By Amit Bapna
After last year’s crop of online specials, we are well and truly in the age of the long (anything beyond 30 seconds) films these days. Playing out mostly on digital media, some of these films had us rolling on the floor laughing, desperately hunting for a box of tissues and every emotion in between. But we are left with an uncomfortable question: does occasionally great filmmaking make for great brandbuilding? Especially at a time when brand connect is often nebulous and far-fetched? Euphemistically called branded content, this genre seems to be the new ‘Holy Grail’ for many marketers. Biba’s ‘Change is Beautiful’, Anouk’s ‘Bold is Beautiful’, homeware brand Cello’s ‘mother-daughter’ film and Lenovo’s #Goodweird campaign are some recent examples of films bidding for engagement through subtle branding. But in pursuit of subtlety, have they missed the branded part of the equation entirely?
A two=minute film from ethnic apparel brand Biba was all about addressing societal biases of arranged marriages in India. If it was not for the last shot with the brand logo, many a viewer would not realise that the bill for their viewing pleasure (or otherwise), has been footed by a brand called Biba. About walking this thin line between messaging and content delivery, Siddharth Bindra, managing director of Biba says, “The brand is giving a point of view on subjects which are important for today’s women”, and that in his view is resulting in a strong corelation (between the film and the brand). The 10 million views clocked within 7 days of launch signifies the point of view of (our) customers, he adds. The brief for the agency was to create engagement around the brand, via content that creates conversations says Suva Ghosh, founder and chief creative of ficer, Brandmovers, the agency behind the film. Mostly social issues like equality, women empowerment, and gender choices create conversations, get shared and tend to go viral, he adds.
Myntra’s private label brand, Anouk, one of the 11 private labels in the online player’s portfolio wanted to identify with free spirited, modern Indian women. The reason, according to Abhishek Verma, head, Myntra Fashion Brands is that most brands in the ethnic category take a more product driven route. And so films touching on a host of issues like single parenting, eve teasing, lesbianism, and the most recent one on gender discrimination at the workplace. All of them have been well-mounted creative renditions and are linked by the common feature of not having any direct product-connection. How is the brand benefitting? Are the 15.5 lakh views garnered by the brand enough for it to rest on its laurels?
Verma agrees that likes and shares cannot be the measure of success and would like to be evaluated a year from now on how these films, taken together, have worked for the brand. “A year from now we would like to be known as a brand that stands for freedom of women”, he says.
What makes this particularly relevant is a backdrop where marketing budgets are under severe scrutiny and every campaign has to justify its ROI. So, if a few brands are opting to feed prospects a diet of brand-less communication, what are the chances of it registering? For Dheeraj Sinha, chief strategy officer, South & South East Asia, Grey it’s not about how many times the brand name appears, but how engaging the communication is and whether it goes with the stance of the brand.
Brands are treading this path for multiple reasons and often floundering. While the comparative cost of the digital medium when pitted against TV rates make it look cheaper for now, many stumble because of the ambiguous positioning that the digital medium has been accorded in the minds of many media planners and creative mavens. As somebody famously pointed out, the ‘storytelling muscle’ in organizations has atrophied from lack of use over the years as we basked in the glory of mass media.
Rishi Dogra, former PepsiCo-man and currently CMO, babajob.com, an online job portal for aspiring workers bemoans the fact that the approach of traditional marketing towards digital video content has its roots in a system that has been architectured for TV with too much focus on percentage time allocated between branded message and the rest of the narrative. At his new company, the team has created a unit called BabaLab which would focus on original programming, relevant to the portal’s ecosystem. He plans to collaborate with young filmmakers across the globe.
Whatever be the journey, a long-term approach to branded content is a must-do: the brand needs to get known for the kind of stories it tells over time. The other big must-do, according to Sinha, is to play the branded content game on a slightly longer term basis, unlike the current sniper approach and the force-fit to click-topurchase metrics.
The 6-minute long Lenovo film created in collaboration with The Viral Fever to promote its multimode Yoga convertibles and tablets, and Cello’s 7 minute long film showing the laboured journey of a mother’s life are two different genres of story-telling, both very subtle in their brand connect. They and the sundry others like them face the challenge of getting lost in the traffic eventually — the large swathe of ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ notwithstanding — if they do not follow the rulebook. Else to conventional wisdom, these brand-less films end up the equivalent of a luxurious self-indulgent night-out.
Source:The Economic Times
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