The trend by brand marketers to appeal to their core audience through branded entertainment continues to explode in growth. By delivering brand message through compelling content rather than traditional advertising, brands can truly engage an audience and hold their attention rather than hammering them with repetitve and annoying ads. A recent example is Honda Motor, with their Power of Dreams Series. Honda successfully delivers its message in a very powerful and entertaining way.

In a recent Media Post article written by Dave Jackson, senior vice president of ad sales for Grab Networks, he give some greate advice for developing a brand content strategy:


To begin to develop a branded content strategy, I suggest the following process -- the "4 Es of content creation":
Engagement -- The content must first meet a consumer need or desire to get them interested in watching (research can help with understanding consumer content affinities for your audience). Then, and only then, the brand should be integrated in a compelling way that helps pay off the content promise while delivering on the brand promise.

Extension -- Scaling the content to get it in front of the right people. While having the content on the brand's Web site helps reach loyal users, to really make the content work, it needs to be syndicated broadly across the Web based on the audience's content affinities.

Execution -- Embed additional functionality to the video to build engagement with features like recipe prints for food marketers, or buy-it-now links for manufacturers or retailers. Then set up tools to measure the activation from those elements.

Efficiency -- Often the production and syndication costs can be significantly more efficient than a full-blown :30 commercial production. In some cases, a brand can even make a small cpm revenue share on that content.

The skill set of creating compelling branded content should be considered as an evolution both in how we look at advertising messages and how they are distributed versus a radical shift in strategy and capabilities. It will benefit all in the value chain: marketers, agencies, publishers -- and, most important, the consumer -- if we can work together to create branded content that is compelling for the consumer and delivers for the brand.