(Heron Island, AU - photo credit) A while back I wrote a few bits about some of the ways that technology is going to make people's lives simpler: mostly concentrating on improving the bits of people's lives that revolve around people, information and entertainment (ie the good bit). The great thing that technology does is make connections with all these things much easier and faster. The problem for the traditional providers of information and entertainment is that technology allows people to miss out all the annoying ads that interupt what they are looking for. As technology gets smarter, this might well move from 'ability to avoid' to 'preset to ignore'. If the amount of available and personalised content exceeds your attention span, but your devices are able to filter it based on learnt preferences, then an advertisement has to be better than a programme (to use a TV analogy) before your devices will even recommend it. (BTW your devices WILL know more about what you want to watch than you will ever need to).
This causes a problem for brands, who have tended towards interuption of content to gain attention. The idea of branded content (which to me means informational or entertainment content that is at least as good as the best of non-branded content) has seemed like a holy grail to the media agency business, and one which has largely been diluted by ad-funded OFCOM regulated quasi-sponsorships on TV, or tactical product placement exercises online. Ads that are better then programmes are still either unrealistic or regulated out of existance (in the UK anyway).
So what has changed? If you've seen much news in the last few months you'll know that a British bloke has blagged a job as the caretaker of an island on the Great Barrier Reef in Queensland. And that there was a recruitment campaign the first day back to work in January, then 35,000 entries uploaded, then a swim/blog/lounge-off for the shortlist in Queensland. As well as a some £50m worth of PR for the Queensland Tourist Board who commissioned the campaign and a Cannes Grand Prix for CumminsNitro who created it. Not to mention 6 months on an island for Ben Southall who won.
And more importantly for the purposes of this post, the BBC have commissioned an hour of documentary about the selection process (which cleverly took place on some of the most beautiful islands that the tourist board looks after). This airs on Thursday at 9pm on BBC2 - primetime BBC real estate. This isn't ad-funded programming, this is ad-inspired programming - a campaign so good it inspires commissioning editors to join in, producing content that is all about marketing the destination (the whole point of the campaign).
(Slight tangent - I was going to put a link in this post to Marcus Brown's Content Manifesto, because it takes the future of agencies and tourist board marketing to the logical creative extreme, and so seemed relevant. But Marcus has turned the site into a book so I can't.)
The line between branded entertainment and branded utility is currently pretty fuzzy. There's some debate at Neil Perkin's about what Nokia actually gain from the (nevertheless very cool) Bruce Lee ping pongads that have been doing the rounds over the last couple of weeks. I think this one is an interesting take - in these sales focused days there is a clear path to purchase within the application itself, taking advantage of the device's connectivity, but still enough novelty that it will be shared and shown off.
Now what would have been really special is if Men 18-24 recommended gift had been an iPint (from CMD Global)
I've seen loads and loads of media packs over the years. Some I've even downloaded myself because I wanted to read them rather than having them turn up unannounced as an inbox clogging 7mb attachment. So it was great to meet with GoViral last week and get a beautifully presented coffee table hardback book called The Social Media Metropolis, which didn't really try to sell me any of their services. To be honest, this in itself puts it in the top 1% of ways that media owners communicate with media agencies. When you read the content though, you see that it perfectly embodies what the brand is about, as it is basically an explanation of how the communications landscape has changed from Cluetrain onwards. It uses a few case studies from GoViral's clients, but it doesn't do hard sell. It just explains why. And it takes 120 pages of expensively designed hardback to do so.
And the result....I've read it from cloth covered cover to cloth covered cover. Over the weekend. And taken photos of it. GoViral's business is all about creating purple cows - remarkable stuff, branded content so good that you want to spend time with it and to tell other people about it. And as they so clearly know what they are doing, they will be my first port of call next content campaign. Only takes one or two campaigns to pay for a hardback media pack.
There's a few things I've seen this week that reminded me of this Media Week article from a couple of months back. Firstly the Nokia Comes With Music campaign launching (actually there's a Comes With Music blog that looks like it is Nokia's work as well - including a Blogger video widget that should play the TV ad, but doesn't work. I would play it here, but there doesn't seem to be an easy way to embed it. To be honest, it isn't good enough to bother actually spending time adding, so I guess it is an example of why all content that a brand creates should be easily shareable). Now there's no surprise that mobile brands are positioning themselves as music curators with ever increasing desperation... after all, if your marketing is so far removed from your R&D that you have to rely on it to create artificial product differentiation, you are in a pretty bad place as a brand. If you are in that position (which I'd suggest that Nokia are) and your main competitor is Apple, who wrote the book on designing products that market themselves, then you really are in trouble. Anyway, it is another step in the erosion of value in music content. 02 are also raising the stakes in the battle for control of the live music scene, announcing their sponsorship of the Academy venues across the country, giving O2 customers priority ticketing and content access to the main mid size gig venues in London, Birmingham, Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool, Newcastle, Oxford, Sheffield & Leeds, to add to the existing O2 Arena and Wireless Festival. This one makes sense to me, as it is more about the brand facilitating experiences (gigs) that are hard to access (as Academy size gigs sell out in hours. Well, Brixton certainly does) than abount positioning O2 as an aggregator of musical content.
That isn't too say that branded content is a bad thing in music, rather that Nokia's approach seems a bit desperate! What really interests me is the work that Intel are doing at the moment. All of the bands mentioned in the Media Week article were established artists who wanted more freedom than they could expect from the major labels who had built their careers. Neither Groove Armada/Bacardi or McFly/McDonalds is a particularly cutting edge choice of partner for either party. Likewise neither Paul McCartney nor Starbucks had very much to lose when cosying up for an instore release. What Intel are doing is interesting because it focuses on the unsigned acts, where there is a much bigger potential payback for the brand investing. Bedroom bands are of course the natural territory for Intel, whose processors power demo recording across the world, but unsigned bands don't cost much compared to Paul McCartney or Groove Armada and there is far more kudos to being seen to support one.
Of course, this is not really any more radical an idea than a battle of the bands for the X-Factor era, with added advertising support from Intel's deep pockets. However, it raises the interesting question of what Intel will do with the winning band. If this develops into a crowdsourced talent scouting operation for the first signing to their label, then we could be seeing the first move towards brands as record labels in the traditional sense - ie. not just marketing music, but supporting the artists that shape popular culture.
There are still plenty of rumours that Red Bull are going to do this properly (still surprises me that they haven't, after having run the Red Bull Academy for 10 years now). However, it is the agency holding companies that really seem to be slow off the mark. Global agencies, whether creative or media, still seem to think in terms of audio-visual. Fair enough, that is what made their fortunes, but surely branded content divisions should be employing the A&R people who get pushed out as the economic crisis starts to hit the already contracting major label market. Agencies have always had the power to make artists' careers (hello Moby, Dandy Warhols, etc), but the real potential for client brands lies in discovering acts at times in their careers when they most need to trade.
(Heron Island, AU - photo credit)
