Branding David

Starting with a great slide on the evolution of branded entertainment, Alexandra Levy from Google, focused in on radio programs from the 1930’s, soap operas from the 1940’s, product placement from the 1960’s, television contests from the 2000’s, and digital integration from today.

Using The Apprentice as a great example of branded entertainment, she really drove the point home that branded entertainment is everywhere and growing.

She also brought up Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy, which was sponsored by Burger King and an interesting way to brand content in a compelling way for audiences today.

Three principles of Google Branded Entertainment:
1. Destination: Develop the Concept
2. Distribution: Make it Discoverable
3. Accountability: Measure the Results

Alexandra went through each point with more details, talking about how to develop the content, distribute it, and measure the results. She, of course, promoted Google products like YouTube, saying that it would be the best place to put video content, as it is the biggest.

“You need people to be caring about your content.” - Alexandra Levy

The whole speech continued to progress as a pro-Google session, with very little actual content other than “use Google for everything” sales pitch talk. It was frustrating, but also fairly understandable. Google is the largest, but did we need around one half of the session being used to re-enforce that? Probably not.

The content outside of “Google is god”, was really decent though, and was a great reminder of what can be done with branded video entertainment. Reminding people that it isn’t just about display advertisements, logo overlays or other such basic ways to brand content to make money.

My hope from this session is that media businesses here at nextMEDIA realize that sponsoring branded content could be both profitable and fun as I would love to work on, develop and promote sponsored content that worked well both for me and the advertiser’s business.