The Role Of Branded Content
We spend plenty of time working with our clients to help them understand and devise a role for branded content in their marketing mix. There’s a number of factors that can influence what role branded content can play for your brand. In this article we’ll break down what each of those factors are and aim to give you a clear understanding of the role that branded content can play for you.
What is branded content?
Like most terms in marketing, there’s differing opinions on what branded content is. You might know it as sponsored content or native content. The question of what branded content is is of little consequence for brands. Sponsored, branded or native are used interchangeably to describe a style of content execution.
When we say branded content, we mean working with an established publisher to leverage their existing relationship with their audience. Working with them to create content that can then be distributed to audiences that know and love the publishers they regularly consume.
Branded Content is designed to look and feel like editorial content. It sits in a contextually relevant environment to match the form, feel, function and quality of where it appears. That means you get more of your target audience for longer on your brand’s message. It’s also content that an audience chooses to spend time with, as it’s an opt-in rather than disruptive experience. As we get into the role of branded, you’ll see just how powerful this is.
What role does branded content play?
The goal of content is to capture the attention of an audience to deliver a message. Ultimately it forms perceptions and shifts behaviours. Branded content does this through advocacy from trusted publishers (aka third party advocacy. This is valuable because it’s always better to have someone talk about you, rather than talking about yourself.
Branded content captures the attention of the target audience while they’re in an open & considered mindset. It is best used when trying to establish a brand presence or shift consumer perception and behaviour. Other channels that capture passive attention are used for reminding the audience of a brand’s existence.
Understanding the forms of attention
Despite the changes in how we consume information today, what we know about human attention hasn’t changed much since the 1800’s. William James, an influential American Philosopher & Psychologist remarked once that ‘Attention is a spotlight’.
There are multiple forms of attention within the attention spectrum for example:
- Selective attention
- Divided attention
- Sustained attention
We understand these terms from common phrases like ‘selective hearing’ and ‘having someone’s undivided attention’. Selective attention is when we block out some of our environment and focus on one particular feature. Such as watching TV, you focus on the screen in the living room, not the room. Or when scrolling a social feed, our eyes have been trained to scroll past things that don’t interest us.
Divided attention is when our attention is split between focus. It is when we are paying attention to at least two things at once. Examples of this are listening to the radio whilst driving, or a podcast while exercising. They are situations where we are multi-tasking and have limited capacity to consume a message. Consider the impact of a billboard at the train station, vs a trailer for a new movie you see at the cinema.
Sustained attention is when we continually focus on the primary thing happening in front of us. Like watching a movie, or reading an article, or for some of us doing work without distraction..
Different forms of media tap into these types of consumer attention throughout the day.
The growing ‘war’ for attention
Traditionally advertising has been all about scale and targeting: the ability to reach our target audience at the right frequency. The advertising world is now shifting to a greater focus on the impact or quality of impressions. Impressions are what we buy, but attention is the measurement for how good the quality of what we’re buying truly is. The way we now consume media has started an all out war for our attention.
We’re in the midst of an advertising revolution. We were raised to buy media on reach. Reach became targeted, and a suite of platforms followed that catered for this, each with their own trade offs. Now we’re at a crossroad: how do we drive better attention without sacrificing the reach and targeting we’ve become accustomed to? What is certain, is that whatever can achieve length and quality of attention is the next frontier of advertising., which is why ‘Attention’ is such a hot topic in marketing right now, it measures what happens after our impression is delivered and how impactful it is on the audience.
Both studies and common sense are showing that better attention drives greater sales uplift. Amplified Intelligence have done some studies on attention and what they found is that the more active attention someone pays to your message, the higher the sales uplift. On average, every second of Active Attention that someone considers your ad results in 3 days memory retention.
Ourchallenge as marketers is now to drive better levels of attention. This goes beyond hitting scale and targeting to deliver boat loads of impressions. When we make this commitment for a higher quality of attention, we play in areas that inherently consist of more value to the consumer. Richer & Active attention quality goes hand in hand with value exchange to the reader.
The good news is that branded content drives better attention than other channels. We know from studies such that TV captures on average 11 seconds of the audience’s attention, Out Of Home (OOH) is approximately 7 seconds. For Branded Content, it’s not seconds – but minutes that people stay engaged.
