Branded Content

The Fateful Merging of Media and Marketing

Jonathan Hardy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781317278887
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This is a critical study of the changing relationship between media and marketing communications in the digital age. It examines the growth of content funded by brands, including brands' own media, native advertising, and the integration of branded content across film, television, journalism and publishing, online, mobile, and social media.

This ambitious historical, empirical, and theoretical study examines industry practices, policies, and 'problems', advancing a framework for analysis of communications governance. Featuring examples from the UK, US, EU, Asia, and other regions, it illustrates and explains industry practices, forms, and formats and their relationship with changing market conditions, policies, and regulation. The book provides a wide-ranging and incisive guide to contemporary advertising and media practices, to different arguments and perspectives on these practices arising in industry, policy, and academic contexts, and to the contribution made by critical scholarship, past and present. It also offers a critical review of industry, regulatory, societal, and academic literatures.Jonathan Hardy examines the erosion of the principle of separating advertising and media and calls for a new framework for distinguishing marketing communications across 21st-century communications. With a focus on key issues in industry, policy, and academic contexts, this is essential reading for students of media industries, advertising, marketing, and digital media.

PART I

Practices

DOI: 10.4324/9781315641065-1

1

Advertising and media

Separation and integration

DOI: 10.4324/9781315641065-2

Your Facebook feed says ‘Sponsored’. Your online magazine says, ‘Paid content’, another in BuzzFeed (2015) lists KFC as ‘Brand Publisher’ for an article, ‘11 Things All Busy Families Should Make Time For’, including KFC’s Popcorn Nuggets. You read a powerful series of articles on hunger in America, but it is labelled ‘paid programme’, produced by the Wall Street Journal (2016) Custom Studios in collaboration with Mini, and includes such branded wisdom as ‘Mini owners are all different. There’s no one person that Mini drivers look like. It’s the same with food insecurity. It’s all walks of life.’ You see an Instagram post for Cocoa Brown tan with the hashtag #brandambassador (ASA, 2019). From product placement in films and TV to mobile news feeds and social media influencer endorsements, brands are burrowing into media content.

The relationships between media and advertising are changing profoundly as they converge across digital platforms. Increasingly, brands are involved in the production of media content. This branded content takes various forms, from material that is self-published by brands, through to ‘publisher-hosted’ content, where brands supply or fund material carried by third-party publishers. Some of this is so-called native advertising, advertising that blends into the editorial or content environment in which it appears, merging brand messages with entertainment or informational content. Taken together, such non-traditional advertising, which blends brand messages with entertainment or information, grew at twice the rate of traditional advertising worldwide in 2017, surpassing $100 billion (PQ Media, 2018).

Branded content has grown rapidly, becoming a major focus for marketers during the last decade. In the UK, content and native advertising grew to £509m. in 2014, accounting for 22 per cent of all display ad spending (Internet Advertising Bureau [IAB UK], 2015). Spending on non-traditional, native advertising has been rising in recent years and is expected to occupy an important, if not central, position in advertising strategy and expenditure into the future.

Eight million signed into YouTube in 2012 to watch an event called Stratos in which Felix Baumgartner fell from high altitude space to earth in eight minutes (Swatman, 2015). Viewers watched the Red Bull logo throughout, on Baumgartner’s space suit, on the space pod, and on the clothing of crew and spectators below, although ‘the camera never lingers on these symbols’ (Einstein, 2016: 2). Welcome to the world of branded content. Red Bull’s promotions illustrate the expansion of a brand’s use of its own media, so-called ‘owned media’, using its websites, and social and mobile apps to communicate directly with audiences. Red Bull’s Media House produces TV shows, including Baumgartner’s jump, for its Red Bull TV channel, and licensed to the Discovery Channel, Netflix, and others, while Stratos also secured worldwide publicity in news coverage as ‘earned’ media. Red Bull is now a fully functioning media company, whose Media House also creates art and photography books, a lifestyle magazine, Red Bulletin, amongst a host of music and extreme sports content that features branding but rarely includes the energy drink itself. In keeping with much so-called content marketing, the benefits or attributes of the product are not mentioned in Stratos. Baumgartner’s successful jump did, though, fit perfectly with the brand’s tagline: ‘Red Bull gives you wings’.

The integration of media and advertising is not new but it is intensifying. Branded content is occurring in different forms across news media, entertainment and social media.

The creation of entertaining or informational media content controlled by brand owners (‘owned media’) is one kind of branded content. Another is brand communications that appear within independently owned, ‘third-party’ media publications, channels, platforms, and social media spaces that are subject to control by parties other than brands. Increasingly brands are sponsoring, co-creating, sharing control, or exercising full control over content in these media. In fact, marketer control over the content, timing, publication, and dissemination of communications is key to understanding the shift to branded content and the forms and practices favoured in ever-changing environments. Media and marketing communications are merging. Marketers like Red Bull and action camera tech company GoPro are becoming broadcasters and publishers, while media increasingly incorporate brand-created or brand-sponsored content. In entertainment media, marketing integration includes advertiser-financed television, product placement, virtual advertising, and advergames. Boundaries between media and advertising are being tested, crossed, redefined, and erased. Pressures on marketers to find effective ways to reach prospective purchasers and pressures on media to attract advertising finance and accommodate marketers are occurring in contexts of disruption and change in markets, in policy, and in creative communications practices and use. Within the overall convergence of media and communications industries and cultures, the convergence of media and marketing is gathering pace across the various dimensions of ownership, work practices and values, cultural forms, and user engagements. The emergence of new forms and practices of integrated advertising raise a host of issues ranging from consumer awareness and acceptance of advertising to the consequences for the media’s editorial independence and creative autonomy.

