I discussed the concept of brand journalism with Aurélie Charpentier of AdC – L’Agence de Contenu. Aurélie and ADC are leaders in spreading the effective discipline of brand journalism across France.
L'Agence de Contenu
In today’s digital era, with powerful communications tools at our fingertips, brand journalism has come of age and is soaring in popularity because it is the most efficient approach to enhance the image, reputation and competitive leadership of companies and organizations.
“This is not advertising or public relations, or the brand content. It is something between the three,” says David Kiley of BusinessWeek about the fast-growing discipline of brand journalism.
Aurélie asked me to define brand journalism.
“This discipline centers around managing image and reputation online,” I told her. “It is based on credible, transparent, legitimate and focused communications of legitimate and authentic news related to a company, organization or business sector. It is really journalism, and not necessarily related to PR, advertising, media relations or marketing.
“Public relations, promotion and marketing are, in fact, pushing messages out to audiences, one-way. Brand Journalism, on the other hand, engages audiences through an open exchange of news and sharing.”
For me, anything that deals with branding, regardless of who does it, involves public relations, advertising and marketing. To suggest otherwise is disingenuous, although I’m sure a whole lot of journalists want us to believe they can do something with branding that practitioners in these other fields can’t. Probably the only thing they can do better, and that’s debatable, is write better.
Don,
You have put your finger on the core issue, I believe — “write better.” In my work with a wide variety of clients, I find that many good PR, marketing and advertising professionals lack accomplished writing skills and, in the area of brand journalism, they completely lack the ability to write with a sense of balance. The style of writing that seems to be taught in many schools is “one-way,” for lack of a better description. It’s not engaging or balanced but rather promoting. And, that style simply falls short of being effective in today’s interactive communications environments.
David