Engage your audience with entertainment
Branded content is designed to build awareness for your brand by associating it with content that shares your values. People can’t wait 5 seconds before skipping the adverts on Youtube, so rather than trying to tell your audience your message in those 5 short seconds, why not aim to be on the other side of the advert and provide the entertainment where they will spend the next 2, 5 or 10 minutes watching.
Pundit Reveal Roundtable
In 2018, Eir approached us to produce a short video to reveal their new Pundits Donnacha O’ Callaghan, Luke Fitzgerald, Murray Kinsella and Maz O’ Reilly when they took over the Pro14 broadcast rights. Even though we would only have a short amount of time with each of the pundits, we would need to bring them all together for a single day of filming. When we looked at the concept for the 30s TVC for the reveal we figured we could get much more out of this day with a little extra production. We pitched Eir on the idea of doing a roundtable discussion between their new pundits, not only would you add intrigue with seeing how they interact together for the first time, and how characters might bounce off one another, you would walk away from the day with an hour long discussion, that could be broken up into tiny social bites that would feed content to all of your channels for the weeks ahead of the season even starting.
We when finished post production on the project, Eir had the pundit reveal video, an hour long roundtable discussion and 15 short(60-2min) pieces for drop on their social channels over the weeks before the season began
Champions Cup Launch
Later in November of 2018, we worked again with eir around their launch of the champions cup on eir sports. Again rather than make a video that simply advertised the fact that eir was broadcasting the games we worked with them to piggyback on an upcoming broadcast game between Munster and Leinster and produce some content with their pundits once again.
We asked each of their pundits to answer the question what was their favourite memory from the Champions Cup. Very simple right. Well, edited together with archive footage that they had mentioned and tasteful music, I think we managed to create something far more entertaining firstly and engaging secondly than other videos they released on their channels.
Educate your audience
You might think that your brand does not work in such a conveniently entertaining space or have personalities that can generate a buzz like sports pundits however the same strategy can work in other environments.
Stablelab are a Sligo based company that developed a tool for equestrian blood testing. Every year they go to the American Association of Equine Practitioners conference, set out their booth and try to convince the passing footfall to stop for a chat and get to know the company.
This was the one time of the year that all the experts in this field were together in one place, and all looking to have meaningful discussions around current issues. In 2016, working with Moose, Stablelab managed to secure nine of the most well respected practitioners in the field and get them to part-take in a 2 hour long round table discussion about current topics in the field.
Immediately after the roundtable was completed the footage was collected and editing began. The following morning on the show floor was the full edited round table discussion available at the stabelab booth. Now this was interesting to passers by, not only was the discussion itself interesting, but the accolade had gone to Stablelab for producing the content. It seems very abstract as a concept, but simply by being the producers of entertaining content your audience will come to love your brand.