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FOCUS ON LIONS ENTERTAINMENT
of London-based BCMA (Branded Content Marketing Association). He highlights campaigns such as Guinness’ admired ‘Sapeurs’ (the Society of Elegant Persons of the Congo), the five-minute documentary by AMV BBDO that celebrates the real-life, resplendently dressed gentlemen from impoverished parts of Brazzaville, the Republic of Congo’s capital. Also well regarded is the YouTube channel for the GoPro cameras used for filming extreme sports. The channel boasts more than 1.3 billion views for its curation of content sent in by the camera’s fans and users. Business-to-business campaigns can also be entertaining, Canter says. The Virgin Media Business ‘#VOOM Pitch to Rich 2015’ stint for Richard Branson’s broadband services at Virgin Media Business included content featured on UK TV network Channel 4 and primetime news programme ITV News. It invited the UK’s small and medium-sized businesses to compete for investment from a £1m ($1.44m) fund and audiences were asked to vote for the most deserving enterprise on the vmboom.com website. Online traffic shot up to 165,000 daily visits from 2,000 visits before the campaign. Canter says: “The best way to approach a content- or entertainment-led campaign is to ensure you have a solid foundation based on clear insight and true audience data. Brands can no longer control what people say about them, but they can influence the conversation using entertaining and engaging content.”
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A recent example was producing an 8 x 30 mins primetime fly-on-the-wall factual series called Ready For Take Off for the airline Qantas in Australia to “reawaken public affection and employee pride”, Clark says. It reached an average of 790,000 viewers each week, and was seen by more than one million at one point. Sam Glynne, FremantleMedia’s vicepresident of global branded entertainment, emphasises the importance of not confusing branded content and its ultimate commercial message with pure family entertainment. “We don’t compete in the same space as the brands we work with, which include automotive, health and beauty, FMCG and technology,” she says. “Got Talent is an opportunity rather than a threat in that the alignment of super-brands can be incredibly powerful when they exist in non-competitive spaces.” Caressa Douglas, senior vice-president of branded integration at US-based BEN (Branded Entertainment Network), notes that such an approach is crucial at a time when high-end branded entertainment is at its most competitive. A subsidiary of computer-software giant Microsoft, BEN uses data and science to analyse the brand and entertainment alignments that will be most productive for clients, which include General Motors, Hyundai Group, Honda, Heineken, and Microsoft and its videogames brand Xbox. During her Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity talk, The Era Of Brand Integration & The Science Behind It, she will demonstrate how to insert
Sam Glynne: “THE ALIGNMENT OF SUPER-BRANDS CAN BE INCREDIBLY POWERFUL WHEN THEY EXIST IN NON-COMPETITIVE SPACES”
Leading entertainment producers are directing their skills to the brandedentertainment world, as demonstrated by FremantleMedia, the TV-production goliath behind Got Talent, the reality talent show that made UK singer Susan Boyle an international star in 2008. Got Talent has since become one of the hottest reality TV formats of all time, with localised versions in 69 territories — a Guinness World record. Its videos have recorded more than 19 billion YouTube hits combined. FremantleMedia’s director of global entertainment, Rob Clark, explains the branded-content business model: “While our core clients are broadcasters, more and more brands are becoming clients as well and we see Cannes Lions as a place to talk about all the ways we can work with brands.”
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brands seamlessly into on-screen entertainment. “We don’t normally have a metric, but brands want to know what they would get out of branded-content campaigns. So we [via Microsoft] built an algorithm based on duration on the screen, strength of the entertainment property and the show’s time slot, among others, which would dictate the price [the brand paid],” she says. Other activities include working as closely as possible with the production team — from the shows’
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creator to the crew in charge of wardrobe — for a complete understanding of its objects. “Entertainment is much more personal than it used to be because audiences seek out what they want to watch,” Douglas adds. “They are much more selective so a brand needs to figure out where they are.” And when you find them, you need to understand what they want in an era where traditional living-room TV viewers are joined by “cord cutters”, “cord shavers” and “cord nevers”, a generation of viewers who reject TV subscription packages on the basis they can access free entertainment online, on social media and via mobile apps. The need to get the partnership right is heightened by the fact that there are now a myriad more shows from which brands can choose. As Douglas notes, during the recent Upfronts (the US industry event at which TV networks showcase their upcoming programming slates to advertisers), there were 39 new entertainment platforms. “How are brands to navigate all of that?,” she asks. “They used to choose from 100 new TV shows and 100 movies a year. Now, you can have 200 TV shows a day.” BBC Advertising, part of BBC Worldwide, the commercial division of the UK public broadcaster, says it has developed a technology that will enable brand-owners to ascertain whether or not audiences are responding positively to their brandedcontent initiatives. Its sister division, in-house creative agency BBC StoryWorks, worked with facial-recognition coding expert CrowdEmotion to conduct The Science Of Engagement, a research project for figuring out how marketers can use branded content more effectively. “The current metrics used to measure content-led marketing performance are often based on those used for more traditional forms of digital advertising, and we don’t believe they fully capture the content’s impact,” says Richard Pattinson, BBC StoryWorks’ senior vice-president of content. “We are currently exploring the impact of different content formats, and the types of stories being told, on audiences.” The resulting tool kit that will be built from The Science Of Engagement’s findings will be available to advertisers and agencies from September. FremantleMedia’s Sam Glynne
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