Posts for 'Branded Entertainment'

Here's further evidence of video's rising importance for marketers seeking to build relationships with consumers: a survey of 1,000 American consumers and 500 marketers by Levels Beyond, a video content management provider, found that 59% of consumers are likely to watch a brand video when they visit a web site and 40% prefer watching a video vs. reading the same information. For millennials, 51% prefer watching a video to reading content.

As far as the types of video consumers like, 67% chose "how-to or instructional," followed by "comedy or spoofs" (42%), "product/informational" (34%), "micro-documentaries" (33%) and "animations/infographic videos" (30%).

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Late last week, Visible Measures released its quarterly Branded Video Report for Q2 '14, finding that branded videos were watched 2.8 billion times, an increase of over 50% vs. Q2 '13. The big driver of the record quarterly views was the World Cup, with videos related to it accounting for 19%, or almost 555 million of the views.

Nike was by far the biggest winner of World Cup related branded videos, with nearly 259 million True Reach views during the quarter, 84% of which were from its eight World Cup videos. Nike wasn't even an official World Cup sponsor, but its videos received 2.5x the 103.7 million views of adidas, which was the official sponsor and landed the brand in 3rd place for the quarter.

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Connecting with consumers has become harder than ever for brands. Fortunately, online video has opened up a whole new opportunity for brands to act more like publishers than advertisers, doing more storytelling than just advertising. A prime example of a brand that recognized this and developed a winning branded entertainment strategy is Quiznos, which launched "Toasty.TV," a destination for original and curated video.

Toasty.TV hit it big with its first original video, "House of Thrones," a hilarious mashup between Netflix's "House of Cards" and HBO's "Game of Thrones" generating almost 1.6 million views to date. In this case study presented at the recent Video Ad Summit, Quiznos' VP of Advertising and Marketing Chris Ruszkowski and agency partner Moz Miraba from Windowseat, detail the strategy behind Toasty.TV, how it reached its core millennial audience and the specific results it has driven.

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At NATPE recently, I interviewed Scott Donaton, Global Chief Content Officer for UM (Universal McCann) and head of UM Studios. The agency has clients including L'Oreal, BMW, Johnson & Johnson and many others. In the interview, Scott articulates very well the value of branded entertainment and why so many brands are now getting involved.

Scott explains how brands are seeking to move from traditional interruptive advertising experiences to ones where they can add value to conversations that audiences are already having. A great example Scott describes is UM's work with BMW to develop branded content in support of the new bobsled it designed for Team USA in the Sochi Olympics. Importantly, Scott also details how brands measure the success of their branded entertainment initiatives.

The interview runs approximately 7 minutes and is well worth watching for anyone interested in how branded entertainment is evolving.

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While at NATPE last week I did a short video interview with Mike Wiese, director of branded entertainment for JWT New York. In the interview Mike talks about how clients are approaching branded entertainment projects, how these align with traditional paid advertising, how one of his clients, Macy's, is succeeding and where branded entertainment is heading in 2014.

The edited interview is below and runs 5 minutes, 47 seconds.

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Last week at NATPE, I had the pleasure of interviewing Frank Cooper, PepsiCo's Chief Marketing Officer, Global Consumer Engagement. Frank provides great insights into how PepsiCo's brands are evolving from a traditional approach to marketing to the consumer, to one that is more focused on engaging them with the brands. Part of doing this involves adopting a "beta culture" throughout the company, where campaigns are iterative and not necessarily fully polished at the outset.

Frank sees content as a key element in engaging consumers and believes there's a huge opportunity in episodic content online, where PepsiCo brands themselves will become more active. That said, he's very pragmatic about branded entertainment, explaining that these days everyone is vying for the consumer's precious attention. Brands can't do sub-par work if they expect to be competitive in their entertainment offerings.

Among the other topics Frank discusses:

- The increasingly important role of data in informing content choices, channels and other decisions.

- How expectations of those under age 25 differ from those older than 25.

- Success metrics of two recent campaigns, Mountain Dew's "DEWmocracy" and Pepsi Refresh and what the company learned from each of these.

- The organizational challenges consumer packaged goods companies face in adapting their marketing practices.

And more.

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• Jordan Hoffner - President, Digital Media, Electus

• Ian Schafer - CEO and Founder, Deep Focus

• Doug Scott - President, OgilvyEntertainment

• Josh Cohen - Co-Founder, Tubefilter (moderator)