Amazon.com’s recent $4 million purchase of the single “for auction” copy of J.K. Rowling’s handmade “The Tales of Beedle the Bard” is an excellent case study of a successful, non-traditional content strategy.  Rather than capitalize solely on the publicity associated with the $4 million that ultimately went to The Children’s Voice Campaign, Jeff Bezos’ company turned the acquisition into an exquisite content opportunity to share with visitors to Amazon.com.

For us, the real takeaways from Amazon’s Beedle the Bard idea are the four criteria any company could use to brainstorm and evaluate content strategy ideas:  1) Relevancy, 2) Community, 3) Exclusivity and 4) Cause.  Amazon nailed every one.

 

Relevancy:

Amazon’s decision to bid on J.K. Rowling’s book was a natural fit for the company’s brand.  Sotheby’s auctions all manner of rare items that ultimately contribute to charity, but Rowling’s book was an ideal prize for the e-tailer once known as “Earth’s Biggest Bookstore.”  Though Amazon carries a wide variety of products now, choosing an object which resonated with their core business (and their core passion group) was vastly preferable than, say, a lock of John Lennon’s hair.  It may seem like an obvious point to make, but rather than “making content fit” companies would do well to keep an eye out for opportunities which scream their brand identity.

 

Community:

Content forms community.  Someone recently told me that in 100 years, we’ll have The Church of Harry Potter.  (It wouldn’t be the first book to inspire a devoted following).  Amazon was more than aware of the massive interest the purchase of the book would generate, but where they elevated the game was turning around and providing access to the book to millions of fans worldwide who had no shot at seeing the elusive “living artifact” from the Harry Potter series.  When Rowling announced the Beedle the Bard project and reiterated that there were no plans to publish the book on a mass scale, fans expressed their disappointment in almost every article that covered the story.

Amazon saw opportunity here; while they couldn’t legally publish the stories on their website (the auction did not include rights to the content), they could publish images and “reviews” of each tale in the book.  The reviews amounted to detailed plot summaries, thereby granting grateful fans the best taste of the book they were liable to get anytime soon.

The strategy worked spectacularly.  As of this writing, the web content generated from Beedle the Bard generated 181 discussions and hundreds of posts, ranging from deep thanks to Amazon to rants against J.K. Rowling and everything in between.

While Amazon could have tried to start a discussion around Rowling’s limited edition release without purchasing it, the idea probably would have fizzled.  Owning and sharing the content in order to activate the community was key.

 

Exclusivity:

For some, paying $25,477 per page for a book seems a little nuts, especially when you’re prohibited from publishing the book.  But let’s put the $4 million price tag in context of other big-ticket media buys.  By the end of October 2007, Fox had sold 56 of the 63 in-game 30 second spots at a peak of roughly $2.7 million.  Without even considering production costs, the bill comes to $90,000 per second .

 

That’s a lot of money, especially when you consider part of your audience will be busy refilling the chip bowl and recycling some beer during your platinum-plated 30 seconds.  Yes, the spots will live on YouTube for the foreseeable future, but they’ll also be brushing up against every other Superbowl ad, plus the advertising embedded in YouTube.  Many of those ads will hope to drive visitors on to brand websites and temporary microsites.

 

Amazon, on the other hand, has secured exclusive content which lives on their website.  Exclusivity is a major relationship builder with audiences and a big competitive advantage. We bet you won’t see Amazon publishing a Beedle the Bard Widget for Facebook any time soon.  Google has not indexed Rowling’s handwritten pages, and it will be a very long time before “samples” appear in Google Books.  Exclusivity is an atomic weapon in the information arms race.

 

Cause:

Where do the profits from those $2.7 million Superbowl spots go, by the way?  Right into the pockets of Fox, of course.  While Amazon could have purchased a Superbowl ad, they wisely allocated their high-dollar buy in a way that does double duty; the $4 million goes to benefit The Children’s Voice Campaign , a charity co-founded by J.K. Rowling to benefit the lives of institutionalized children across Europe.

 

As we’ve said before, we are in the Age of Brand Meaning.  Consumers are drawn to and reward brands that embrace social agendas.  While Amazon’s $4 million donation to charity (one wonders if it will be Rowling or Bezos that gets the write-off) is not deep enough to be considered a social agenda marketing platform, any consumer can tell you which buy (Superbowl vs. charity auction) comes with a cause.  Cause is not a strict requirement for a content strategy, but it is a powerful amplifier. Amazon’s creative expenditure works harder.

 

Amazon, our kudos goes to you.  Brilliant move, and proof that your team gets it when it comes to content strategy.

 

What about the rest of us?  The next time you’re sitting down with your company’s C-suite to talk about content strategy, keep these four guidelines in mind: Relevancy, Community, Exclusivity,  and Cause.  There may not be another copy of Beedle the Bard around (is it on Bezos’ coffee table at home?), but there are equally good opportunities ahead.