House of Cards, Xerox Partner with The Atlantic on Immersive User Experience and Content Strategy

In Part 2 of our interview with The Atlantic’s Vice President of Marketing Sam Rosen (read Part 1 here), we dive deeper into two specific campaigns The Atlantic executed in partnerships with the popular Netflix series “House of Cards” for the show’s Season 3 launch and with Xerox. Rosen walked us through how each campaign began with one authentic insight that kept the entire campaign on track and how native advertising on their new website improves their user experience and content strategy.

Can you share examples of powerful content marketing campaigns involving The Atlantic?

We partnered with Netflix for the launch of “House of Cards” Season 3. What we wanted to do was appeal to sophisticated Atlantic readers in a way that was tasteful and respected their sensibility, while also promoting the show’s lead characters, Frank and Claire Underwood. What we developed together with Netflix was two-fold. On one hand, because Frank and Claire were in the running for the White House at the time, we all thought, Well, wouldn’t it be interesting if we looked at the history of how different to-be presidential couples ascended on their paths to the White House? We wanted to do it in a way that was serious journalistically, with strong original reporting, and yet still aligned thematically with “House of Cards.”

So, we commissioned a writer to go out and interview different experts and insiders and gain insights about important presidential couples’ ascents to the White House, and we analyzed what made those who succeeded different from those who failed. We shot a video with Kati Marton, who wrote a book on presidential couples (“Hidden Power: Presidential Marriages That Shaped Our Recent History“), and who served as a consultant for the project. We interviewed Ken Burns and others and, I think, fairly deep into the psychologies and histories of First Couples.

At the same time, to integrate the characters in an interesting, authentic way, we worked with three leading linguists, James Pennebaker and Ryan Boyd (University of Texas, Austin) and Mark Liberman (University of Pennsylvania), to run the scripts of all of Frank and Claire’s private dialogues, from Seasons 2 and 3, through a language-processing software that Pennebaker developed. The program identifies patterns of dominance and submissiveness based on simple words like you, we, I, don’t, can’t, and won’t. We charted the difference in their patterns of dominance and submissiveness between Seasons 2 and 3 — and actually showed that the language they used in the show reflected the changing dynamics of their relationship. In Season 2, they showed themselves to be an unusually high-functioning power couple, but in Season 3, their language betrayed that they had splintered and were more like any normal couple going through marital problems.

By creating an experience that was journalistically rich, with timelines, video, photography, and original reporting, the final result was, based on the feedback I’ve heard, quite interesting to our readers. In that instance, I think we were able to do good content marketing because (a) we engaged our audience in an immersive storytelling experience beyond traditional advertising, and (b) the Netflix team was amazing to work with — there was the perfect mixture of creative friction and trust.

That’s a really intriguing campaign. Can you walk us through another example of a time content marketing worked well for The Atlantic?

The other example that comes immediately to mind is that of Xerox. The brand was launching a new campaign centered on the idea that “Work Can Work Better.” An integral part of that equation is, of course, technology. But you also need to augment technology with best practices that will create a thriving workplace overall.

With the project, which we called “Working Better,” our intended audience was senior business decision makers, so we collaborated with Xerox to develop a process that would allow us to share valuable insights and ideas with them. First, we started by surveying executives in The Atlantic’s network to understand their pain points. We wanted to make sure everything was based in real data and the actual struggles leaders face in their workplaces. And we got a great response back.

From there, we identified three major themes that executives felt were their primary challenges in “making work work better,” which were:

• Agility: creating a faster-moving, leaner organization.
• Alignment: making sure everyone from the top to bottom — senior management, middle management, and entry level employees — were all on the same page and going in the same direction.
• Productivity: essentially, doing more with less. A lot of executives are facing smaller budgets yet asked to produce bigger results, so they want to understand how they can get more out of what they’ve already got in an increasingly competitive business environment.

Then we took those three themes and hand-selected a number of experts, authors and entrepreneurs — for example, Stew Friedman from the Wharton School of Business; Jason Fried, founder of Basecamp; Don Tapscott, author of “Wikinomics“; and others. We shared the key challenges and questions our executive audience had with the experts who could help them the most, and, in a series of interviews, we encouraged each contributor to offer both big ideas and specific, actionable bits of wisdom.

