ebay Embraces Content
Marketing and Finds Its Voice
Sheila Shayon
Storytelling is a brand requirement these
days. And as a digital brand with its own
oft-repeated creation story—a “corporate
myth” about collecting Pez dispensers—
eBay is expanding its chops as an original
storyteller and content publisher. Turning
its homepage into a digital magazine it’s
calling eBay Today, the visually-rich digital
hub presents a Pinterest-like grid that
creates stories out of curated collections
and timely themes.
Hiring a chief curator and editorial director
last fall in “tastemaker-in-chief” in Michael
Phillips Moskowitz, eBay is now live on
ebay.com, where users can scroll through
picture-squares of product and collections,
hovering over a headline for a drop-down
description.
“We’re now in the content business,”
explained Devin Wenig, President eBay Marketplace, to The
Atlantic. “So, for the first time, eBay has a voice. We’re telling
stories. We have an editor. We have curators. And we have
writers on-staff. You’ll see that evolve to some longer-form
stories, some really beautiful pictures... It’s media-like.”
In case you missed the memo, brands are now publishers.
Pepsi has Pepsi Pulse, Coca-Cola is on a Journey, Red Bull
has RedBull, and now it’s eBay’s turn to produce “the same
kind of content that a news organization might want to
publish about the company—data-driven stories about the
items people are most searching for, infographics depicting
surprising top sellers, and so on,” as the Atlantic put it.
For Wenig, former CEO of Thompson Reuters Markets,
tailoring content to specific interest-sets comes naturally.
“There are very passionate sub-categories on eBay,” he
said in the Atlantic. “We want to bring in people from those
communities who are influencers, and allow them to begin
to tell stories about what they love about eBay, the things that
they do, and almost create a community dynamic in some of
those verticals.”
It’s also part of eBay’s push to improve
its mobile experience, where 50% of eBay
sales are occurring—including close to
12,000 cars a week, said Wenig. “We’re
entering a post-mobile age now. Mobile
is so important that it’s almost silly to talk
about mobile.”
Cultivating a daily mobile habit, where
users check-in multiple times a day to see
updates on items they desire, eBay is betting
that value-added content will sweeten the
draw, just as it’s hoping that smart hashtags
will promote site users to promote content
on social media. It’s also one more finger in
the dyke against fierce competitor Amazon,
in a post-mobile world where shopping and
storytelling never sleep and content still is
king.