Are you correctly branded for the local culture?

While companies insist that branded content is a hot new thing, it’s actually a relic of the mass media age that has been repackaged as a digital concept. In the early days of that era, companies borrowed approaches from popular entertainment to make their brands famous, using short-form storytelling, cinematic tricks, songs, and empathetic characters to win over audiences. 

This early form of branded content worked well because the entertainment media were oligopolies, so cultural competition was limited. Films were distributed only through local movie theatres; similarly, magazine competition was restricted to what fit on the shelves at drugstores. Consumer marketing companies could buy their way to fame by paying to place their brands in this tightly controlled cultural arena.

Brands also infiltrated culture by sponsoring TV shows and events, attaching themselves to successful content. Since fans had limited access to their favorite entertainers, brands could act as intermediaries. 

The rise of new technologies that allowed audiences to opt out of ads—from cable networks to DVRs and then the internet—made it much harder for brands to buy fame. Now they had to compete directly with real entertainment. So companies upped the ante. BMW pioneered the practice of creating short films for the internet. Soon corporations were hiring top film directors and pushing for ever-more-spectacular special effects and production values.

These early digital efforts led companies to believe that if they delivered movie-style creative at internet speed, they could gather huge engaged audiences around their brands. Thus was born the great push toward branded content. But its champions weren’t counting on new competition. And this time it came not from big media companies but from the crowd.

The problem that companies face is structural, not creative. Big companies organize their marketing efforts as the antithesis of art worlds, in what I have termed brand bureaucracies. They excel at coordinating and executing complex marketing programs across multiple markets around the world. But this organizational model leads to mediocrity when it comes to cultural innovation. At Eyecatchers, we follow a disruptive approach that we like to call ‘Cultural Branding’ – taking advantage of the enormous opportunities that social media has created by way of spawning sub-cultures of the crowd-culture. To know more, or to get your brand a Cultural Branding Strategy, speak to us on +91 9967450735 or drop a mail at info@eyecatchers.co