The consumer desire for greater engagement with their favourite brands is skewing the role of marketing from pure advertising to providing entertainment and information, and brands are rising to the challenge by offering an array of content through varying formats.

Today marketers are using content as a means of engaging with consumers. It is no longer enough to push the product towards the market; the product has to pull the market in, through channels such as social media.

Across every sector, brands are looking at creative ways to pull in consumers, says James Cashmore, entertainment industry leader at Google, which owns YouTube. “We are starting to see more and more [advertisers] using part of their media budgets to commission and create programmes and engage with brands through the likes of YouTube and Facebook,” he says.

However, marketers must not make content for content’s sake; it must serve a purpose. And as content creation takes up a greater part of the marketer’s role, they will need to understand its applications.

Most marketing material has the potential to be used as “pull” content, even if it is initially part of a “push” strategy. For example, BT’s “Adam and Jane” ads, like their Nescafé Gold Blend forebears of the 1980s and ’90s, create a narrative that viewers follow. In July, BT turned its push narrative into pull content by giving the public a say on what would happen next in the couple’s relationship.

“Our most recent ad and associated content is central to BT’s marketing plans, evolving our campaign from being broadcast-only to being an interactive campaign which the public can influence,” says BT Retail head of consumer communications David Still. The vote closed in August, resulting in the decision that Jane would become pregnant. BT’s dedicated web microsite now hosts the winning video, as well as outtakes and the entire back catalogue from the ad series.

Opening up the story to the public to develop its next stage was a calculated risk, given that people could suggest any outcome imaginable. While some suggestions were, predictably, facetious, the majority were not, Still says. In this respect, the brand appears to have reaped the rewards of its own six-year commitment to the storyline. BT will also “continue to invest in more content-driven marketing,” he pledges.

The story of Adam and Jane: After six years developing the narrative, BT gave viewers the chance to have their say“This direct invitation to interact with BT’s advertising resulted in over 1.6 million votes and was picked up in mainstream press and radio,” Still continues. “As an open invitation, the ad naturally attracted its critics; but about 70% of responses were positive, reflecting people’s willingness to engage with the BT campaign narrative.”

The Virgin app

The message of engagement has also taken wing at Virgin Atlantic, propelled by smartphone apps. The brand’s “Fly Without Fear”, “Jet Lag Fighter” and “Flight Tracker” apps help fliers combat the irritations of air travel, while giving the airline access to thousands of potential new customers globally.

Virgin Atlantic head of PR Anna Knowles says: “Consumers are looking to engage with brands, and content is a key way for this to happen. People have come to expect that companies will provide content, and brands that do not do this will be left behind.”

The increasing importance of branded content in part inspired the programme of the Edinburgh International Marketing Festival, which launched in August this year and was covered by Marketing Week. The event is organised by the Marketing Society and client-agency intermediary Creativebrief.

According to Creativebrief managing director Paul Duncanson, original content has become integral to how brands address their target markets: “It is not about the advertising campaign, it is about the entertainment and engagement of your consumers. That has never been more true than it is now – you have to engage them, otherwise they will reject you.”

There are provisos, however, as Matt Jagger, creative partner at agency Naked Communications, pointed out during a seminar at the festival. “There is very little point making content if it is not very good. And there is very little point making content if it is not engaging, or if it does not deliver on your communication objectives.”

According to Jagger, Naked is currently working with Foster’s lager on the production of original comedy. Although the brand declines to confirm the extent of the plans, it is an area that the two companies have identified as a good fit for Foster’s values, with beer and laughter going hand in hand. Jagger attests to the brand’s eventual ambition to produce long-form content, “either an actual television series or even getting involved with movies”.

By working with television production companies and talent agencies, Naked is creating content for the brand’s website, Foster’s Funny, says Jagger. “The aim of Foster’s Funny is to aggregate and contribute to the British comedy scene. It is essentially a comedy hub that will house content and act as a comedy aggregator.

“It will be updated weekly and contain content modules that will appeal to Foster’s drinkers. Some of that will be original comedy, some of that will be new talent, some will hopefully be some old classics coming back.”

If Foster’s investment in comedy is as extensive as indicated, it will be a tough undertaking. Getting so intimately involved can create problems, as Foster’s has already discovered (see When Branded Content Goes Wrong).

However, a deep commitment to content can increase consumers’ depth of engagement. By turning a brand into a valued source of information or entertainment, consumers are more likely to visit of their own volition, and each time they do, they remind themselves of that brand’s values and characteristics.

