Branded content will get (even) better when marketers fully assess its value
Content marketing is a successful marketing tactic, with spending increasing 16% YoY to reach $412B in projected global spending by 2021. Until recently, branded content, where the role of the brand is to finance the content creators (usually publishers) rather than drive the subject matter and production process, was growing even faster, with research firm Polar citing 40%+ YoY growth in recent years. Why the slowdown in branded content? While the quality of broader content marketing efforts improves as platforms, creators and marketers are reducing the level of digital dross and instead focus on content quality and thought leadership, branded content is facing the opposite pressure, as paid distribution gets more expensive and media agencies, driven by a performance marketing focus on returns, advise clients to assess effectiveness of branded content through a “cost per view” (CPV) measure that leans on content creators to limit production values. To combat this dynamic, marketer have an opportunity to take into account the broader value that branded content efforts can deliver, and thereby ensure high-quality branded content will serve brands, publishers, and consumers alike.
Successful branded content efforts — going way back to 2001 for the original BMW Films through to more recent efforts like Pedigree’s K9FM and Net-a-Porter’s Porter magazine — share three critical attributes that drive marketing value — (1) a commitment to supporting the values of their audiences, (2) an engagement format that is rich, original and purposeful, and (3) an activation approach that generates discussion, insights and assets for broader (and ongoing) marketing activities. By determining the value of each of these three areas, and assessing the total return on investment, marketers can shift the conversation “beyond the CPV” when it comes to evaluating branded content opportunities.
First: Younger, highly-desired audiences are squaring up to marketing messages with increasing skepticism and increasingly look for brands that reflect their values. Branded content as a tactic seeks to create brand awareness through stories that reflect shared values across audience and brand, and is well-suited to position these banner-blind audiences to be responsive to marketing messages from brands, based on research from Ipsos and others. Now is the time for marketers to incorporate the projected lift in brand perception and awareness measures into their attributed value estimate for branded content efforts — a more ‘sympatico’ audience is a more valuable audience...
Second: Wealthier, digitally-fluent audiences are looking for content that explains and entertains (mostly with B2C products) and content that educates and troubleshoots (mostly with B2B services). Branded content, especially that which is developed in an ongoing, serialized manner, is extremely well-suited to driving long-term engagement across audiences and products (like any engaged audience — they are interested in following a good story!). Now is the time for marketers to incorporate customer lifetime value thinking, perhaps even amortizing branded content production costs over an average customer lifetime — after all, it’s cheaper to communicate with an engaged audience than re-engaging on a campaign-by-campaign basis…
Third: Modern, mainly digitally-focused marketers are looking for word of mouth efficiencies in their creative campaigns — remember those painful “can we make it viral?” requests from 10 years back?! — and an original branded content series or storyline, a bit like using a celebrity or paid influencer, throws up plenty of interest-based (rather than brand-based) interest, engagement, and yes, extreme sharing and word of mouth activity, if executed well — like GE’s Science-Fiction Podcast, The Message. Now is the time for marketers to incorporate a reasonable projected incremental awareness and engagement value across their branded content efforts — a single ‘view’ might yield 10x the ‘views’ after the paid media concludes...
Branded content, particularly if video-based and serialized, generates incremental value beyond the “cost per view” calculation that still drives many marketer decisions in this successful yet still evolving area of content marketing. With the additional, incremental value of higher awareness, engagement, and word of mouth value (let alone the TON of usable visual assets with full rights across media that often result from production), it is up to marketers to insist upon a comprehensive and holistic view of the return on investment involved — one that builds on content marketing best practice, but is right for each individual organization. The marketers that push ahead with this comprehensive view will put themselves in a much stronger place to secure the right investments for, and thus develop and reap the rewards of, high-quality, impactful branded content programs.
