Nokia To Test Whether It's Possible To Buy Relevance

Nokia is going to spend millions of dollars over the next year on a content marketing campaign delivered via a website created by Wired magazine’s Brand Lab. Activities will include ads and events, according to AdAge, in an effort to promote the company now that it’s no longer in the mobile phone business.

I get the allure of such sponsorship deals for marketers.

The media landscape is chaotic, consumers are too busy to pay attention to anything, and they don’t believe much of what they see anyway. Nevertheless, marketing is under serious pressure to find ways to deliver brand messaging, so the chance to buy both a direct channel and an imprimatur of credibility might not only be convenient, but strategic.

Only it may not be, and here’s why:

If you have to buy it, it’s probably not worth it. Brands have been trying to buy their way into conversations for generations, and it has never been particularly successful unless is was through advertising, which succeeds because of a simple, blunt proposition: If the benefit of an ad's content overcomes the disruption and disbelief its very presence prompts, it works. 

Advertorials (or the latest buzzworthy labels, native advertising or sponsored content) are harder to believe because they mimic journalism without providing any of its presumed objectivity, so there's no equation or context on which consumers can rely. If whatever Nokia wants to pay to be said wouldn’t pass muster as articles in Wired, let alone in ads, why would it be any more credible on a site the magazine produces for it?

The opportunity, if there is one, would be to establish an uber-credible media outlet that had real, iron-clad and public rules for what got covered, and how facts were collected and vetted (not crowdsourced, as Nokia and Wired plan). It would need to be a better news source, not just a different one.

But why do it? Nokia intends to “…start a conversation to ensure that technology serves humanity and not the other way around,” according to the AdAge story, which also quotes Wired’s publisher saying, “The goal is to be provocative, have a debate and a large conversation.”

I'm all for large conversations about important stuff, but the premise that any brand can prompt or own it is somewhat of an overreach, isn’t it? Real, organic conversations involve diverse participants using a multitude of channels to meet on constantly shifting platforms.

Nokia’s seven-figures’ worth of investment is a sliver of gated presence in a vastly larger and more expensive open community.

Imagine if it had elected to dedicate that money to creating relevant content that would appeal to that larger marketplace? One engaging, unpredictably viral conversation would be worth a dozen controlled, sponsored simulacra of debate. 

Microsoft should be grateful. Nokia primarily operates in the B2B world now that it no longer sells phones, yet it will spend seven-figures getting its brand name in front of consumers over the next year. I’m curious about how the “larger conversation” will change those associations vs. making sure folks know they can still buy Nokia-branded devices that someone else is selling.

Nokia’s post-phone challenge is to define and articulate what it does, and why it’s relevant to anyone. There’s probably a rich and compelling innovation narrative embedded in its current offering and research, yet it opted to pay other people to talk about other things. A "large conversation" about Nokia might have been a better focus for its seven-figure spend.

The world doesn’t need another branded content plan in lieu of advertising, it needs better content and conversations on one hand, and better advertising (configured as any form of sincere and truthful commercial communications) on the other. 

Unfortunately, Nokia and Wired’s nascent plan doesn’t seem like it will provide either, but instead try to walk some vague middle-ground that’s obfuscated by the pretensions of new media theory. 

I just don’t know if it’s possible to buy relevance.