Nashville American Marketing Association

The Soft Sell of Branded Content

Nowadays, most companies are looking to get new fans and customers thats an unobtrusive, soft-sell. Branded content. It’s the idea of creating content that tells a story to an audience and as a second priority includes a brand. Branded content

Branded content is a relatively new form of advertising medium that blurs conventional distinctions between what constitutes advertising and what constitutes entertainment. Branded content is essentially a fusion of the two into one product intended to be distributed as entertainment content, albeit with a highly branded quality. Unlike conventional forms of entertainment content, branded content is generally funded entirely by a brand or corporation rather than, for example, a movie studio or a group of producers–Wikipedia.

Many companies–such as American Express, Gatorade, Red Bull and smaller ones too–are now using branded content as a way to connect with their audience.  It’s a shift in thinking from advertising in the way the brand wants to communicate to the way the consumer wants to hear the message. It makes more sense as many people tune out the sales-only messages. Leading with the soft sell instead of the sales pitch may be the right play if this is your goal.

Looking for a Bigger Bandwagon

With so many channels and video outlets, and with how much video helps SEO and how easy it is to track video, it seems like more companies should be jumping on the brand content bandwagon with video. However, we’re hearing from marketing folks that branded content often gets lost in the overall discussion of marketing strategy with a client unless a few people have a passion for it.

Why we wonder? We know marketing professionals are making the best decisions for their clients and brands with the information that they have. But we do run into a couple of misconceptions about video and branded content:

The brand’s message will be lost.

In fact, many people are investing in branded content because it creates a stronger emotional connection for the brand. In a recent FastCoCreate article, Linda Boff, Executive Director of Global Marketing for GE said that for GE, branded content had a much greater impact on consumer perceptions than standard display ads.

They’re worried about the cost.

But since branded video is often unscripted storytelling, it is usually less expensive than a traditional commercial, or scripted corporate video … and for gosh sakes, branded content is more fun.

Since, we’re doing a lot more video branded entertainment at Gamma Blast lately– specifically for some of our national clients, we’re here to give a few tips. We hope this helps your company’s brand become stickier and more profitable.

Some thoughts about branded entertainment:

• The brand has to fit the story to make the best connection.
• While the brand is integrated into the story, you don’t want the piece to feel like the brand is first priority. That makes it feel, “icky”.
• Many people, especially Generation Y and younger, accept a branded message as long as they get something that they want. I could care less about the GE stove shots in Top Chef since I get to watch these chefs.
• Whatever branded entertainment you create, it has to be something that you’d want to watch.

Is your company using branded content? How is it going? NAMA would love to hear from you.

Post written by Liz Denning, Gamma Blast, a video production boutique

They are documents that are crafted with such care; objectives that lead to strategies, flow into tactics and finally get wrapped up with measurements as a big, satisfying bow.  As marketers, the act of creating a marketing plan is part of our DNA, part of the joy of being a marketer.  They’re neat, tidy and when you accomplish your goal – very satisfying.

While I’ve probably written more than a hundred of them, I’m seeing the value more and more of the Un-Marketing plan.  Of course, marketing plans still have their value, and our business still uses one, but for us, the Un-Marketing plan is the present that’s just as pretty.

The Un-Marketing plan is based on moving on a potential business/creative situation, even though all of the pieces aren’t in place.  It’s an approach many businesses need to take so they can stay nimble to adjust to the latest opportunities in the fast-moving economy.  For us, the approach is best used when an idea is in its infancy since putting the concept in a formal marketing plan might kill it since it would be shoved too far aside.

To give you some background, our company, Gamma Blast creates TV and web content and programming for recording artists and companies.  We recently saw the value of the Un-Marketing strategy.

It began last year.  Through a relationship our Executive Producer fostered, we began talks with D1 training gyms about how we could work together.  It is a company of sports-training/workout facilities with a center in Franklin that’s one of 11 in the South and Midwest.  What differentiates it from other gyms is it trains players for the NFL combine.

We brokered a deal to get the rights to film there, to create stories around one of its trainers.  We didn’t have any distribution for the finished product, how it would be financed or even really exactly what it would look like.  We did know it trained high-profile players and NFL players own a portion of the business.  We saw potential and had patience to keep building the flavors slowly like a fine soup, on the back burner.

A year passed.  Then as luck would have it, a relationship built in NAMA (yes, NAMA) led the pieces to fall into place.  A NAMA friend had a contact at ESPN who needed a small video piece shot in town.  We parlayed that piece into more work.  Then once we built the relationship, we realized this was an opportunity we needed for our D1 idea.  We sold a web series for one of ESPN’s websites based on sports training that’s being shot at D1.

Was it a structured process tied up with a bow?  No, but once you get used to the un-marketing process, the results can be just as pretty.

By Liz Denning.  Liz is Co-owner/Marketing Director of Gamma Blast and Communications Co-Chair for NAMA.  She’s been a member since 2009.