The World of Branded Entertainment: Q&A With Abby Marks – Charlene Weisler

Abby Marks, Director of Strategy and Operations for Ogilvy Entertainment, entered the creative world of advertising via management consulting. In this fascinating interview, Abby talks about the process of creating branded entertainment, a comparison between branded and native formats, global applications with clients, examples of success and predictions for the media landscape. She also offers great insight into Ogilvy’s recent BEAM whitepaper on branded entertainment, which can be accessed at this link: Ogilvy.com/beam.

There are five videos that can be viewed at WeislerMedia.

Subject and Length (in minutes):

Background (4:51)
Branded and Native (5:27)
Measurement (2:10)
Processes and Success (4:17)
Predictions and BEAM (6:41)

Below is a short excerpt of the interview:

CW: How has branded content changed in the four years that you have been at Ogilvy?

AM: It’s an amazing time for branded entertainment and branded content. We are really seeing the shift in consumer appetites for content and the willingness to go over the top and pay for that content. So for brands, the ecosystem is past the tipping point. The past year and a half has seen a huge swell of brands that really understand that opportunity. When I started at Ogilvy Entertainment in 2010 it was still a time of convincing brands that they needed programs collaborating with media partners, creating their own series, hosting them online and promoting them as if they were a TV or film property. Today we are seeing that shift.

Consumers too are getting much smarter. They are not put off by brands that create compelling content if it is insight driven and if it feels relevant to where a brand should be playing, like Dove’s “Real Beauty” sketches or Lacta’s “Love in the End” film. [Editor’s note: The Lacta video is highly recommended.] Consumers are open and receptive if it is great content and it is compelling to them. They don’t mind that it is from a brand.

CW: What type/length of programming works best for branded content?

AM: As far as the length of video content is concerned, we tend to think of mobile as short form but to be honest, if you are going to engage in mobile there is more and more research coming out that says that people are looking more for longer form in mobile. Viewers are looking for a sustained experience -- maybe they are waiting for a bus, they are meeting some friends -- they want to find that one place and really dive deep into that content. It is all about story. If the story can be told in 30 seconds, that is great. If the story needs ten, twenty, thirty minutes, the consumer is ready for that kind of story as well.

CW: Tell me about BEAM.

AM: We have been in the branded entertainment sector for about ten years which is a pretty long time considering the more recent focus towards branded content. We’ve had a strategic relationship with MIPTV, which is an annual international content festival and marketplace in Europe. We thought that it would be a great platform to launch a whitepaper around strategic use and measurement of branded entertainment, how it should be used, how it can be used and how it should be measured. So we wrote a whitepaper, “Making Magic, Using Logic: the Ogilvy Branded Entertainment Assessment Model.” It is meant to help align ideas heading into a project, what it should achieve, where it should be distributed and how it should be measured so that it is not an afterthought and it really helps to prove out the success of these programs.

Interview conducted by Charlene Weisler, Weisler Media LLC. She can be reached through her research blog www.WeislerMedia.blogspot.com or at WeislerMedia@yahoo.com. Full disclosure: Charlene hosts a street art blog on The Starry Eye blog community

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