Quality entertainment content and product placement are merging like never before to give brands a new edge online, explains Tim Dams, editor of Televisual Magazine
The world of traditional TV advertising and sponsorship has always been heavily regulated, and brands have learned to work within the boundaries they have been set. But although advertisers’ love affair with TV’s huge potential continues, over the past 18 months we’ve seen more production skills being poured into the regulation-free online arena. And as a result, we are now witnessing a blurring of the lines between programming and advertising.
While this lack of regulation online might seem a positive boon to advertisers, it presents its own unique challenge: finding the delicate balance between not having product loom so large that audiences completely reject the message, while also being certain of getting value for money from video where a product might only play a bit part.
The truth is, we’re in uncharted territory here and pretty much making up the rules as we go along, discovering the boundaries as and when we cross them. Obviously this means that mistakes are being made along the way, but as with everything these mistakes are a vital part of the learning process.
Undeniably, the appetite for online content is vast, and the figures speak for themselves. For example, YouTube claims that it has more than 1 billion unique users each month, over 4 billion hours of video are watched on the site each month and 72 hours of video are uploaded every minute. Yet – impressive as these figures are – content uploaded to YouTube is only going to be successful if it’s good, interesting and shareable.
What would be just as interesting to know is how much of this content is not being watched. This is a crowded market place and you have to be very creative and clever to stand out – and to do that often requires production skill and money.
This makes online content a creative and fertile area for partnership. And there are some fantastic examples of where these partnerships have worked well. For example, the promo video for ‘Sexy People (The FIAT Song)’ by Arianna featuring Pitbull, which received more than 5.5 million YouTube views within three weeks of its release, had people questioning whether it was a commercial or a pop promo. The answer of course is irrelevant as it’s a great piece of content from which both parties benefit.
This isn’t the first time FIAT has succeeded in this arena; their Motherhood promo received almost 5 million views.
Meanwhile, a recent Pepsi commercial featuring Beyoncé racked up over 11 million views as the brand sought to move away from traditional celebrity endorsement with an online video featuring an excerpt from the singer’s then un-released single Grown Woman, and also included an entirely new dance routine.
If you want something a little more cerebral, check out Jaguar’s Desire – a 12-minute mini feature film created in collaboration with Ridley Scott Associates and starring Damian Lewis, Shannyn Sossamon and Jordi Mollà and featuring music by Lana Del Rey.
Since the dawn of commercial TV, viewers have been fed content via a fixed schedule with regulated advertising seen as an acceptable interruption to programming. Online, the situation is different. People are actively searching out their own content, and as such seem to understand that producing good content is difficult without good partners.
Even without regulation there has to be guidelines, and for brands looking to ride the content wave the focus should be about looking at how they get people’s attention and encourage them to watch their content. From there, it’s a case of looking at how they weave their message in without destroying the experience.
As we get closer to full convergence and the internet becomes the central hub of the living room, perhaps the idea of regulation online will come to the fore. However, for now this new ‘wild west’ frontier of content creation is a hotbed of creativity and excitement where necessary mistakes are being made. But in between, we’re seeing some staggeringly good examples of successful content.
Tim Dams, editor of Televisual Magazine for Group FMG
Originally posted on June 21, GroupFMG Blog