Branded Content: The Big Re-Brand

What I love about the marketing industry is the way it manages to market itself. You often hear the old adage that a plumber has leaky taps at home, because they never get round to applying their expertise for themselves. Not so in marketing: we love to market ourselves. Enter to lights, smoke and musical fanfare: Branded Content.

Those old enough to remember 'street sampling' will know that it now goes by the name of experiential marketing. There wasn’t a significant gear-change between the two disciplines (we’re not talking analogue to digital here!) it was just more of a natural evolution. A new way to dress up something that already exists and was, frankly, looking little tired. It didn’t really live anywhere specific. PR firms did it, event companies did it, no one really cared that much. It was just extra corporate chugging on the side of bigger, bolder, traditional campaigns.

The experiential evolution was nothing more than a re-brand. A stroke of genius self-marketing that clients loved the sound of and began chucking money at, and that the industry media loved and launched a new column or two about. Governing bodies were set up, awards ceremonies were built, and agencies re-wrote their service provision descriptions and some of their staff’s job titles.

Is “branded content” just a new name for something that already existed? Around 25 years ago, before cable TV and YouTube, my mid-puberty obsession was skateboarding. I wanted to watch as many videos as I could get my hands on about the sport, but without it being featured on any of the four channels on my TV, I had to order the VHS tapes and wait for them to arrive in the post. (There’s something to be said about anticipation marketing here, but that’s a different article…)

The only people making these videos were the skateboarding brands. They were the only ones who wanted to share the stories enough to make films about it. And when the VHS tapes arrived, I’d sit and watch the God-like skaters grind picnic tables and kick-flip down staircases all to a thrash metal soundtrack. The videos didn’t tell me what deck they were using, or trucks, or wheels. They didn’t talk me through the tricks and they didn’t sell me anything other than good old-fashioned hero worship. What was on these videos was not called branded content, but that’s exactly what it was.

Sure, the delivery channels for this kind of content have changed. We might be streaming rather than rewinding things to watch now. But branded content is just a name. A title. And what it represents has been around forever. The marketing industry just saw an opportunity to make it mainstream, diverting attention away from the unsolvable and inevitable demise of traditional advertising by re-branding an existing format.

The double-whammy is that for the creatives, it’s all their Christmases come at once. Years of watching their creative dreams of making the next Guinness ad eroded away through the soul-destroying restrictions of 30 second limited, sales-focused, ROI-driven output. With branded content, they get to make actual films. No selling, limited metrics and almost unrestricted creative freedom. All you need is views. And if they’re not too hot once they’re online, you just blame a lack of marketing support. How wonderful.

But what do all these changes mean for the consumer? Branded content is providing a service. It cuts through the UGC, creating editorial control within the wasted hours of online video consumption. The brand isn’t just delivering considered, non-overtly sales-driven, high quality content to absorb, it’s limiting how much dross is consumed. “Thanks Brand X...” says the consumer, “…before you made this branded content, I was watching a panda hiccup and a child bite another child’s finger. Thanks to you, I feel more fulfilled during my fag break. And I have a warmer feeling towards your brand now than I did before.”

So branded content isn’t going to replace traditional advertising because it’s not at the frontline of selling, but it is stealing that essential and bountiful space between the hard-sell and the consumer’s emotional breeding ground. So let’s go forth and brand some content. We’re all in, and everyone is happy. It’s a win-win. It doesn’t matter how long it lasts either, as someone out there is looking at what’s next on the self-marketing re-brand agenda, to everyone’s benefit.

Ben Gallop is managing director or Brand & Deliver