Branded Content advances the critical study of the changing relationship between media and marketing communications in the digital age. This book examines the forms, evolution, and implications of branded content practices, ranging from brands’ own media to sponsored content and programmatic native advertising. The ways in which marketers are adopting branded content is explored in the context of the ongoing convergence of paid, owned, earned, and shared media. While it focuses on forms of integration (native advertising, product placement), the book also examines how these have developed alongside the disaggregation of media and advertising and the growth of online behavioural advertising and marketers’ ‘owned’ media. This book considers: (i) what is happening; (ii) what the problems are; and (iii) what the prospects are for those problems being addressed. It describes industry practices and their relationship with changing policies. It considers how emergent practices have been ‘normalised’ and it examines where and how problems have been articulated and critiques developed.

Before proceeding further, it is important to justify the book’s focus, in the context of a broad-ranging debate, and much scepticism, about what branded content encompasses and what significance it has within existing and emergent marketing communications practice.

One response when branded content is discussed is to say that this is nothing new. It is now nearly two decades since Scott Donaton (2004) described the merging of advertising and entertainment in his book Madison & Vine, based on an Advertising Age newsletter that ran from 2002. I like it when people say this since they are inviting us to pay attention to the history of branded content; but, of course, I don’t agree that this subject has been fully discussed, that the cartographers have safely mapped the terrain. Instead, I want to contribute to the excavation and re-evaluation of the historical formations through which branded content has developed and been understood. And, as we will see, branded content can be traced back far beyond the last two decades to the early formation of public communications, if not the birth of human symbolic communication. The integration of paid advertising and publishers’ ‘editorial’ content includes 19th-century ‘reading notices’, and 20th-century advertorials in print publishing. Product placement is coterminous with the birth of cinema, while now extending across entertainment, news, games, post-production virtual placement (Dagnino, 2020), and on to influencer marketing by (micro)celebrities and AI-assistants (Yesiloglu and Costello, 2020).

As well as being long-standing, another, contrary, charge is that branded content represents relatively fleeting and ephemeral phenomena. Branded content, native advertising, and associated terms tend to be overhyped, presented by interested parties as solutions to problems marketers face, where the framing of problems and solutions is partial and contestable. Another line of argument acknowledges the growth of branded content but argues it is a short-lived, transitional stage, indicative of more profound changes underway that a focus on ‘branded content’ is apt to misrecognise and misread. By 2007, Scott Donaton (2007) cautioned, ‘We’ve moved past the age of interruption, and even past the age of embedded content and into a model of engagement’. One way to resolve these contradictions is to acknowledge that there are different temporalities relevant to the discussion and analysis of branded content, across myriad diverse practices. A 2014 review of how far ‘Madison Avenue’ (the New York avenue synonymous with advertising) and ‘Vine Street’ (in Hollywood, representing media and entertainment) had actually merged reported a mixed picture, in which ‘the partnership between advertising and entertainment has become just as imperative and pervasive […] But in other ways, it’s shocking how little has changed’ (Sebastian, 2014).

These are important sets of debates that demand clarity, support, and reflexivity in considering the status and significance of branded content practices. Put another way, the debate demands resources from key domains of knowledge, from industry analysis and expertise, from the qualities and resources of academic scholarship and, as this book will emphasise, from a wider range of voices and perspectives across civil society. For now, I offer the reassurance that this book aims to consider how branded content is constituted and constructed across discourses and practices, not assume the status of the object a priori. Yet, it is the argument of this book that a profound convergence is underway between media and marketing. How to understand and assess that convergence is the challenge and focus of this work.

Donaton (2004) asserts that the alliance of advertising and entertainment media is a means to repair the damaged business models of both. Branded entertainment is vital to save the media and marketing communication industries. We are witnessing, says Donaton, a fundamental transformation of the business of marketing communications from an intrusion-based marketing economy to an invitation-based model. This represents a shift of power from communicators to consumers. Empowered consumers can bypass advertising messages. The central claim is of a power shift from producers to consumers as the driver of innovation. Donaton (2004: 3–4) writes: ‘innovators who respect the transfer of control and invite consumers to interact with brands on their own terms will survive. Resisters will be trampled.’ I invite you to keep in mind that set of claims throughout, as this book is, in part, an extended review of their merits. Whether we are indeed witnessing a profound shift of power from communication producers to users is among the critical issues this book seeks to assess.

Branded content: Main forms

Branded content covers three main areas. The first is brands’ own content (so-called ‘owned’ media) appearing on marketers’ websites, Instagram, Facebook pages, YouTube channels, publications, podcasts, apps, and so on. Some restrict the term content marketing to refer only to brands’ owned media content ‘posted on your own or other unpaid platform’ (Pulizzi, 2015). Next is the ‘native’ distribution of marketers’ paid content: ads integrated into web pages, apps, and news feeds in social media. Much of this is programmatic, part of the increasing automation of advertising buying, selling, and placement (see Chapter 6). One way we encounter ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• PART I: Practices
• PART II: Policies and problems
• Index