As ad money moves from TV to interactive -- and to online video -- new and old rules of branding apply. Here are some pointers.
I've been an Apple-man since 1988 's Apple IIGS. My fiancé has been an Apple-woman only since the first season of "Sex and the City." A nerdy sales guy named Jason was responsible for ushering me into the world of Macs, but I'm 100 percent sure that Carrie Bradshaw was the salesperson responsible for my fiancé's switch.
Carrie's narrative and lifestyle were so appealing that Apple, whose brand perfectly befit the character, reaped the rewards of being part of her story without her ever mentioning the computer.
Product and brand integration have proven to be extremely powerful on television and within movies, and with the tides turning on the effectiveness of traditional TV advertising, the growing amount of time users spend watching online content and the ever-present aversion users have for pre-roll ads, integrating a brand into engaging internet shows seems like an emerging oasis of marketing opportunity.
The more things change…
According to a January 2008 joint study by the ANA and Forrester Research, 62 percent of marketers say traditional TV advertising has become less effective in the past two years and 65 percent of advertisers are eager to try new ad opportunities, including placement in online TV shows. To that point, Nielsen's Media Research has shown that product placement in TV content still boosts brand awareness by 20 percent.
As consumption habits of video content change, and as users start to watch shows featuring their favorite laptops, on their favorite laptops, advertisers are once again faced with the question of what shows to integrate with, how to integrate into shows on these smaller screens effectively and what the pay-off is from this integration.
What shows should you integrate with?
"Quarterlife." Just kidding.
The shows to integrate with are those where the brand is relevant to the content and where the inclusion of the advertiser is seamless with the show's characters or arcs. Brands like Quiksilver have done this for a long time, integrating their apparel and merchandise into surf videos shot for online distribution. None of the surfers hawk Quiksilver's brand, but they consistently show off how the products could be put to effective use.
Other shows might not completely integrate a brand. Smart sponsorships, which illustrate a relevant connection between the product and show, can be effective in garnering positive branding as well.
Case in point, I recently saw an online show about how to perform criminal deeds like pick a lock or blackmail people. The show was brought to me by the movie "The Bank Job." I'd seen the film's trailer, but the fact that Lion's Gate aligned itself so well with web content that I was interested in viewing stuck with me, and according to Nielsen Media Research, nearly 60 percent of viewers feel positive about brands they recognized in a placement.
If brand integration in online shows produces the same powerful effects as it does on TV, the conversation turns to getting similar scale.
Turn and face the strange…
Changes are afoot in how people find and view content. Mass fragmentation combined with new technology has forever changed how audiences rally around content to produce scale for advertisers.
There are screens everywhere now, and unlike the TV model where Show XYZ lives on Channel ABC (sorry, couldn’t help it), the internet is spawning a new environment where good content finds its relevant audience via mass syndication. VideoNuze columnist Will Richmond has referred to this as the “Syndication Economy,” and Melissa Mulvihill of FreeWheel describes the opportunity of this emerging distribution world by saying that “whether you build audiences or build content, syndication is the greatest value because you become part of a much larger ecosystem.”
For publishers and content producers this means setting their content free and relying on new technology to ensure they can manage and monetize it effectively. For advertisers who integrate their brands into content it means getting comfortable with the notion that their messages will find scale by being wherever the audience wants them to be.
As an example, surf videos that feature the Quiksilver brand have played on all the portals, but they've also played across the internet's long-tail -- on dedicated niche sites like Surfline.com and Skuff.TV, as well as on blogs and through aggregators like Blinkx.
The takeaway
By tastefully integrating a brand into good storytelling research has shown that most users' affinity for the brand grows (something of a "me-likey the show so me-likey the brand" phenomenon). What's more, the effects of the traditional 30-second advertising around these shows is bolstered by the three to five minutes of brand exposure during the show.
So while the audience is fragmented and the distribution model is changing, wherever relevant users spend time, relevant brands need to be, and when they can be part of the actual story, the pay-off can be substantial.
Bradley Werner is VP, operations at Digital Broadcasting Group. Read full bio.