Google's 'Material Design' And What Card-Based Content Means For Marketers

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This article is by Linda Holliday, CEO of Citia, a card-based content platform company.

For the last several years, the internet has been melting. Really, more accurately, the internet, including the World Wide Web, has been breaking into pieces—chunks, tiles, cards, or, as Google GOOGL -1.59% calls theirs, “material.”

We’ve had a page-based metaphor for the internet that we can trace back to the Gutenberg press. It’s what we’ve built digital media on, and it’s with us today in the form of websites and online pages.

But something is happening that’s significant – we’ve moved from desktops and laptops to smart computers in our pocket. The screen has gotten really small and most of what we consume is either a feed or a flow. Email was the original flow. SMS is a flow. Facebook, Twitter TWTR -2.67%, Pinterest and most media are now all continuous scrolling flows.

Recently at the Google I/O Developers Conference they announced a very profound and somewhat overlooked innovation. Google is now using what they call “Material Design” – a card-based user-interface system to communicate consistently and persistently across all Google environments.

What this reflects is a very strong force – consumers demanding that they have access to all the media that they consume on anything, everywhere. The tech industry tends to focus on the platform wars, among Apple AAPL -0.35%, Google, Facebook; each of which is trying to create experiences that inter-operate beautifully and generate decisive consumer preferences for their devices and/or their ecosystems.

But that’s not what all that consumers want – consumers want to use iTunes and Pandora and SFX and Netflix and YouTube and many more services and sources. I would estimate that the average active internet user moves among eight to 10 separate platforms a day. That horse is already out of the barn.

Platforms want to improve the ease and ubiquity of all of their assets across any kind of experience that their customers might be engaged in. That’s really smart.

But what does this mean for brands and businesses and publishers and agencies? We too need to meet all kinds of customers across all kinds of devices and platforms. That’s why the move to cards and the metaphor of liquid media is so appropriate.

Furthermore – and less acknowledged – is that “flow” requires a certain amount of speed. Something that drips once a week or once a month isn’t much of a flow. So, the second massive implication for business is that commercial media needs to be generated much more frequently. Marketers need to step up to a higher velocity—to the 24/7 media cycle.

Maybe that sounds exhausting and expensive and it might be. But it’s the new high stakes of doing business. How does all of this happen with limited resources?

Well, it doesn’t all have to be original or fresh. One of the luxuries of the former era was that most commercial media was slowly, carefully and beautifully made –not very often and rarely re-used. Perishable assets. Now, different customers and audiences are interested in different things at different times. Now, most content, most communication, should be considered an asset. Evergreen assets to be used and reused as the opportunity presents. And since attention now flows unevenly, in what might be more like a stock market, companies need to be at the ready to play their content into interest when interest is actually trending. With a nice inventory of ready-made media assets, that’s not only possible, it can be easy and successful and deliver a much-improved ROI.

Cards, or tiles, or chunks or “material” is simply a commonsense solution to a new style of media creation and consumption.

The biggest example of this is Redbull’s Content Pool. Other companies and individuals are using Redbull-made and -branded media across every kind of screen and platform constantly. On a smaller scale, L’Oreal might make a series of “how-to” modules and continuously play and replay them into trending conversations about celebrity looks–using the same cards on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, What’s App – all of which would link back to L’Oreal’s total “how-to” web properties on mobile and desktop. The cards could even be placed as IAB units on Academy Award media, etc.

The convergence of publishing and advertising has already taught CMOs that they need to act like publishers. That and the success of native advertising is the very genesis of content marketing. But businesses also now need to think like platforms. To make their own flexible and often evergreen content units. Units that can be used on owned properties, as paid media, and in social and other feeds and flows.