Mark Boyd is among those at the front of the pack paying homage to “content is king.” For the past three years at Bartle Bogle Hegarty and earlier at other agencies and clients, Boyd has been looking for new ways to get the brand message to audiences beyond traditional advertising.
Holding the title of director of content, he has been at the forefront of ad-funded and sponsorship initiatives across various media—radio, print, and TV—and believes it’s only a matter of time before an entirely new model will be widely accepted as a way of funding traditional media.
However, he’s realistic enough to know it’s not around the corner because much of the talk about branded content is just that—talk and no action, at least not yet.At BBH, he built the content department into a core division of the agency, launching and driving forward the Audi Channel, leading mobile innovations, gaming and publishing across clients like Unilever, Diageo, and Audi. Even with clients willing to take some risks, getting such programs off the ground isn’t always easy.With Audi getting into running in effect a TV channel, there were TV licenses that needed to be acquired and challenges in how to keep costs under control, tasks that traditional agencies have never had to face much less handle. But Boyd takes it all in stride because he believes that advertising is not and will never again be what it once was.
