Don’t ‘dabble’ in branded content without a defined purpose says Qantas’ Gemma Matthews
L:R Duggan, Tully, Ackland, Matthews
Qantas Airways entertainment manager Gemma Matthews has said brands should not “dabble” in branded content if they do not have a defined and clear purpose of what they want to achieve.
Speaking at last week’s Mumbrella360 conference on the airline’s native advertising experiment AWOL, a partnership with youth publisher Sound Alliance, Matthews said: “I don’t think you should do it if you don’t have a real reason for doing it – there’s no point to dabbling.”
“We had a defined, clear purpose we went to Sound Alliance with, we knew that was the right demographic for this type of content.”
Couldn’t disagree more -surely the whole point of branded content is “dabbling”? Its all about test and learn. Hard to do in broadcast, but easier to do online… put stuff out there, monitor how it goes, add $$$ if it starts to take off… Brands that don’t make lots of “little bets” (thanks Peter Sims) will be the ones who make very costly mistakes.
How on earth do you measure or prove that someone has booked a qantas airline ticket as a direct result of reading the AWOL site?. There’s no booking functionality on the site
So true. Ditch the dabbling for a clear sustainable content strategy!