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Branded content is ideas that bring entertainment value to brands and that integrate brands into entertainment.
It is magnetic brand properties in the form of TV programmes, community events, people, film, video, broadcast TV, narrowband, broadband - linking important passions to important brands with a strategic reason why.
By enabling these new entertainment experiences, brands gain significant fame and goodwill. By creating more value for the consumer, more value for businesses is created.
It means taking the philosophy and message of a brand and translating that into entertainment properties that consumers want to engage with, e.g. films, TV programmes, music, events, digital, sponsorship, merchandising.
Creating brand entertainment based on the things that really matter, consumers volunteer their attention. It is the move from interruption to attraction.
Branded content is a new form of creating an entertainment property, as it involves a new type of creative partnership between content developers, agencies, broadcasters/distributors and brands.
It is co-creation, i.e. the convergence of the marketing trinity: content, media and brands.
There is a new social and economic landscape. Multiple channels, new technologies, a less attentive consumer have made interruptive connection with consumers more and more difficult, the old collision-model of advertising is becoming increasingly anachronistic in a world of personalised media platforms. A new approach to consumer engagement is needed.
Branded content embraces these changes. Creating brand entertainment based on the things that really matter, consumers volunteer their attention.
In terms of AFP at a time when technology is set to reduce the impact of spot advertising, broadcasters and brands alike are looking for ways to work together more proactively. Advertiser funded programming, often thought of as an enhanced form of programme sponsorship, is one of the methods that successfully combines the editorial needs of the broadcaster with the marketing communication objectives of the commercial sponsor.
Branded content is happening.
The US is currently the country the furthest ahead in the development of Branded content, with Coca Cola and Pepsi being the leading brands in exploring the opportunities offered by Branded Content, e.g. Steve Heyer’s speech at Madison & Vine, mycokemusic.com, PepsiChartShow.
‘Branded content programmes’ include any spend from an advertiser, agency or marketing company that goes towards the creation, production and distribution of broadcast Television programming. They include the televising of brands’ events, deficit funding of programmes by advertisers across all broadcast channels and platforms, as well as channels and programming segments owned directly by brands. This excludes standard programme sponsorships, paid for advertising space and production.
Simply put, branded content programmes covers any project where the money goes directly into the production of the show. Sponsorship and promotions all happen after the thing is in the can.
Sponsorship is adding a brand’s logo to an already existing event or entertainment property, whereas Branded Content involves coming up with the creative idea together with the brand and the producers. It is an effort of collaboration in order to bring consumers entertainment that they want, in the form that they want it.