Thursday, May 10, 2018
Interview with Adam Rossow, Threadline Digital
If you're a content marketer, trying to measure the impact of your content with clicks and impressions is very difficult. That's why Denver's Threadline Digital (www.threadlinedigital.com) exists. We caught up with one of the company's co-founders, Adam Rossow, to learn more about the company.
What does Threadline Digital do?
Adam Rossow: Threadline Digital helps marketers, agencies, and publishers to measure and demonstrate the impact of their content market. Where we focus on, is the content that has to do with brand building. It's content that is focused on engagement goals, around demonstrating thought leadership, educating and audience, and sometimes, top-of-funnel content, that early stage content. It's really content where there is no direct call for action. It's not about clicking and going into an online shopping cart, or downloading something, or immediately entering a sales funnel. What we do, is we provide metrics for marketers, which allows them to gauge the effectiveness of that content. Until now, that's been extremely hard to do. The whole reason we started this, was because content marketers have been building all this great content with those brand building and relationship building goals, but measuring effectiveness of that with clicks and pageviews on a site just didn't seem to jive with us. We figure that there must be a better way, which is what we're doing, providing metrics that help them see the true brand impact. Did it raise awareness? Did that content shift perceptions? Was that information useful? Did it portray you in the way you are trying to position yourself?
What's your background and that of your partners?
Adam Rossow: I have two partners, Gary Zucker and Jonathan Futa. We all come from the market research area. I started in public relations and integrated marketing in New York, and moved out to Denver about fifteen or sixteen years ago—thank goodness! I helped to start iModerate, a qualitative research firm in Denver. It was recently acquired by 20/20 Research. Both Gary and I were part of iModerate's team, and Jonathan worked for a market research consultancy, Benenson Strategy Group. Long story short, we all have a market research background, and a little bit of marketing and content marketing background, with Gary having also been in business development.
So what's driving your customers, and why do they need something better than what's out there?
Adam Rossow: What's driving them, is there has been a huge boom in the content marketing industry as a whole. It's going gangbusters. We're seeing that, for most companies, it's one third or more of the marketing budget. There has been a lot of shift from content that is meant to drive immediate sales and immediate calls to action, to content development which is more brand-based and relationship-based. It's more about getting people into the funnel, and interested, and positioning your brand as a helper brand. As it turns out, after spending a lot of time and making huge investments in this type of content, what our customer are seeing from the metrics are not aligned with their goals. When your editorial or brand goal is to position your firm as a leader in what your industry or expertise might be, seeing that you got 2,000 clicks on an article doesn't tell them that goal was achieved. It only shows that people liked that article enough to click on it. That's what's driving this. There's a need for insight and understanding, to see if the content really aligns with their goals. At the end of the day, in the C-suite, this really validates their investments in content. As the dollars rise, and as efforts increase, there's definitely been a demand from the top down to show how effectively those dollars are being spent, and if they are really moving the needle.
How's the company funded, and where are you today?
Adam Rossow: We recently publicly launched, but we'd been doing this, consultingwith Bennington Strategy Group, part of WPP. We were playing around with different things, and this was born within that company. We wound up buying them out, breaking this part, and starting our own thing. We've been doing this for 18 months, but really just started on our own and funding it ourselves, and have been bootstrapping since January.
People have been doing content marketing a long time on the Internet, why is there still a gap between measuring the effectiveness of content and the idea that only clicks matter?
Adam Rossow: I think people have grown up in the digital age, and the way things have progressed, it's been really easy to measure someone's behavior and actions through clicks, because it's something easily automated. For some objectives, it can be the right measurement. However, it's a lot more challenging to figure out how a piece of content or an ad has impacted someone's attitudes, and what emotions have been sparked. I think it's pretty challenging for brands to do this, to get these types of metrics. To really do that, you have to stop using past behavioral metrics, and go out and ask consumers about what they think, what impressions did it leave, how did it make you feel, would you be more likely to do X, Y, Z. You have to actively step up and engage with consumers, which is really challenging. Until a couple of years ago, companies were not spending that much on content marketing to make that worthwhile. But, over the past five or six years, we've really seen an uptick of the hundreds of thousands of dollars now being spent on this kind of content marketing. We're seeing it becoming really pervasive in industries where relationship building is important, like the banking industry, or the insurance industry, or pharmaceuticals or medical products. I think the challenge have stems from how challenging it has been, and the extra steps associated with getting those insights.
Finally, what's next for you, and what are you working on now?
Adam Rossow: It's really about branching out from just providing our products to marketers and content marketer and brands, and helping publishers and agencies. A lot of publishers have what are called content studios, which are really popular. If you're a company like Kellogg, and want to buy some sponsored content on the New York Times, the New York Times has a content studio to help create that content, place it, and do all that stuff. There is a lot of content cropping up, which we haven't seen before, and one of the things we'd like to do is see if we can automate this a little more, and really shorten the timeline, and get those insights faster and the information back quicker. Right now, it's a little labor intensive, and definitely not all software yet. There's still a lot of service component involved. That's one of our big internal goals. The external goal, is ot really help content marketers prove their value, and figure out how effective their work is. If we can make their lives a little easier, and help them set a better strategy, and help them get more money in their budget, and be able to help them show their CMO that their content is doing this or that for their brand, I think it's mission accomplished.
Thanks!