Branded content: fun to make but not making much money
Ads are for selling and branded content should be too, says Adrian Flores, even though he’s very happy to make cool looking YouTube videos that don’t do all that much.
This is the information overload age. Precious consumer eyeballs are constantly being distracted. Hollywood, gaming, cat videos. Our audience no longer has the inclination or attention span to pay attention to paid advertising. Banners are blocked, ad breaks are time-shifted and print is dead. It’s a sad old world out there for traditional advertising.
But fear not, salvation approaches. Lo, behold branded content and its promised bounty of earned media. See, what has been holding advertising back has been this pesky insistence on shilling things like product benefits and, horror of all horrors, selling. We’re in the entertainment business now fellas. For creatives, this is great. We just have to come up with cool shit that will clock up YouTube views. There’s no need to worry about that hard bit, that ‘making the client’s product interesting’ thing. So long as at some point in the four-minute short the audience sees a cameo by the brand, it’s all good. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not deriding every piece of branded content out there. There are brands that have impeccably woven the narrative of their product into something compelling. Harley Davidson’s Ridebook perfectly tapped into the Americana heritage ethos that currently dominates the male fashion blogging worlds and used mixed media collaborations to position the brand as an object of lust for a new generation of 20 to 35-year-olds.
But for every pitch perfect execution like that, you have an Intel asking Kiefer Sutherland to reprise a character from a defunct television show with the only link back to their product being the fact it’s in the same room as him.
Like so much before it, branded content is falling victim to the overzealous marketer, the ‘it worked for Apple, it’ll work for soap’ lemmings.
As 1950s adman Howard Gossage said: “Nobody reads ads. People read what interests them. Sometimes it’s an ad.” And if your ad is not about selling, the question must be asked; why exactly did you make it?
Adrian Flores was an award-winning copywriter at Sydney agency Publicis Mojo. He has recently moved to London.
- This article first appeared in Encore magazine. Download the iPad edition, now free.
Interesting point of view but your argument can be easily inverted. I agree entertaining videos on You Tube need to have an objective that they are aligned to, but so do ads and there are some terrible ads out there. To paraphrase you, “For every Big Ad there are hundreds of Intels asking their agencies for Big Ads….”
Additionally if the objective of the communication is in fact to entertain and build a brand off the back it I’d argue branded entertainment is better placed to deliver that. Conversely, if you’re trying to communicate product and price then a TVC may be your best bet.
There seems to be a lot of antagonism between exponents of branded entertainment and ‘traditional’ advertising. However, if you take TV as an example, both branded entertainment and TVCs have been around since the beginning (Popeye selling Spinach? The original Soap operas). Both have been done very well and very badly in that time and neither is a marketing panacea.
Surely the argument should be that branded entertainment should work hand in glove with ‘traditional’ advertising to achieve the overall objective? Otherwise Red Bull’s Fearless Felix should have had a price flash on his parachute.
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Nice Article. Poses questions, makes assumptions, gives examples and voices its despair.
Is it Branded content? or is it Content branding? There is no simple answer to this form of advertising, but it is much more complex than simply sitting a famous person on a specifically targeted motorcycle in a scene within a cinematic story.
Every last actor, model and/or sports star who ever appeared in a commercial is a form of legal shilling, I don’t think anyone believes for a moment that these people actually like or even use the products.
Branded content is the way the truth and the light, it will become, almost, the principle way of doing things in the advertising world, second only to good old honest word of mouth, a thing which has built and ruined empires.
The product sponsored television of the 1950s and early 60s were the unrefined beginnings of branded content, but they were also among the many babies, so tragically thrown out with the bathwater, when ad men started to get too clever for their own good.
One thing is for certain, Branded content, like the Cups and Beans, the Shill or the Three Card Trick, had better be handled skilfully, or the cost will be devastating.
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‘the truth and the light’, wow Richard, I thought it was just marketing.
Good piece Adrian, you might like this post by the Ad Contrarian poking fun at the notion of no longer using advertising to promote products, but rather using it to promote content which, surprise surprise, then promotes a product.
http://adcontrarian.blogspot.c.....ntent.html
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Agree with “from the sidelines” it sounds a little one sided.
Just like TV isn’t right for every problem, branded content isn’t, or direct mail, or print, or search…
““Nobody reads ads. People read what interests them. Sometimes it’s an ad.” And if your ad is not about selling, the question must be asked; why exactly did you make it?”
To change perceptions about your brand or product?
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Experiential branded content 2.0:
http://m.youtube.com/watch?fea.....ZOphJLv6ek
Shameless self produced content promo…
The Sailor Jerry Fire Engine Sessions.
What can I say, I’m creative and like doing cool shit. So why not get amongst the big corps marketing budgets… f#ck it!
Kris
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