Moderator: Will Richmond, VideoNuze
Rob Barnett, CEO, MyDamnChannel
Jeremy Lockhorn, Director of Emerging Media, Avenue A/Razorfish
Peter Hoskins, CEO, ManiaTV
Joe Frydl, Ogilvy Entertainment
John McCarus, VP, Digitas Branded Content

Will: What is branded entertainment? What does that mean? What are your clients goals as it pertains to it?

John: Clients that have a digital strategy are starting to realize they need a digital content strategy as well. It is brand content. What is the relationship that the brand needs to have with the content.

Peter: At the end of the day, branded content is entertaining and advances the brands marketing objectives, whatever the objectives may be. We look at a series of metrics, like moving brand perception according to a tracking study, for example.

Jeremy: I think more about branded experiences. It is doing away with the one-way of old media, and embracing the two way conversation of new media. It also allows the consumer to get engaged.

Peter: We talk about a continuum where you can start with a “brought to you by” around cool content. The other end is like Transformers, where there is a love story between a boy and a car, which launched the new Chevy Camaro. Everything in that continuum communicates that brand message. Adding a bit of art to that process really improves that process.

Rob: Being here, at this point, is a perfect marriage. Companies like MDC are rewriting the rules. You’ll find that we’re a lot easier to work with than traditional media. We find that agencies and brands in particular are much more interested in working more with the content. There are audiences that are very electric. “You Suck At Photoshop” is a great example. We’ve got opportunities that are a lot more personal, a lot more integrated than bigger media. There are also fewer levels, so we can move a lot faster than traditional media.

John: The fundamental difference is that there is no network on the Web. If you are a brand that is used to have things packaged up and wrapped in a bow, that isn’t going to happen on the web. We operate further upstream.

Unless you can guarantee an audience, you’ve got a non-starter. We know that in the end of the day we need to deliver an audience. We are all in the audience product marketplace.

Jeremy: There is something to the comparison of the size and the quality of the audience. If you can put my brand in front of the right 10 people, then we want to talk to you.

Will: What has worked?

Joe: Helmans. We did a broadband program on yahoo, “in search of real food.” It was successful as content because we started with “what is the brand about?” Helmans wanted to be about “real food.” When you start with the DNA of the brand, a number of opportunities present themselves. Getting Yahoo to treat this as content is also key. The more they can treat it as editorial, the easier it is for them to drive traffic and reach.

Will: Could they have succeeded without a partnership?
Joe: Probably not. You need a minimal level of distribution to get the idea seeded.

Will: Do you work with Yahoo along the way? Or do you bring it to them afterwards?
Joe: It is a fuzzy process, but they are all open to ideas like this. It was important for us that they treat us as content. Too often, people look at brands just as big checkbooks.

Peter: The brands we have the most success with are the ones that we sit on the same side of the table with. We aren’t in a hits business. We try to form a relationship with the audience through episodic content, but is independent of that advertiser. Then we can bring the right brands to the right content, and reach the right demographics. Every one of our shows follows that formula. Our video game show is consistently successful.

Jeremy: We did a program for BestBuy, who wanted to increase awareness of their appliance department. We partnered with Sarah Moulton where we did a makeover of her apartment. She had a horrific kitchen for a celebrity chef. So we did a complete remodel of her kitchen in 8 episodes. That is a great example of marrying the right concept with the right audience.

Will: Success around what metric?
Jeremy: Viewership, engagement, that sort of thing. But ultimately we wanted to drive sales. It pretty much blew our expectations out of the water.

Joe: Marketers are used to launching things in synchronization across platforms. Now we are looking at building audiences slowly, leading up to a big launch. We’ve got lower costs of production, lower costs of distribution that allow us to look at success differently than we look at it on television. What is a hit on the web?

Rob: If we were to build a YouTube today, it would costs $80-$90k. The question is how many videos do you want to host and have people watch. If you are going to create content, don’t create too much of it. If someone is going to consume 3-4 pieces of content, you want to be able to deliver your content to them consistently. It is more like an HBO model than a broadcast model. We have 8 channels. We don’t want to say that every single video in the world is here. We brought in Don Was (music producer) for a program for Lincoln that focused on bands from Detroit. It was twice as successful as any of their other campaigns.

Will: Where does the push for branded entertainment leave the agency world and their role?
Jeremy: The new world is about earning attention, not buying attention. It makes us work a lot harder, rather than just buying the eyeballs.

Joe: You also need to embrace the ambiguity. And recognize that everyone is trying to eat your lunch. The roles are going to be very fluid.

John: This is a whole new space. We sit with our clients at “the gate to the distribution swamp.” We discuss a distribution and engagement strategies. One of the challenges is to think about costs and process and the role of traditional creative.

Jeremy: There is a blurring of the line of what is media and what is content. One of the things we’ve learned about in social media is that distribution trumps destination. The philosophy behind social media is about bringing pieces of functionality that are relevant to an audience where they are, instead of driving them back to their site.

Tags: avenue a, digitas, maniatv, mydamnchannel, ogilvy, OMMA, omma video, razorfish, videonuze

This entry was posted on Monday, June 16th, 2008 at 12:11 pm and is filed under Content, Events, Video Portals, Viral, Web 2.0, WebTV, advertising, video syndication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.