Why German advertising expert Thomas Koch almost once became a representative for a Japanese chainsaw manufacturer, why he believes B2B advertisers have an advantage over their B2C colleagues, what to expect from content marketing and why around 80 B2B advertisers met at Europe's largest start-up hub in Vienna at the invitation of WEKA Industrie Medien.
Thomas Koch could perhaps have changed his career again. Do something completely different. Get out of the rut of media planning and advertising. Into a new professional adventure: For months, Germany's probably most famous advertising expert and media planner was wooed on Facebook by a Japanese producer of chain saws. The manufacturer offered Koch via Facebook ad to distribute the great tree-cutting enablers in Germany. Koch puzzled for a long time why the Facebook algorithm had chosen him as the addressee of the advertisement. The solution: at some point Koch had mentioned the horror film "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" from 1974 on Facebook. This was apparently enough for the Facebook algorithm to deduce from this posting that Thomas Koch was probably an expert on chainsaws and therefore eager to become a representative for the Japanese manufacturer.
Targeting that becomes stalking, the vicious lure of social media for advertisers and the role of trade media for B2B advertisers, these were the stops on the mental journey taken by German advertising wide-eyed expert and agency founder Thomas Koch at WEKA Industriemedien's Digiday 2018. The specialist media publisher invited around 80 marketing experts to Wexelerate, Europe's largest start-up hub, to discuss content, content marketing and digital communication and to learn about WEKA Industrie Medien's new digital products.
Americans who do not exist
Koch was not sparing in his criticism of the somewhat lax handling of data on reach by platform giants such as Facebook "Facebook is repeatedly convicted of providing false figures. Now their user figures are also under scrutiny," said Koch. Because: "For the USA, the Facebook ad manager reports a reach of 41 million users aged 18 to 24. However, only 31 million people in this age group live in the USA. Not only because of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Koch is convinced: "Facebook is in the biggest crisis of its still young history.
The matrix of uncertainty that currently accompanies B2C advertisers consists of many elements: Ad fraud, lack of control over one's own brand when using programmatic advertising, a dulling of consumers towards many online forms of advertising, the question of whether the advertising vehicle Facebook really always drives campaigns to the target and sometimes not also to the wall. Koch is convinced that B2B advertisers are at least largely exempt from such worries: "They have always had it easier than their B2C colleagues. They have always known their customers," says Koch. For him, the B2B market is almost reincarnation-relevant, he jokes: "Should I be born again as a media planner, I'd like to look after even more B2B clients than I've already had the pleasure of doing in this life." Trade media would ultimately also make the job of B2B advertisers easier because they automatically reach the decision-maker in the right situation: "The right situation is probably the one in which people are ready to engage with a product, a brand. This is exactly what we find when decision-makers go to the website of a specialised medium. They are looking for a solution to their problem. And they fervently hope to find the decisive impulse here," says Koch.
Patience please!
This is precisely where the new digital products from WEKA Industrie Medien come in, at the interface between situational attention to advertising and the search for a solution to a professional challenge. whitepaper platform, the minisites or the unique QuestionLead product. in particular, the options for effective content marketing for advertisers that is relevant to readers are being further fanned out. "In the meantime, we have built up a unique portfolio of options in the B2B segment," says Florian Zangerl, Managing Director of WEKA Industrie Medien.
The keynote speech by the Viennese communications consultant Ivana Baric-Gaspar dealt with the success factors in content marketing. She pleads for a defusing of expectations in content marketing: "It is not the task of content marketing to close deals, but to build and maintain relationships." Using content marketing as a sales tool and hoping for quick success would only lead to disappointment. After all, says Baric-Gaspar, it is about one thing: "Stop selling. Start solving problems". Tools like white papers would follow exactly this principle. Because such tools make it easy to actually observe one of the most important commandments of successful content marketing: "Take the perspective of your target group. Always. Everywhere," advises Ivana Baric Gaspar.
Relevance, Thomas Koch chose a comparison from the dessert industry, is "the icing on the cake" for advertisers and content creators.
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