Don’t assume audiences will love your brand story – BBC.com’s Jamie Chambers
On Tuesday 23 October, four of the BBC’s content experts from New York, London and Australia presented a storytelling summit in Sydney. Here, Jamie Chambers, regional director ANZ of BBC World News and BBC.com, talks through the power of storytelling.
Putting it bluntly, not everybody cares about your brand’s story. We see the role of a good media partner is to understand which of those stories are going to best resonate with our audience and, most importantly, deliver on your campaign goals.
You know when a brand has been involved too heavily in content. Whether it’s too frequent or too obtuse. I remember a product placement for a car brand in a show where there’s a powerful moment in the storyline, and then all of a sudden the actor pulls out his phone and opens the car brand’s app to turn on the car. You can almost see the actors cringe. And instances like that just pull you as the audience out of the storyline. From an emotional perspective, you reject it. And our new Science of Memory research study proves that when the emotional engagement is gone, the memory encoding opportunity for the brand is lost.
If you force it too heavy, the message is lost. Brands must acknowledge that. The key is to work with quality directors & storytellers and let them be your guide. Let them determine how much is enough to let the story develop in a natural way, while still ensuring the brand plays a role and your business objectives are met.
It’s difficult to have those conversations with clients. This is why we invest in research like our Science of Engagement and Science of Memory studies, so we can put empirical evidence in front of the CMO to show when and how best to integrate the brand to retain audience engagement AND deliver the right outcome for the brand.
It’s not that attention spans have shortened. With a good story told in a relevant environment, audiences will be happy to spend time with your content. From our side, we’ve seen no erosion on the time people spend on our website. People are happy to spend three or four minutes on long-form narrative as long as it’s done well. When you visit a site such as BBC, you’re primed to expect a certain level of quality & invest a proportionate amount of your time. That’s given us permission to commission 800-1200 word branded content narratives that create dwell times of 90+ seconds. With the videos on BBC Reel, our new video platform on BBC.com, we’ve got short, medium and, in time, long form content, and we’re seeing people happy to spend several minutes with the content.
But when you’re browsing social media, or similar environments, our frame of mind is different. So when we produce content for social, we don’t just shove our six-minute video on there; we will look to recut it. We look to get emotional impact in early to engage audiences earlier, and in some cases, drive audiences to a relevant platform where they can watch the full piece.
Not all platforms are created equally. Just take a common truth – your experience in social media is a lot more “swipey-swipey” and it takes a lot to make you stop and break that learned behaviour. But think of it in other areas – you don’t go into a two-hour movie at a theatre and walk out after 2 minutes because your attention span has collapsed due to the rise of social media. Human evolution doesn’t happen that quickly. And that’s an important consideration when choosing your media partners and distribution strategy.
Branded content plays a very specific role. It’s not necessarily a general awareness builder. Nor something you would generally use to drive much lower-funnel activity. Our AdImpact research study demonstrated its particular strength lies in that difficult mid-funnel space, where you’re looking to build shift perception, build consideration and recommendation. Common sense tells you there are a lot of actions in between somebody simply being aware your brand exists, to actually going into a shop to buy it. And this is where branded content plays a particularly effective role in bringing that person further along on that journey, and quicker.
And when it’s done well, branded content has a deep effect on you – not just emotionally but in your long-term memory. It can impact you through into your day-to-day life and that’s going to affect purchase decisions, brand recall and how likely you are to recommend the brands to your personal and professional network. Our Science of Memory research aims to give brands and content creators insights & tools to help them create emotionally engaging, memorable and effective branded content. Based on a global study, which includes respondents from across Australia, Asia, Europe and America, it uncovers the role emotion and memory play in successful branded content campaigns, and we are excited to bring these insights to Australia to help brands get the most from their investment in branded content.
Trusted news is a highly effective channel for marketers. As a user, you’re interested & engaged in what that content is telling you, and in your own mind, you’re then primed & receptive to all the content you are seeing on that page. Research shows that as long as you trust that publisher, you’ll read content from them – both editorial and commercially-funded – as long as it meets your expectations of quality.
The BBC’s journalists do not create branded content. We operate a strict “church and state” system and any quality publisher should conduct themselves similarly to ensure trust and integrity are maintained. A perception of “cash for comment” will erode audience trust, as well as impact advertising effectiveness. Instead, those in our StoryWorks division (the BBC’s content marketing arm) embrace the same principles of editorial quality and lean on the editorial team for insights and topical angles, as well as proven distribution strategies. We then develop the content brief and use a qualified network of content creators out there who can create the right brand story to the same exacting BBC editorial standards. And no branded content appears on the BBC before we have editorial approval, to ensure it meets our guidelines and is of the quality our audience expect of us.
Storytelling is a difficult art, but what’s even more difficult is doing it while also delivering on business outcomes. But the BBC is one of the world’s biggest content creators so there’s a hell of a lot we know about creating amazing content. And our experience in developing award-winning, effective branded content is something brands can tap into, to help accelerate them on their own content marketing journey.
To find out how the BBC can help make your branded content more memorable and more effective, email Jamie.Chambers@bbc.com, Regional Director ANZ.