From there, we created an interactive online experience with a series of shareable tiles that each had its own illustration, along with a quote from one of our experts. We also turned our interviews into five longer-form articles that explored each challenge and idea in greater depth. Then we turned all of that into a physical print book that Xerox sent out for free to anyone who signed up for it.

“Working Better” is a great example of a project where we began with a data-driven approach and ended up with a creative, engaging, valuable result. We based the content on a quantitative methodology and qualitative insights, which we then used as inspiration to create a multifaceted program, spanning short-form content — since many executives are busy and appreciate bite-size ideas — long-form reporting, interactive design, and a physical print product. The reaction was great; the program got excellent results across traffic and brand engagement and health goals, and everyone considered it a huge success.

What guides your approach when you’re creating these immersive campaigns?

I think it all has to start with an authentic insight that sits at the intersection of (a) the brand’s values; (b) the specific campaign they’re working on; (c) The Atlantic’s sensibility; and (d) the shared audience that we’re all trying to reach. When we’re coming up with ideas, we’re looking for a unique insight or angle that exists at the middle of that four-part Venn diagram.

From there, we evaluate ideas and content on a spectrum, from brand-centric to ideas-centric. And we always try to over-index on being ideas-centric, even when we’re mentioning the brand or talking about its products. There’s an important difference, for example, between saying, “Hey, look at how committed Brand X is to innovation!” — that’s brand-centric — and exploring how Brand X’s entire industry is experiencing unprecedented disruption; finding the interesting stories across that landscape; and then artfully weaving in the ways that Brand X is authentically driving transformation and change. In the latter, or ideas-centric, version — of essentially the same narrative, mind you — we’re leading with what’s going to be interesting to a discerning audience, whereas in the former, we risk coming across as delivering a press release of sorts. We have a dual mission of advancing and protecting both our audience’s and our clients’ interests, and so we always aspire to do exactly that: Share interesting ideas and stories that simultaneously align with our brand partners’ goals and engage our audience deeply.

Obviously, creating a rich, engaging, and informative user experience and content strategy was at the heart of both campaigns. When it came to redesigning your website last year, how was native advertising impacted by The Atlantic’s own brand experience goals?

We rethought our approach, from the ground up, to distributing native ads on TheAtlantic.com. To reiterate, for us, native advertising is a way to employ content creatively in the service of our clients and The Atlantic’s brand and audience. We’re not trying to replicate editorial formats and hope our audience doesn’t notice. In fact, we’re going in the opposite direction. We think that native content can be an end in itself: a fascinating, ever-novel means of educating and entertaining sophisticated audiences. In that respect, native isn’t a format — it’s a sensibility. What’s “native,” then, is the sensibility that The Atlantic has developed over its 160-year history, and any native content should delight visitors just as much as anything else on the site. So, in that spirit, we created a native unit that’s even more differentiated from editorial placements and, at the same time, much higher-impact and more visible.

We used to have a greater quantity of native-ad placements across our site, but we’ve now focused on quality and visibility. That aligns, naturally, with The Atlantic’s entire website redesign, which placed an emphasis on impact and restraint. We’ve also done A/B testing with different ad formats, and what we’ve ended up with is a design and strategy that’s driven upwards of 300% more engagement and traffic to our native content — while also creating a better brand experience for our audience. Our goal was, really, fourfold: how can we (1) improve performance, (2) differentiate native even more from editorial, (3) architect an even more seamless user experience and content strategy, and (4) achieve even more powerful results for our advertisers? And, I’m happy to say that I think we did all four in a way that everyone’s delighted with.

Next time you have an idea for a piece of content, think about ways you can deliver more than just a new article or blog post. What supplemental materials can you also create through the process, including content that will help amplify your message? Can you also create a quick video to share on social? Infographic? Get the most out of each campaign and don’t be afraid of diving deeper into the key insights to create more great content around one concept, including experimenting with new-to-you content formats.