By Raihan Hadi
REV Media Group (RMG), Malaysia’s number one digital publisher, brought back their annual Exploding Content event once again this year.
Like every year since they began the event series in 2017, RMG showcased a new angle to this year’s edition. In case you haven’t been following it closely, Exploding Content is RMG’s annual event where you can find out all the details about their content and audience learnings, highlights of outstanding case studies of client campaigns from the year in line with the learnings, followed by which they introduce and highlight new and innovative digital media solutions to their partners in the marketing and media industry.
The number of attendees of Exploding Content has been increasing incrementally every year, successfully drawing a crowd of 400 attendees most recently in 2021 for their virtual session. The success of this series of events has also led to an annual Raya-themed spin off called Exploding Ketupat, which goes to show how using the series RMG is capable of catering to different types of audiences on various occasions as well.
A history of exploding content
As mentioned earlier, the Exploding Content series had begun in the year 2017, and here’s a recap of the topics RMG has been working with every year since then:
1. 2017 – EC 1.0 “Owning A Complete Consumer Journey on Digital through Content” – The pilot Exploding Content was held on-ground, and much emphasis was put on the importance of content, and how content shapes the way people think, discover, and develop interest for a topic or product.
2. 2018 – EC 2.0: The Malaysian Edition “Going Wide & Going Deep With Content Marketing” – The topic was about combining Going Wide, & Going Deep – building interest groups within the audience over time through evergreen content with AirAsia throughout that year (Going Deep).
Stretching across different channels and formats, RMG introduced closing the marketing loop with Content Retargeting with Ecoworld (Going Wide).
3. 2019 – EC 3.0: POW KA LIAO “Cont. Going Wide & Deep & The Content Quadrant” – As an expansion from the concept of Going Wide & Going Deep through content, in 2019 RMG explored more ways to go wide and deep.
This was also the year that RMG introduced the Content Quadrant, which aims to help brands and media agencies visualise their content plan for the year.
The four quadrants consisted of:
- Branding & Education
- Deep Consideration
- Sustenance
- New Launch
4. 2020 – EC: The Big Bang Edition – “What 31,000 Malaysians Told Us” – In the 2020 edition, the theme was coined “The Big Bang” Edition, named after the explosion of the RMG universe where they expanded to include more digital properties across the Media Prima umbrella.
A group-wide audience survey about the content preferences and spending priorities of their audience, which garnered 31,000 respondents, and shared their findings about the general spending habits and content preferences of Malaysians, with an emphasis on a comparison of Millennials and Gen Zs.
This was also the year where RMG introduced SPARK, which is their commercial social media arm. SPARK houses all of Media Prima’s social products and influencer marketing for brand solutions.
The evolution of news…
In 2021’s version of Exploding Content, RMG will be exploring the importance of news, and how it has evolved over the last few decades.
They have identified the different types of news; hard, soft, and social news.
Hard news has been defined by RMG as urgent and important news that is to be reported to the general public about noteworthy events that would impact society.
Soft news, on the other hand, encompasses entertainment, sports, and other non-urgent news which audiences will still be interested to catch up on.
Social news has been around for about a decade or so from the emergence and high uptake of social media. Social news points to stories that have been circulating in social media which have garnered enough public attention, that news portals pick up on as well following verification.
In EC 2021, RMG pointed out that news is no longer limited to just typical broadcasting stations and reports, but has transcended across different types of platforms in the form of articles, videos and a plethora of social media formats.
News Reader Personas
The Kepochi
Kepochis are consumers of content who would prioritize finding out about news in the quickest, and easiest manner. This is because they want to be seen as the first ones to discover and share news to their peers.
They would have frequent updates from news aggregators and push notifications from their content sources, and often would want to consume news in quick and bite-sized formats.
The Initiator
Initiators are consumers of content who shape their news consumption around their schedule.
By nature, they might simply prefer structure to using their time, and as their intentions are already set to utilize their time in that way, they are the types who are open to long-form content.
The Passerby
Passerbys are consumers of content who are likely to consume news content unknowingly, and simply just “pass by” the content they see while scrolling down social media, or through people sharing news with them, as they go about with their day.
They do still want to be in the know of current affairs and happenings, but may not necessarily read into the topic in high detail.
Case Studies
foodpanda
In 2021, foodpanda was set on a mission to share joy with Malaysians.
Understanding that Malaysians consume content differently, RMG curated different forms of content across articles, videos and social media postings to reach out to them through both lifestyle & hard news, all still revolving around the themes of fun & joy.
To date, the campaigns have garnered over 18.5 million reach on social media, over 1.1 million video views, 631K article reads and 610K social engagements.
Click here for more information.
Maxis
In a similar approach, Maxis aimed to lift the spirits of the B40 community.
By partnering with RMG, they took on a tactical approach in amplifying how and what Maxis was doing to help the society, introducing the B40 Jaringan Prihatin Programme across our social platforms via articles, social media postings and display formats.
Maxis also maximized their brand exposure through a roadblock on the Buletin TV3 YouTube Channel as they took over and injected their branding onto Buletin TV3’s mastheads, playlists, hashtags and more.
Altogether, this campaign achieved over 12.6 million banner impressions, 1 million social media reach, 214K article reads and 145K social engagements.
This article was first published in MARKETING Weekender Issue 310
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