Report

Branded is back

In the wake of the pandemic and growing concerns about digital ad fraud, advertisers are placing a greater emphasis on the power of meaningful stories that resonate with consumers, and less on short term promotional advertising. makers reports.

The past year has seen something of sea-change in thinking within the advertising industry – one that has placed a greater focus than ever on branded content.

The reason is twofold. Firstly, in the wake of the pandemic, social justice movements such as Black Lives Matter and growing concern about the state of the natural world, many advertisers have elevated their brand content strategies.

Many are placing a greater emphasis on the power of meaningful stories that resonate with consumers, and less on short term promotional advertising. More than half of advertisers using paid branded content and influencers say doing so is more critical than it was a year ago, according to a recent Advertiser Perceptions report. Secondly, many agencies and commercials producers say there has been a move away from hyper-targeted, pay per click (PPC) advertising designed to maximise short term sales over long term brand building.

“There’s been a really interesting shift,” says Maurice Wheeler, chief executive of the We Are Family agency network, which specialises in children, young people and family marketing and works with brands such as Lego and Mercedes-Benz. He says that brand (or native) content was the hot thing five years ago as advertisers tried to foster deeper engagement with audiences.

But then the hyper-targeted programmatic ad buy enabled by tech giants like Facebook and Google grew in popularity, with algorithms allowing advertisers to deliver specific pieces of content to specific people.

Global losses to ad fraud exceeded usd35 billion last year, a fiGure expected to rise to usd50 billion by 2025, accordinG to the World federation of advertisers. “I think they got slightly dazzled by it,” says Wheeler, explaining that this kind of advertising typically doesn’t need the big storytelling or emotional journeys of branded content. “It tells you ‘this is who we are’ and ‘here is the 20% discount code’ – it’s a quite brutal approach.”

Many advertisers and agencies think they went too far, and were too focused on KPIs and costs of conversion. “It was just a numbers game –[advertisers] thought that if you shout out to enough people, some of them will buy,” says Wheeler.

They recognise that, within the digital space, they have been “riding on the back of brand collateral” that they have might have built up over the past 30 years, says Wheeler – and that they need to focus once again on their brand story.

This realisation has gone hand in hand with growing concerns about the trustworthiness of digital ad delivery. 40% of advertisers cited ad and bot fraud as their second-largest concern among this year, compared to fifth in 2020, according to the 2021 Advertiser Perceptions Trust Report.

Global losses to ad fraud exceeded USD35 billion last year, a figure expected to rise to USD50 billion by 2025, according to the World Federation of Advertisers.

Unsurprisingly, highly regarded advertising figures have increasingly begun to question the effectiveness of targeted digital ad campaigns.

Scott Galloway, professor of marketing at the New York University Stern School of Business, lashed out in a recent blog post against ads bought by algorithm. He cited a study by MIT professor Catherine Tucker which found that even targeting something as basic as gender was unsuccessful more than half the time (i.e., it was worse than random).

Furthermore, the technology that enables tracking, the digital cookie, is on the way out. As it is, most tracking cookies are either blocked or deleted by web browsers. Apple recently updated iOS to require would-be ad trackers to obtain a user's position before dropping a cookie. Google's Chrome, which commands 60% of the browser market, will block third-party cookies altogether by 2023.

“The change away from cookies is changing the landscape,” says Celeste Hubbard-Breen, president of US-based content agency Hecho Studios. “It is making it a requirement to have content that people want to find and that they want to engage with, versus content that is being pushed at them.”

Hubbard-Breen agrees that advertising became too data and tech driven in recent years. “Nowadays, we have the opportunity to tell deeper stories that are beyond just the selling of a product… it’s definitely about sharing and shining a light on the brand's values and deeper stories.”

The ability to share stories has also grown, creating an environment for “much more flexible distribution of content,” says Hubbard-Breen. “Not only can you reach people through a post or television, but also through an Instagram Reel, a TikTok or a podcast. That flexibility is sparking the creativity and innovation in our market – in different ways for brands to be able to connect with audiences.”

By way of example, she cites the lauded The Real Heroes Project, which Hecho Studios worked on with agency 72andSunny. Produced during the height of the pandemic, the project saw famous athletes and players dedicate their match shirts and jerseys to a healthcare hero working to combat Covid-19. The athletes covered their name on their jerseys and replace it with the name of their healthcare hero. In Hubbard-Breen’s words: “We flipped the script.”

Hecho Studios, which was spun out of 72andSunny in 2013, is known for high profile storytelling content such as Google’s emotional Year in Search films.

It’s currently focused on the technology and sports markets, where Hubbard-Breen thinks there is room to expand Hecho’s offer.

Her advice for creating stand out branded content is straightforward. “It’s always about finding a human insight. If you are not really solving a problem or telling a story about something that people are actually interested in or curious about, it is going to fall on deaf ears.”

“This realisaTion has gone hand in hand wiTh growing concerns abouT The TrusTworThiness of digiTal ad delivery.”