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Stars from all over the world attend the 59th Monte-Carlo Television Festival at the Grimaldi Forum for five days on June 14, 2019, in Monaco City, Monaco.
The Monte-Carlo Television Festival has, for more than half a century, presented the very best of television from around the world.
Studios, TV channels and stars of the small screen get together for several days in an idyllic setting to promote their programs for press and public, and compete for the prestigious Golden Nymph Awards.
Shaftesbury participated by bringing our newest productions to walk the red carpet, Departure, Frankie Drake and Hudson & Rex.
Carmilla, Shaftesbury’s global digital phenomenon, recently received the Brand Content of the Yearaward from MIPTV. The award was presented at the MIPTV conference in Cannes, France on April 11, 2018.
Carmilla stars Elise Bauman and Natasha Negovanlis were on stage to accept the award, and were soon joined by Shaftesbury Chairman and CEO Christina Jennings and Shaftesbury SVP, Branded Entertainment Kaaren Whitney-Vernon for a panel discussion of all things Carmilla and branded content, hosted by Drew Baldwin, Founder of online video curation platform Tubefilter. U by Kotex® Global Sector Leader Fiona Tomlin also joined the discussion via pre-recorded video.
During the discussion, Elise and Natasha shared the history of Carmilla, and how it become a true transmedia brand and put branded entertainment on the map. Kaaren added that Carmilla’s origin really came from U by Kotex®’s desire to step away from traditional advertising to try and reach their target audience of young women.
“People don’t want to see ads,” Kaaren said, “but as brand managers, that’s been our go-to for years: we just create 30-second ads, we get our reach and we tell people how great our product is. We can’t do that anymore with young people.”
With Carmilla, the idea of entertaining an audience first instead of just telling them about a product was the goal: creating great characters and great stories and drawing people in instead of just pushing out product.
Christina added that Shaftesbury began developing the Carmilla concept as a throwback to sponsored soap operas from the 1960s, and the partnership with U by Kotex®, with their desire to be bold and different, made perfect sense.
Check out the full video for more including:
At SXSW on Saturday night, Adweek honored the finest brand storytellers of the past year. The Arc Award winners represented brand names like Wendy’s, CNN and Land O’Lakes and lesser-known brands like Dutch confectionery company Tony’s Chocolonely.
During the event, Adweek caught up with the honorees to talk about what makes great storytelling and why it’s so important for brands to listen to their customers.
“Its really about understanding what your customer is looking for ,” said Kaaren. “and what the audience wants to hear”
Shaftesbury SVP, Branded Entertainment Kaaren Whitney-Vernon recently appeared on Melinda Wittstock’s podcast, Wings of Inspired Business. Kaaren and Melinda spoke about networking and educating an audience on shifting their marketing approach.
Kaaren mentioned to Melinda that it’d been a “tough grind” to help people understand what branded was, and what it could do for them. The biggest challenge, she said, was ensuring that people really took the time to understand the branded entertainment approach, as well as the effort that it takes to do branded content right.
Asked to talk about advice for women entrepreneurs, Kaaren immediately pegged networking as the number one activity. “You’ve got to put your face in as many places as possible,” she said.
Give the podcast a listen to hear the rest of Kaaren’s advice including how you never know where your next—or first!—client might come from.
Listen to “87 Wings Of Advice: Kaaren Whitney Vernon” with Melinda Wittstock right here.
Branded Entertainment is still a relatively new practice, and as such, it can be difficult to find and deploy branded entertainment best practices. While many organizations have founded success with branded content, it’s not always immediately clear how their success can translate to other brands and other industries.
