What the Top 20 branded content campaigns tell about media and creative

Opinion

Find out the Top 20 branded content campaigns of all time ahead of their release at Cannes Lions this week. Electric Glue’s co-founder argues they underscore that the role of media is to liberate great creative ideas.

When Andrew Canter came to us and asked if we’d like to help find a way to mark 20 years of his Branded Content Marketing Association, it didn’t take much longer than a heartbeat for us to respond.

Electric Glue launched on the back of the “Rapping Farmers” campaign for Yeo Valley in 2014 – and big content ideas are in our DNA. Electric Glue’s purpose is to help clients scale their businesses by navigating a media environment of increasing complexity. Through a guiding principle of ‘sacrifice’ we encourage clients to do fewer, bigger, and better things which have an impact with their customers.

And this, too, is in the DNA of our chairman, Sir John Hegarty — so he leapt at the chance to help produce the All Time Top 20 Branded Content Campaigns initiative that will be the centrepiece of BCMA’s presence in Cannes this year.

The top three in John’s chart (see accompanying table, below) are Red Bull Stratos, BMW Film Series and The Lego Movie.

All very interesting, I hear you say: these are initiatives from, respectively, 2012, 2001 and 2014.

But we wouldn’t have invested so much time and effort in this research if it were just an exercise in nostalgia or a comms industry history lesson.

We believe passionately that branded content, especially audio-visual content, is a genre whose time has come (again). This time around, the stars are aligned.

When BMW launched its Film Series in 2001, internet video distribution (a development on which the whole project was predicated) was very much in its infancy. A curiosity even.

Now it’s the mainstream.

And this has created rapidly diminishing returns for some forms of low quality “spray and pray” forms of advertising, in both their traditional and new-minted varieties.

In terms of big ideas and quality of execution, the industry generally isn’t in a very healthy place right now. Branded content offers the perfect antidote to that. Committing to a branded content project is effectively a commitment to great work.

This has always been one of Hegarty’s guiding principles throughout his career (apologies, John, I’m paraphrasing here): “Inferior creative work needs lots of repetition. Great work sticks immediately.”

Branded content has been growing steadily again in recent years. Now the time is right for it to become the most potent and effective option in the industry’s armoury.

But of course, this is not for everyone. It takes bravery on the part of the client and it requires skillsets that some marketing departments, with staff churn running at very high levels, just don’t have.

One of the questions we get asked a lot – particularly from the sorts of media professionals likely to be in The Media Future’s core readership – is about how it all works in a media planning context.

Do they really believe you create the content and then negotiate placement deals with established media owners?

It doesn’t work that way. Run-of-the mill media planning spreadsheet algorithms just don’t apply here.

But here are some interesting numbers from the Red Bull Stratos initiative. In the first two weeks after it launched on YouTube, it notched up 100 million playbacks. To date, the film of this extraordinary jump from space has been viewed more than a billion times. A huge chunk of the audience still remembers watching.

In our experience, no client has ever been disappointed in the business outcomes derived from high-quality branded content initiatives.

The most recent Guinness work, “Niall Horan’s Homecoming – The Road to Mullingar”, shows the world can come full circle. Hat tip to Electric Robin, The One Partnership and PHD for a film that tells a story of friendship and talent while celebrating modern Irish culture through the lens of two global superstars who have an authentic connection to Ireland.  Compelling content, culturally relevant, entertaining and distributed for a global brand in a truly ‘of the moment’ way.

So, yes, we believe the time is right for a renaissance in this sector of the market.

Original and effective creative work earns its own fame. If content is compelling, people will seek it out. In that sense, branded content represents a renaissance for the idea that the industry works at its best when creative and media are intertwined. The role of media, surely, is to liberate great creative ideas.

Simon Orpin is co-founder of independent media agency Electric Glue.