There's nothing brand-new about branded content

03 May 2015 - 02:00 By Jeremy Maggs
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There has never really been a good time to be a journalist. And it's been going on for years. As far back as the parting of the Red Sea, whining reporters ended up getting their papyrus soaking wet as their lack of accreditation had put them at the back of the long line out of Egypt.

Most of us have got used to our lot in life and take perverse pleasure in this perpetual state of mutter and grumble. Until now, that is. Of late, brands and their advertising agencies have cottoned on to a new marketing concept (and I use the word "new" reservedly) called, among other things, "branded content" or "native advertising".

It's a simple thing, really. The media space has become as busy and as cluttered as an Eskom war-room meeting before a long-weekend "maintenance festival", and unless scintillating in creative and strategic brilliance, traditional methods such as full-page ads, 30-second radio and television ads and barking billboards have lost a little shine and often battle to find that thing all marketers want, called "breakthrough".

So, it's better for these brands to create their own content in the hope that platform-perplexed consumers will spend a little more than a nanosecond engaging, digesting and hopefully connecting the call-to-purchase synapses.

"Authenticity in messaging creates a real resonance and believability," says one marketer. But here's the rub. Most branding and advertising agencies are very good at creating images and developing snappy body copy and payoff lines but flounder when it comes to the more serious, interrogative longform stuff that brands are demanding, whether in the form of a strategically placed "native advertising" piece, some riveting video content for instant upload or the next undiscovered frontier - the podcast.

It takes a different set of skills to do this stuff - for instance, postulating a clever argument or premise and cleverly inserting the brand message so that readers, viewers or listeners won't know they've entered the high church of advertising, albeit in a different guise. And if it's well executed - and it can and should be - brands will find that critical customer push-through point.

Some are embracing the concept. During the last soccer World Cup, Coca-Cola set up a brand newsroom to create relevant multiplatform content and react speedily to news on the ground that it could then reshape and repurpose for its own benefit. Red Bull, with its own media platforms creating content stunts such as edge-of-space skydives, has been a pioneer in the field for some time.

To create this new torrent of content, reporters, many of whom had resigned themselves to a life of covering courts and car crashes, are bei ng wooed by agencies . But while all the excitement about this new discipline rages, one old PR man told me wistfully he's been doing all of this for years with much success for a range of blue-chip clients. But what he didn't realise was branded content is just PR 2.0 with a fancy new name.

Maggs is a writer and broadcaster and edits the marketing website www.theredzone.co.za

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