Only 4% of all forms of advertising and marketing is remembered positively, 7% is remembered negatively (!) and 89% isn’t noticed or remembered at all. Consequently, many companies have turned to producing branded content. Nine out of ten companies world-wide are creating branded content and it is easy to understand why: Brand recall is 59% higher for branded content than for display and native ads and consumers are 14% more likely to look for additional content from a company after a single impression of branded content...read more
The end of the 30 second ad
Establishing your brand image
Branded documentaries give brands the opportunity to tell their own story within a format that is engaging for potential customers. Rogan Productions recently produced a 6-part series entitled The Craftsmen’s Dinner commissioned by the highly revered whisky brand, The Balvenie. Presented by the Michelin starred chef Michel Roux Jr., the series follows Michel as he uncovers the story behind some of the UK’s finest craftspeople. Jonathan Cornthwaite from the Balvenie tells us what their aim was for commissioning this online series: “We feel that, just as it takes time to craft a stunning knife or malt our barley at The Balvenie, telling stories about craftspeople takes time too. We cannot tell the story of Ole Hansen smoking his salmon in a 30 sec TV Commercial, so to get under the skin of it we have to take the time and we dedicated a 10 minute episode of the series to Ole. We have a story to tell, so making it as engaging and beautiful as possible was an important element to having people watch and interact.” Branded films can create and further nourish a bond with potential future customers so that, for example in the case of the Balvenie, when they’d go out to buy a bottle of whisky, aside from seeing just the bottle in itself, they would remember its story, heritage and the craftsmen that were involved in producing it, adding emotional value to the product. It is that emotional value that is so crucial, as most of our decisions are driven by emotion: “A brand is nothing more than a mental representation of a product in the consumer’s mind. If the representation consists only of the product’s attributes, features, and other information, there are no emotional links to influence consumer preference and action. The richer the emotional content of a brand’s mental representation, the more likely the consumer will be a loyal user”, Professor Murray writes in Psychology Today.
Content people want to watch
Rather than trying to force customers to watch ads, brands should focus on creating highly entertaining and engaging content that people will choose to watch and share. An example of this working brilliantly is Dove’s Real Beauty campaign. With 170 million views on YouTube, this was the most watched online branded content in 2013 and the third most shared branded video. This campaign got the whole world talking, and Dove has been part of that conversation – boosting sales massively in the process.
Unfortunately, most branded content isn’t this successful – a recent study found that their success rate is only about 30%. Brands must be mindful about the quality of the films they produce: “Quality standards for branded content are somewhere below sea level. They don’t have to be, but they are, largely because brands don’t think of creating content that’s as good or better than original content produced by popular publishers and entertainment companies. They think of creating content that’s as good or better than a display ad. Which is perhaps the lowest of low bars.” Ms Spiers, founder of The Insurrection, points out. Brands have to remember that the aim with branded content is to create films that people want to watch and within this they compete with all of the world’s content, from cute cat videos to the latest season of House of Cards.
Let storytellers do their work
This can seem like a Hercules task at first, but a good place to start is to work with highly experienced production companies in the making of branded films, as storytelling doesn’t come naturally to brands nor to marketers. The language used is a different one. In the worst cases content can be self-serving, not useful and pointless. Just one in three marketers believe that the content they develop is effective. Brands have to approach the creation of branded content with a completely different mind-set than the creation of an ad. Working with a production company such as Rogan Productions, who aside from creating branded content for luxury brands, also produces award-winning documentaries (with programmes broadcast on BBC, Channel 4 and Al Jazeera this year), is a way of making sure that the brand film will not only be beautifully shot, but also structured around a compelling narrative with an authentic and powerful story.
