Why Branded Entertainment is Inevitable

In the closing presentation of the Berlin Fashion Film Festival earlier this year, we tried to summarise a broad stretch of antagonisms that had sprung up over two days of discussions. There was an awareness of big data collection, a nebulous resentment towards it and a frozen powerlessness to act. We looked at a photo of the Utah Data Centre and a quote on propaganda that read like an elevator pitch for the ecosystem of modern advertising.

Amongst the dissonance was a concern that online advertising is increasingly finding its way to interrupt in new media spaces. More compelling than that was a widespread understanding that these platforms are consciously morphing into media channels driven by advertising models. Overt product placement was either not registering or invisible, cerebrally ad blocked. 

And a question. Should we think of the internet as a public or private space? Naomi Klein hadn’t been widely read. The gravity of her criticism seemed to have lost its pull following the implosion of the anti-capitalist movement and its rebirth as a commodified (individual) brand identity. The assumption of advertising so far has been that digital and online space is open to privatisation. A sort of assumption of the right to be in that space by dint of a global reach of finance and scale. 

Most importantly, though, there was an agreement that it wasn’t brands being in that space in itself that was a bad thing, just that they weren’t acting appropriately when they were. With the largescale emigration to SVOD placing viewers in an increasingly ad-impervious digital environment, how should brands adapt to existing in that space? Which is where the topic of Branded Entertainment entered the conversation. 

It sounds like a wilful act of newspeak to refer to brand funded film as ‘entertainment’ rather than ‘content’. At the very least it assumes we’re entertained by what we’re viewing. But the term ‘content ‘carries a whole bunch of negative implications – both in terms of relative creative integrity and general budget levels. Too often the assumption is that brands’ deviations from traditional advertising formats can be broadly lumped into a ‘bucket of content’ produced at low cost to populate social media and drive eyeballs from areas of low commercial visibility into brand owned and operated digital spaces. 

Is this what we, us consumers (because those of us who work in production also have to wade through this stuff), actually want? Is it brands engaging in the structure of the environment they’re sitting within to create moments of genuine cultural and social value? 

The short answer is probably not. We all know the way we’d conduct ourselves in a bar is likely to be different to how we’d behave at a dinner party, even if the crowds at both were comprised of the same friends and colleagues. It’s not that we’re fundamentally different people in different contexts, more that we adjust and nuance our personalities depending on who we’re speaking with and where. 

Which brings us to the current position and voice of brands in digital spaces and to what many would see as an imminent need for a period of adjustment. To a large extent this requires brands to first acknowledge that a different economy of value operates in these online and digital spaces compared with traditional broadcast media. There are already signs of a failure to recognise this in the integration of brand presence within social image sharing and messaging platforms. Simply buying your way into these spaces isn’t enough. The audience is too savvy and a firewall of scepticism comes pre-installed on the Millennial operating system. Just think back to the last time you were force-fed a 30 second pre-roll advert as the price to pay in exchange for watching a 3-minute (likely product placed) music video. Nobody feels warm and fuzzy towards the brand in that moment. You’re literally paying to watch an advert as it consumes a slice of your limited mobile data plan. 

Undoubtedly, marketing spend grants access, but the imposition of presence through purchasing power can often create an instinctive resistance towards brand content in these environments. Brands can no longer demand to be seen and heard simply because they have the financial resources to command sponsored positioning or interruptive placement. Social media doesn’t function that way and platform abandonment by users is the inevitable end game of this play. Nor is it simply a case of softly-softly until the users adjust, and why should they have to? 

The bigger and more pressing challenge is to embrace the idea that audiences are not only willing but hungry to engage with brands in these spaces so long as they’re being offered an innovative idea, an original use of a medium or a format or story that grips the emotions. And there can be genuine value in that exchange. We’re lucky to have worked on some incredible social awareness projects spanning a diverse range of issues from rebuilding the lives of child amputees of the Southern Sudanese Civil War, raising awareness around access to clean drinking water and challenging misconceptions around HIV transmission and treatment. 

Those are the end-of-the-rainbow projects, where brand money is used not only to create compelling entertainment but to meaningfully impact peoples’ lives for the better in a lasting way. The money for those projects, by the way, came from Intel, Stella and (here comes the invitation to troll) a pharmaceutical company. But guess what – it doesn’t matter. 

Looking to the future we have two options. One is to fall into a continued and regressive state of manufactured outrage (as Brett Easton Ellis framed it) that assumes any intervention of brands in what we consider ‘entertainment’ or ‘social space’ is immovably corrupt and artistically irredeemable. The other is to push the conversation forwards and help brands build a roadmap towards highlighting and addressing a range of global social and cultural concerns that matter to their audience. Alongside this, we can help brands to understand what we, us consumers, actually want to see. Instead of regurgitated memes we should be creating compelling short and long form series that sit as credibly within brand owned websites as they do streaming through Netflix or broadcast on Viceland. 

Not all brand excursions into entertainment need to have a socially redeeming quality, the digital equivalent of a moral indulgence or a cultural carbon offsetting. Entertainment can be just that – entertaining – so long as the programs served up are prepared to be viewed, judged and ranked alongside the output of SVOD services or amateur YouTubers. Branded Entertainment can be varied in its tone, content and purpose. But please, first and foremost, let’s start a conversation about how brands can behave positively in social and digital environments and challenge the assumption of a weight of power to interrupt and intervene on one side against the consumer with no choice or ability to escape on the other. Because all of us, whether working for a brand, an agency, a production company or outside of the system of mass culture altogether, can and should expect more of the values we promote and the messages we spread across our increasingly connected world. Brands can be the engine behind that change. They have money and they want to spend it. It’s coming. It’s already happening. It is, as Brad Pitt put it for Chanel, ‘inevitable’. But it doesn’t need to be sinister.