5 Tips for Building Branded Entertainment That Works
By Anne Stuart
No question about it: Branded entertainment is among today’s hottest marketing concepts. That’s no surprise, given the wave of high-profile campaigns designed to marry a brand to some type of entertainment—from TV shows to movies to podcasts to Web portals—that targets the advertiser’s desired audience.
Done well, such campaigns can generate great returns for both parties. Done poorly, they can cause more harm than good.
What makes the difference? In Robb D’Egidio’s view, it’s the right combination of innovation, media and knowledge about the target audience. D’Egidio, now senior art director at Comcast Interactive Media in Philadelphia, previously held the same title at Fingerprint Interactive, a division of the Brownstein Group, where he developed digital media campaigns for clients ranging from ESPN to Microsoft to United Healthcare.
Among his most successful projects: a colorful campaign for the SuperPretzel line of grocery-store snack foods that promoted the products via TV, the Web and a string of viral-marketing videos.
D’Egidio offers these five tips for companies interested in similarly innovative and effective branded-entertainment initiatives:
1. Know who’s really driving the purchase.
For instance, in the case of SuperPretzels, the actual buyers are probably adults (typically mothers grocery-shopping for their families). But chances are they’ve picked up SuperPretzels because their teenager requested them. For that reason, D’Egidio designed his campaign—which featured talking pretzels attired in goofy costumes—for teens, developing spots that ran both on TV and online.
“They liked the idea of dressing the product up with little wigs and sunglasses,” he says of his target audience. “It was just absurd enough to get them to take a look.” And look they did— on TV, on the Web and on YouTube, where a series of lively SuperPretzel spots often ranked among the most-watched videos.
2. Make your message meaningful.
“It’s got to be relevant to the people you want to reach,” D’Egidio says. “It’s not that people don’t like to find new products or new deals or hear about what’s on sale. It’s that often what’s being offered isn’t relevant to what they’re looking for.”
Who’s doing it right? “Amazon does relevancy well,” he says. “The site makes recommendations based on what you’ve viewed and serves up views of additional products you might like. That doesn’t seem quite as intrusive.”
In fact, he says, that’s the moral of the story: “If advertising is targeted and smart and hitting the right audience, it’s viewed as much more acceptable.”
3. Be creative—but be honest.
Innovation is great—but it will almost certainly fail if it involves tricking, deceiving or playing a hoax on your audience.
“If you try to hide your main agenda, that’s a problem,” D’Egidio says. But that doesn’t mean you can’t experiment with new approaches. As an example, he cites the campaign for an as-yet-untitled “Godzilla”-like monster movie scheduled to debut early next year.
Clips for the film, reportedly code-named “Cloverfield,” provide little information beyond the release date (“01-18-08”). “So people are going online to find out what it means,” D’Egidio says, referring to a host of Web sites (including www.01-18-08.com) that offer “bits and pieces and clues” about the film.
He’s got no problem with the gimmick. “They’re still being transparent about it,” he says. “Nobody’s being fooled about the fact that this is a movie.”
4. Make the audience desire your message.
TiVo and similar technologies now let viewers record programs to watch later, when they can skip right over the commercials; pop-up blockers serve the same purposed online. Keep your message from getting zapped, clicked shut or ignored entirely by making people want the information it contains.
D’Egidio cites a successful campaign by the KFC fast-food restaurant chain: “They hid a code in the commercial for one frame. This stopped people from fast-forwarding,” D’Egidio says. Instead, they scrutinized the commercials to find the codes, then visited a companion Web site to plug in the code and receive a coupon for a free product. “The right creative approach will make people pay attention,” he says.
5. Keep an eye on the ever-shifting landscape.
“Media and advertising and technology are all feeding off each other,” D’Egidio says. “I try to stay involved, to consume as much information as I can about all of them.” His current interest: figuring out how to deliver content to Apple iPhones and other mobile devices. “You have to be ready to experiment,” he advises.
Finally, D’Egidio offers one caveat: Be cautious about user-generated content. “I think it’s subsiding now, but for awhile, everybody was putting the content in the hands of consumers, hoping for free viral advertising,” D’Egidio says. “But a lot of what gets passed along that way isn’t necessarily anything people want associated with their brands. It’s often very crude.”
And it’s often more costly than it appears, he adds: “It’s really not free. For example, if you set up online user forums where you ask people to participate, the costs of monitoring those things can be pretty extensive. In fact, debunking the myth of viral marketing being free is something we’ve taken to heart.” |