As a result, from the exchange of value, the relevant context, the opt in interest, the quality of that attention is much richer – we engage with the content because it’s in environments that we’ve actively seeked to engage with, for example clicking on an article we want to read, rather than having a brand shoved in our face while we’re trying to engage with something else.
We liken branded content to the alluring smell of waffles prompting you to walk down a street and into a store. It’s a question of how you want to be remembered by your target audience.
Attention is key to advertising working
At this point, you might be wondering whether we are putting too much emphasis on attention, but without attention you have nothing. Attention is critical to advertising working. Studies have shown that 85% of our ads don’t sustain enough attention to work. It’s attention that allows you to engage and persuade an audience and holding the sustained attention of the audience is your best bet at doing both.
Part of the reason 85% of our ads aren’t working, is because most advertising formats favor a short, interruptive experience. The attention they capture is fleeting. We’ve been sold a narrative, mostly by big platforms, that capturing 4 seconds of a user’s attention is a success. They would say 4 seconds of ad viewing doesn’t ruin their users’ experience, yet still allows them to make money. Promoting those 4 seconds of attention can drive brand recall and validate their advertising products. As a result, marketers settle for low cut-through formats because it’s easy to achieve. But the reality is, it’s also pretty lazy marketing, which is becoming more expensive and less effective. You need time to deliver a message, and attention for the message to be retained.
The unique benefits of branded content
The contextual relevance of branded content is one of the key reasons it performs so well. Who would’ve thought that audiences would actually enjoy navigating their own content experience, rather than have brand messages that might be relevant thrown at them? For example, reading an article about the best undiscovered travel destinations on a travel blog makes a lot of sense, rather than being hijacked by brands messaging from parallel categories because you might fit into their audience demographics.
The decision to engage with the content makes an audience feel in control, when someone is empowered and feels like they’re making their own decisions, they feel incredibly motivated, and are more likely to remember a brand’s message or act in a certain way as a result.
Another benefit that makes branded content unique is the level of advocacy that it provides for brands. Publishers are the original influencers. Before instagram, there were editors of Vogue, Elle, there was a Chief Editor of the Economist, they helped shape the modern media landscape, and now their voices are amidst a sea of influences crusading along the war for attention. The trust and credibility that an audience takes from having a brand’s message delivered in a publisher’s voice is akin to the advice you lean on with a family member or friend. Branded content creates the perfect environment for influencing behaviour in an industry that was born trying to do the same.
The role of branded content, based on objectives
If you have been in the marketing game for at least a few years you would know that effective marketing is pointed marketing. What is the objective we are trying to achieve? A broad brush stroke has its place but more often than not specific objectives lead to specific outcomes. When we stack them up we can begin to phase consumers through the marketing funnel step by step.
When we select objectives, we simultaneously select channels. We identify the 1-2 things we want to do well, and then we consider the best execution to achieve those objectives. But you need to start with the objective. Examples below:
- If I want reach, I’ll buy display or social
- If I want emotion, I’ll buy TV or Radio
- If I want views, I’ll buy Pre-Roll or CTV
- If I want social engagement, I’ll buy influencers
- And if I want attention from a hard to engage audience, I’ll use content
Because branded content receives richer active attention than traditional content & other channels, we can use it to hit a range of objectives. There is no single objective that branded hits. It is unique in this sense as it has many applications. It offers a unique opportunity to engage and persuade, but because it’s got so many things you can use it for, the selection criteria isn’t just one objective = sorted.
You can communicate more effectively with branded, but other channels are more ‘known’ for an objective, so it’s easy to go ‘oh I want reach, I’ll buy TV’. The nature of the creative means there are so many different ways to approach it.
So what is the role of branded content?
Put simply, the role of branded content is to engage and persuade. Depending on your objective and the stage that your audience might be at, branded can be used in a range of ways. That’s why we’ve developed our proprietary Campaign Solutions. They are a toolkit of unique applications for branded content, that leverage different content formats, approaches, deliverables and KPIs to deliver on specific marketing objectives. Our solutions can be deployed independently or combined to form a cross functional campaign, and are underpinned by solution-specific KPIs and metrics for measurable success.
You can explore our campaign solutions on the Avid Collective website to see how branded content could be a part of your next campaign.