What’s now called content has been part of Steve Sachs’s life since he delivered papers for the Baltimore Sun as a schoolboy. His print media journey eventually took him to one of the industry’s highest peaks. Two decades at Time Inc. landed Sachs in the office of EVP of consumer marketing and sales at the venerable publisher. He helped shepherd the company through a painful transition period to content creation and monetization on this new medium called the World Wide Web. “And now, of course, it’s the leading channel, with new content created every day — by professionals, by non-professionals, by everybody,” he says.
It was because Sachs saw a better way for brands to act as bona fide content providers outside of standard paid advertising channels that he left Time for OneSpot three years ago. “Brand marketers can absolutely deliver people content on the order of that delivered by major publishers. They just have to be able to determine what feels relevant and what does not,” says Sachs, whose key contribution to their cause is to direct them to the channels where they’ll find optimum relevance.
Not surprisingly, he does this in part through OneSpot’s platform, which is a cross-channel content disseminator. It tracks visitor behavior on a client’s website, recommends content for individuals, remarkets them across mobile and social, and drives lookalike consumers back to the site with relevant content.
“Look at Whole Foods. They’ve got something like 4,000 recipes; great recipes that have the same consumer mission of natural, healthy, and delicious,” Sachs says of one of his clients. “What we do is get people to choose their recipes instead of going to Food Network.”
Sachs calls what OneSpot does “content sequencing” and likens it to the level of personalization Amazon has been able to achieve with its customer base. Just don’t call what Sachs does “advertising.”
“There are companies that see content as a form of advertising,” he says. “We don’t work with them.”
