Branded content has always been seen as a stand-alone intervention piece. As great one-time activities that help build buzz in the short term and maybe win a few awards in the bargain. Both, very important aspects to engage consumers. And there have been some great examples over the years of pieces which have stood out as path-breaking in their time, from Coke Studio and Dewarists to Nano Drive with MTV. Every couple of years over the last decade, there have been examples of branded content to build great short-term brand equity.

But what has been missing for the longest time is building long-term brand value from it. Because sustaining the narrative was either too expensive or too convoluted. Even in cases where brands have done multiple seasons of a particular property those were still standalone properties. With yearly gaps, they all have generally lagged in sustaining the level of engagement year on year.

The problem in this whole mix is the lens through which we continue to look at branded content. What if each brand looked at its social media presence the way a TV network looked at its channel and its yearly programming schedule?

Look at these platforms as a means to build consistent engagement while focusing on providing a balance of four key pieces:

Brand utility (What value does the brand bring to the consumer?)

Brand values (What are the core human principles that define the brand?)

Entertainment quotient (Because content without some form of entertainment is just an oxymoron)

A defined budget (Because not all branded content demands massive scale, especially when it’s built with sustained focus)

Plan a set of larger pieces of branded content that creates the right peaks of buzz and engagement with the right amount of social content around it. Build it to enhance the brand utility factor and fill the gaps between these larger branded content pieces with smaller pieces which are low in cost but high in volume and consistent in engagement. So, with a long-term branded content plan, it gives the brand time to build on the high points and navigate through the low points of engagement while having enough options to fall back on to show overall value through the year. And most importantly, it gives a brand the ability to look at the year with an integrated budget and be able to plan the collective and individual monetary and engagement parameters.

And let’s also remember that large and small can be relative terms depending on what the overall budget for the year is. This is enabled by the fact that brands today have multiple social platforms to build content on. So, while some brands might choose to build content for all platforms, for some the prime content platform for a brand could just be Instagram. Thereby, they can choose to focus their content plan for the year on that platform and just use the others to direct traffic to Instagram.

Red Bull and Nike are great examples of this strategy and it has helped them build great dividends over the years. This is exactly how every successful publisher has built its audience and more importantly, built loyalty of viewership. What digital adds on to this piece is the ability to also have each of these pieces through the year, apply the right amount of data and targeting to ensure every piece of content also leads to sales through a strong e-commerce strategy.

A mix of brand building, a publisher mindset and TV programming processes will help build the right long-term system – one that can handle any form of flux that the platforms for distribution throw at us. It will, of course, take a system overhaul and a mindset change but in today’s content-obsessed world, it’s the exact script you need to build long-term value from branded content.

Varun Duggirala – Co-Founder and Content Chief at The Glitch

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