In the information age, the only way for a brand to control its identity is to feed the hunger for knowledge.

According to legend, Jasper Newton "Jack" Daniel put his now-famous whisky in square bottles so that customers would know that he was a square-shooter. Honesty, it seems, was not a common virtue among early American whisky distillers, who often turned out a questionable (and sometimes deadly) product.

If the myth is true, Newton may have discovered an early form of "infotainment." While a square bottle doesn't offer much in the way of entertainment (despite the fact that the contents can be quite thrilling), the message is an important one. Newton distinguished his product by giving his customers what they needed to know in the form of an easily-digested folk tale that they could share and discuss during a long night at their local saloon.

Square bottle = square-shooter = whisky that you can trust to get you drunk and not kill you.

While it's a simple message, it is wholly applicable to the digital age, where well-educated, savvy consumers often know more about a brand than the people marketing the product.

Think your customers don't know better, ask Pepsi
Less than a month earlier, PepsiCo, which makes Aquafina, faced a public relations meltdown when news spread like wild fire that it was changing its label to reflect the fact that its product is tap water.

While pressure to change the label came from a public interest consumer group, Corporate Accountability International, the case illustrates the speed and force with which the internet can rapidly remodel a brand's persona. Not only did the internet provide a super-fast engine for consumers to spread the word that drinking Aquafina was akin to drinking from the tap, it also provided a fertile classroom for those who wanted to learn anything and everything (whether accurate or not) about the water company.

While a well-structured infotainment campaign may not have saved Aquafina from a black eye, the experience demonstrates how vital it is to remember the consumer's thirst for information when marketing your brand.  

So what is infotainment? 
If you're having trouble figuring out what infotainment is, you're not alone. In researching this article, more than a few sources pushed back with questions of their own. Namely, which definition of infotainment do you use?

For the record, there probably is no hard-and-fast definition of infotainment. Dave Wilkie, who operates Green Hammock and is the blogger behind Where's My Jetpack, says the depth and reach of the ad or website generally distinguishes an infotainment ad from a regular ad.

"To know all there is to know, in a fun and unique way, with links to more company-affiliated sites, is generally the goal of infotainment," Wilkie says. "It's about education."

While Lana McGilvray, VP of marketing at Datran Media agrees that education is important, she wonders if the proliferation of digital media hasn't blurred the lines between infotainment and just about everything else you see online.

"It is increasingly difficult to differentiate infotainment, information/education-centric marketing and entertainment for [the sake of] entertainment because the lines have dramatically blurred, especially across interactive channels," McGilvray says.

One reason for the blurred lines, according to McGilvray, may be the popularity of user-generated media, which doesn't have to follow the same regulatory guidelines that advertisers do.

"We are likely to see an increase in infotainment moving forward for all the same reasons that are motivating changes across all media," McGilvray says. "As media channels continue to converge, viewers are less willing to spend much time with media; more and more brands compete for the interactive consumer, and infotainment becomes a much faster and more compelling way to get messages to the ultimate destination."

In other words, ads need to up the ante if they are to penetrate the cluttered media landscape. But that's where the fun begins.

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