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AdStand: Content, advertising and do they ever meet?

Naresh Gupta, Managing Partner & Chief Strategy Officer, Bang in the Middle, cites the latest ads by Truly Madly, Flipkart & Ambuja Cement to highlight the importance of content and why it will continue to drive the world of brands

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AdStand: Content, advertising and do they ever meet?

Naresh Gupta, Managing Partner & Chief Strategy Officer, Bang in the Middle, cites the latest ads by Truly Madly, Flipkart & Ambuja Cement to highlight the importance of content and why it will continue to drive the world of brands

Delhi | October 13, 2015

Adstand by Naresh Gupta

Three brands have done three different pieces of content this week – two of these brands tied up with content creators, while the third brand did it the conventional way with pure play advertising. Truly Madly partnered with AIB to produce Creepy Qawwali. Flipkart partnered with The Viral Factory to produce 'How to train your dad' and we all know that Ambuja Cement created a winner with The Great Khali.

First the simple question, are brands becoming brave to tie up with third parties to produce branded content? Is this where advertising is headed? The overwhelming popular theme suggests that traditional conventional advertising messaging strategies are not working and brands need far more organic content to succeed. Organic means non-scripted, created by users, and often not paid for.

Branded content is not a new concept, it has existed for many years, in fact for many decades. Fashion magazines have been partnering brands to create fashion content for many decades; this is a significant revenue generator for the magazines. These features are not created by the agency, but by the editorial team of the magazines and readers know that the content is sponsored. The trend has been heightened by the online bloggers who create branded pieces for the partner brands. For example, the current Vogue agazine in India has a fair sprinkling of created content for designers.

Truly Madly had earlier created 'boy browsing', a trend of checking out boys by single girls for dating. The AIB-partnered video takes the brand concept and turns into a 5-minute long song that celebrates various facets of how boys troll girls online and the feeling of 'creepyness' that it evokes. The song obviously has greater tonality of AIB and lesser of Truly Madly, but no one misses the fact that it is a brand message. AIB even announced that they have created an ad agency to produce branded content. With over 600,000 views, they seem to have hit the jackpot.

The Viral Factory has a take on Flipkart's 'Big Billon Day' sale starting today. Unlike Truly Madly, The Viral Factory claims on Twitter that this has not been paid by the brand. May be the brand should pay for this, the feature (can't call it an ad) is brilliantly cast, brilliantly performed and will leave you in splits. If the bog billion divas (borrowing from the feature) is a roaring success, this piece will have a big hand in it. At 10,000 views, it looks like it is early days on the life of this video.

Giant strength for the Giant TVC

The piece that may have won the battle at this time is possibly the ad by Ambuja Cement with the great Khali. It is good old traditional advertising with good old storytelling craft and a celebrity that does the magic. It has shades from the earlier wind energy commercial, but the story that this TVC tells is not similar. What makes the Ambuja ad significant is that it comes from a conventional agency, has no content tie-up and yet works like the branded content piece that brands look for today. Just a day old, it seems to be winning over the Internet completely.

Importance of content cannot be downplayed; this is the fuel that drives the world of brands. Brands did experiment earlier and they are still experimenting. What will define the tone of the new age content will be both – the platforms and the content creators. What will win will be the good old storytelling ability.

Info@bestmediainfo.com

Info@BestMediaInfo.com

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