Author: Jana Savić Rastovac, Creative Director at McCann Beograd
Photo: Clio Awards Jury
To begin with, let us agree on one thing: branded entertainment is not placing your product on a dining table in the family breakfast scene in a domestic sitcom.
Branded entertainment is something much more exciting and powerful. They call it the future of advertising, which calls for its reflection in media budgets and a new look at how to make brands feel invited into the lives of their “target groups”.
Has the industry finally found a channel for which people will not change the channel?
Can the brand message be heard more clearly outside the commercial block?
The Clio Awards were held yesterday in New York. The night was the crown on a process that started for me at the end of July on Hainan Island, in China, where I was a member of the Branded Content and Branded Entertainment jury, in the company of fantastic professionals from around the world. The task of our jury was to identify and reward campaigns that are an unambiguous indicator of the direction in which the industry should move.
Campaigns in these categories were done for big and small brands, in the mix of unusual channels of communication, and what they share is an innovative response to the brief. Instead of classic formats, we saw feature and animated films, a blockbuster series that is at the same time a language school, a chain of mobile phone shops that have become polling stations and a small statue that sparks big conversations.
The Grand Prix in the Branded Entertainment category was awarded to the movie “Lo And Behold“. The film, by director Verner Herzog, was created in response to a briefing for a promotional film for the Internet company Netscout. The film is being shown in cinemas all over the world, and people are actually paying to watch something that is undoubtedly a wonderful movie, but also a big brand campaign.
The Grand Prix in the Branded Content category was won by a little girl! The now-famous “Fearless GIrl” has launched a global debate on gender equality, and has become a New York tourist attraction and an inspiration for girls across the globe.
I think that an exciting time of combining channels and forms of communication is coming. The voice of brands can be heard and seen, and can be more convincing and more real, precisely when we hear it outside the advertising square. Branded entertainment is certainly becoming one of the main lines of creative thinking for all of us who are sitting in the agencies.
In this crazy exciting world of today, we compete not only with each other, brand against brand, agency against agency, network against network. We compete against everything: podcasts, magazines, portals, video games, the music industry, television, documentary and feature films, festivals, and even literature.
Let’s think about this and I’ll meet you at next briefing session, where our task will be not only to entertain each other, but, more importantly, to entertain others.
