The New Age of Content Darwinism
Ad Age, David Kellis
“There is grandeur in this view of life... from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.” Charles Darwin from On the Origin of Species
Are you surviving at Content Darwinism? There is a need for Content @Scale and that is creating an evolutionary battle every day in the Digital Universe. And it’s a jungle out there. The best, fittest content for each brand gets reproduced and the content that doesn’t work becomes extinct. It was born as optimization, but it has become more than that – it’s natural selection, survival of the fittest. And we as brand marketers are its engineers. It is changing digital marketing forever.
Darwin’s law of natural selection -- which says that organisms with the most favorable traits, that perform best, survive and reproduce -- is not unlike modern advertising. In advertising, we can apply the same evolutionary pressures to create content that succeeds. We can now develop and run many pieces and versions of creative to see what performs best. The content that is working should get more investment. The content that is not, should eventually be killed off. If you’re not applying Content Darwinism, your brand could be left in the Stone Age.
This is playing out in many ways, but it is a critical mechanism in two of the biggest areas of marketing: Influencer Marketing and Personalization.
Influencer Marketing
Nowhere is this phenomenon of Content Darwinism more acute than with Influencers, particularly Micro-Influencers. Top Influencer firms are working with brands to ask target-relevant Influencers to create and post brand-integrated content to their followers organically. Through a process of natural selection, the posts that get the most interactions/engagement, can get paid media support, while the other content fades away. The Influencers are competing in a battle to get the brand’s paid media dollars behind their content. This evolutionary pressure goes on continuously until the brand leans into a few high-performing executions from Influencers as the predominant creative. This gives you authentic and credible Influencer content that can be honed and battle-tested - evolving your content to its finest possible form. The Pre-Content Darwinism approach is an unevolved troglodyte; the current approach is a highly-evolved specimen: Steven Hawking or Jon Snow.
Personalization and AI
The trend toward greater personalization is also fueling Content Darwinism. The goal of Personalization is to tailor creative content based on learnings about consumers to make it as relevant or personal as possible to them. One way to know what is most relevant is the signals the consumer sends – for Owned Media, it is interactions such as what people click on to find out more or purchase. In Paid media, it’s click-thrus or video views. Based on that knowledge, which can become our 1st or 3rd party Data, we can learn more about people and serve them more relevant content. “Knowing” more people and knowing specifics about them, enables our content to evolve to a better, more personalized form. To put it in evolutionary terms, the content becomes more functional, like a species that develops a wing or an opposable thumb and survives competition. Content that provides utility and is personally useful will always have a better chance of living on. This process can be accelerated through AI or machine learning, in which many pieces or atoms of content, often created via templates and permutations, self-optimizes in near real-time. The selected content survives and flourishes. Endless forms most beautiful. Most of the time.
So here is the tension: Is there conflict between creating enduring, brand purpose-driven campaigns and engineering ephemeral, constantly evolving forms of content? No! Our brand purpose and campaigns should drive the creative idea and persist for the long-term, but the day to day expression of it needs to be adaptable. Digital content can evolve based how consumers respond to it. Not what the creative director likes or even what the Ad testing tells us. It’s a real world battle for survival.
A Disclaimer on Content Darwinism and More on Darwin and the Real Natural Selection
The term Content Darwinism was first coined in 2012 by Starcom agency and has been used here and there, but it hasn’t taken off or been widely communicated. The use of the phrase itself is eerily similar to the journey of discovery of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. The theory of natural selection was actually was first discovered and articulated by someone else. Alfred Russel Wallace. He even wrote a paper and sent it to Darwin telling him about his theory. Darwin happened to be already working on a very similar theory, and soon after getting this letter, rushed to publish his version of natural selection in “On the Origin of the Species.” So he ultimately got the credit for it. It’s time for the theory of Content Darwinism to be published broadly and be common wisdom – that is my goal with this article. Because, if you are not practicing Content Darwinism already you could quickly turn into a marketing dinosaur and we know what happened to those wonderful creatures. Though they did get a movie franchise.