Film rental service Lovefilm has learned this to its benefit, having created a comprehensive destination for movie news, reviews and features . Chief marketing officer Simon Morris explains: “We create content, we buy feeds of images and we create our own images. We aggregate feeds of videos and trailer content, we aggregate critics’ reviews from other publications all round the world, and we put that on our own publishing platform.”

It is a considerable task and requires time and resources, but it has become integral to the Lovefilm brand. “I think that is really important because that is where you get a lot of your style and your positioning from,” says Morris.

Furthermore, he adds that the syndication of the content generates income from advertising: “We have earned a few million pounds in revenue, in addition to the subscription revenue, from creating the media environment.”

There are options, too, for brands to bond with content without requiring the resources and long-term commitment of what amounts to an online magazine. Commercial broadcasters, for example, offer opportunities for advertisers either to fund or to sponsor programming. Beyond television, the prospect of further engagement with viewers exists in the form of online microsites and media players.

Yet because there is tight regulation preserving the editorial independence of broadcasters, advertisers can have no control of the content itself, nor do they ultimately own the rights to it. Finding content suitable for a brand to fund is instead a process of “speed dating”, says Katherine Marlow, content partnership planner at ITV.

Like matching up personal ads, the brand and broadcaster compare the creative brief with the prospective commission, looking for as many shared interests as possible. She gives the example of Sage Technology funding revived gameshow The Krypton Factor.

However, it would not be acceptable to create a format purely to suit the fancies of an advertiser, nor can it make demands to align the content to its aims. Pending an Ofcom ruling, product placement may soon be allowed within this kind of programming but, at present, all that advertisers get by way of recognition is an “ident” on the credits and association with the ethos of the show.

This sometimes needs explaining to brands at the outset, says Marlow. “Very often clients say, ‘If I fund this show, can I have my brand colours in it, can I have people using my products?’ – things like that. What we find very often is that brands are actually wanting to make an advertorial. That is clearly not what we are trying to do here.”

Given that, with advertiser-funded programming, the brand will be asked to cover part or all of the production costs, there is, unsurprisingly, close scrutiny of how valuable the exposure would be.

“The client has really got to be sold on the concept before you start talking about the money,” Marlow admits. “When it gets through to someone like a media agency, their job is to evaluate the ROI, so they will look at the investment versus the value back and that is when it falls down.”

Clearly this is not the only type of content to which measuring effectiveness should apply. Morris says of Lovefilm that “the whole business is underpinned by data”.

“Of every customer visit, we track what percentage consume, read or indulge in a bit of content that we have generated on a monthly basis. We further track that to what percentage go on to make a transaction, and what percentage results in a new addition to a local [subscriber] list.”

Similarly, various kinds of tracking – with various degrees of granularity – are available to brand advertisers on social media platforms. Google’s Cashmore says: “Some of the KPIs [key performance indicators] are driven around how many ‘likes’ they are getting on Facebook. For YouTube it will be how many people subscribe to the channel, and how many people watch the video.” Analyses can go deeper, with brands able to understand how long people watch a video for, if they added it to their favourites list and if they shared the video, adds Cashmore.

Given the extent to which web analytics can follow the movements of users across and between sites, there is no reason to believe that a content platform, online at least, cannot demonstrate its own efficacy if built in a structured manner with clear objectives.

Complete integration

Branded content requires a more integrated approach from marketers – in terms both of media channels and of their own internal departments. In any case, argues Still, “all marketing should be integrated regardless of platform”. At BT, he says, a “rigorous cross-platform integration process” is employed to ensure that each marketing channel applies the creative idea faithfully and consistently.

Yet it remains apparent that many marketers do not buy in an integrated manner, with bigger companies, particularly, operating strictly siloed budgets. “Who owns social media? Is it marketing, is it digital or is it PR?” asks Adam Clyne, commercial director at content-focused agency TVC. “I do not know the answer. Everyone has claimed the budget, but the budget is shrinking.”

The key to a successful execution is allowing content to be discovered by your target audience, otherwise, with intense competition for attention online, the exercise could come to resemble “opening a shop in the Amazonian rainforest and hoping people find it,” adds Clyne.

However, good content is likely to drive integration anyway, he says, because a successful execution will, almost by necessity, extend across more than one platform or require more than one discipline, including promotion of the content itself.