I was privileged to be invited to open and chair the recent AIMIA/Venture One Branded Entertainment conference.  Posted here is my opening views on the current and future state of this curious industry.

Branded content seems to be a marriage made in heaven.

- Content has always been difficult to fund. Even if you are James Cameron. Marketeers have attractive budgets that can help out.

- It is difficult to get in front of audiences outside of traditional ad formats. Long-form entertainment seems to hold audience attention for long periods of time, which is attractive to marketeers.

Yet rather than a marriage, branded entertainment is often more of a sloppy one-night stand where neither parties expectations are met. Clearly there is more subtlety required.

I think branded content can broadly be split out into two areas: Tactical and strategic. Tactical is where a brand takes out a sponsorship within a show to have its product featured in an integrated way –Tefal in Masterchef. Strategic is where the brand takes a controlling interest in the content – such as Johnson’s baby with Babycenter.com.au. Telstra’s content play owning the online and mobile rights to sporting codes in Australia would be another one.

The examples above I would put forward as successful branded entertainment plays. But branded entertainment is a fine balance. Overt branded entertainment works better for older, less media savvy audiences. Brands trying out branded entertainment to younger audiences run the risk of looking like the dad on the dancefloor trying to have a good time. Transparent commercialism is going to be sniffed out in a heartbeat.

Because above all, we must remember that audiences will buy into a branded entertainment experience because of the entertainment. Maybe this was easier with the more stable media habits of the fifties with the introduction of the Soap Operas, but now with the pace of technology, entertainment trends change faster than you can say “branding sign off”. Technology developments are at the heart of both entertainment and marketing experiences. Finally, we are entering a golden age of content, and a golden age of marketing, simultaneously.

This is an age of “and”, not “or” where multiplatform entertainment and a multiplatform marketing campaign can fit perfectly, with technology at the core. As Joseph Jaffe put it in “Life after the 30 second spot”:

“Madison and Vine was just a pit stop in the middle of nowhere”. Madison and Vine and the Valley is where it’s at.

So what we need is not just marketing skills, not just brand skills, and not just entertainment skills, but a careful balance between all three. Marketing should promote the product, but the product itself is not marketing.

This is not easy. But good things emerge when there is a challenge. To quote from The Third Man: “Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonard Da vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love -they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”