Currently, when Branded Entertainment is discussed as a new opportunity—depending on who is having the conversation—one of three common scenarios usually follows. In each case, these scenarios often look more like a way out of trouble than an approach to doing business in a different way. But if we look at these scenarios from slightly different angle, some Branded Entertainment best practices do emerge
Some quick-fix Branded Entertainment scenarios that are presently missing the bigger picture (as seen from their respective perspectives) include:
In each of these examples, Branded Entertainment is viewed most often as a solution to a problem, not as a new approach to doing business. Branded Entertainment is looked at as an immediate problem solver. Now, you might be wondering what’s wrong with that? Well, immediate solutions have a tendency to die young. When Branded Entertainment emerges as a simple solution to common media problems, the engagement process gets shortened, creative corners are cut and, as a result, partner goals tend to be ignored and there is little reach into spreading a brand’s audience. This is where problems begin. Now you have a new set of obstacles to overcome rather than a truly new approach.
Moving Past a “Quick Fix” Mentality
The “quick-fix” misconception misses the mark because it fails to fully appreciate the concept being put in motion as a complete business methodology. That said, as we look at the various ways Branded Entertainment is understood, or partially understood, in the industry, a three-dimensional image is beginning to emerge from the many observed sides. In addition to having the potential to solve problems, Branded Entertainment is also:
Each of these trends can help us develop a branded entertainment best practices approach:
To stay up-to-date with the latest Branded Entertainment news, sign up for updates from Shaftesbury. And if you’re ready to start putting some Branded Entertainment best practices in to play, reach out to us at any time.
Branded Entertainment marketing is growing, and growing fast. Since the recent explosion in content consumption, brands have found new avenues to deliver their brand messages by creating content relevant to their audience. eMarketer projects $8.8 billion in Branded Entertainment spending by 2018, nearly 12 percent of what television spend is projected to be three years from now. That’s a large number, considering television’s 60+ years of advertising dominance.
Today’s brands are recognizing the importance of Branded Entertainment. However, clear and defined ways to measure their effectiveness have yet to be determined. Additionally, brands are struggling to figure out exactly what kinds of content will resonate best with their intended audience, and the issue of scaling these Branded Entertainment pieces has yet to be fully understood.
People have different expectations for online content than they do for TV or print. In more traditional forms of media, there seems to be an aversion toward advertorial-type executions due to audience expectations regarding the content relative to the medium. In terms of digital Branded Entertainment campaigns, research found that 61 percent of consumers agree: as long as the content the brand is producing is good quality and provides what that they want from their content consumption, they do not care if the content is sponsored.
Much like how television concepts are pre-tested before production, the development of a Branded Entertainment can benefit from using similar practices. To zero-in on the type of content that would appeal most to the audience, Shaftesbury developed a technique to gauge audience interest in potential pieces of a branded entertainment program.
After setting content parameters for a specific brand and its objectives, we run a long list of content ideas (headlines and short copy blurbs) through a MaxDif conjoint technique. In layman’s terms, a MaxDif is a type of trade-off analysis. It efficiently allows for identifying which concepts have the most potential appeal to the audience — before incurring any production costs. The resulting analytics then rank the concepts in order of most appealing.
The industry has spent years amassing an enormous amount of data on other forms of advertising to determine best practices. Branded Entertainment has not been afforded that luxury, leaving marketers understandably wary. Shaftesbury’s experience definitively proves that content marketing is a reliable and consistent mode of brand messaging that works. However, to reap its full benefits, it’s important that brands truly understand what their respective consumers want from content. Additionally, brands should continue to experiment with the format and be open to the idea of including more of their brand messaging with the content they produce. Branded Entertainment is a powerful tool that brands should employ, as its efficacy in terms of brand equity is clear and can be proven. Identifying core content needs and nuances are key to success. Armed with these insights, brands can fully invest and embrace the challenges and benefits that come with deploying a successful Branded Entertainment campaign.
As Branded Entertainment grows and brands consider shifting their marketing and advertising budgets, many will struggle with how to get started. Keep the following best practices in mind as you develop a Branded Entertainment strategy:
To stay up-to-date with the latest Branded Entertainment news, sign up for updates from Shaftesbury. And if you’re ready to start working a Branded Entertainment plan of your own, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at any time.
