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Agencies and others are falling over themselves (and each other) to make their mark in the burgeoning content business and here are two interesting new examples. We’ll be seeing a hell of a lot more too with London Fashion Week on the horizon.
Here’s Unilever-owned Impulse Why Not’s latest effort from TMW Unlimited. Impulse Why Not is a ‘limited edition’ variant which presumably means they don’t want to sell too much of it. Featuring vlogger Leanne Lim-Walker.
And a rather longer mini-doc from BBH for General Mills’ Old El Paso, part of a campaign to promote its new smaller-sized ‘stand ‘ stuff’ tortillas. This one features a fishmonger and a butcher from the UK sampling the joys of food down Mexico way.
And they do what it says on the content tin. Lim-Walker is unthreateningly wacky and smiles a lot. The fishmonger and the butcher tour a Mexican market and say ‘wow’ a lot – just like Rick Stein does – and eat a Mexican meal.
One of the points about branded content is that should seem to be like unbranded content: that is, the same as everything else you see. So creativity may not come into it much, it’s imitation you’re after rather than originality. Both of these deserve a 6 for doing exactly that.
Rather like a TV programme maker, you’re judging the agency’s performance (in commercial terms anyway) mostly by its ability to produce a pipeline. Never mind the quality, feel the width..
Can agencies thrive in such a world where there’s loads of competition from bona-fide programme makers, contract publishers turned YouTube factories and others?
BBH seems to see content as the way forward, setting up a facility in Hertfordshire among other things. TMW Unlimited in the biggest part of quoted marcoms outfit Creston, adding content to its traditional direct marketing offer and pulling in more than £20m revenue in the process.
Most ad agencies become department stores when they reach a certain scale; producing some brilliant stuff and lots that just gets the job done – they hope. In their new guise as content factories that certainly seems to be the case, but with less of the brilliant.
Both these pieces of content are infuriating, content-less, inane, drivel. I hereby promise never to get involved in plastering the internet with bland, purposeless shit like this. I can believe that some recently opened, grubby little digital shop could be responsible for such flannel, but not BBH. No wonder Rosie Arnold quit. An utter disgrace.