Amazing Instead of Branded?

Branded content has been on the table since a while now and also when speaking about online video. As brands are becoming publishers it’s the content that actually matters, especially when there are expectations for a bigger buzz.

Brands are desperately trying to involve their logos, products and taglines everywhere, and that’s a thing which partly might annoy a great bunch of people. The audiences skills for analysing the content they consume have become much more sophisticated, and too rude brand messages for example in videos might make the viewer click on the next video suggested.

I recently came across an interview of Katalyst Media’s president Anthony Batt and was impressed by his words on the future of branded content:

“Branded content” sounds like, “Well, brands need to make content.” But they can’t make content because they want to talk about themselves all the time. They need to get behind people who actually create content, and they need to sponsor it, not lightly, not like, “Hey we bought you this,” because people won’t know about it. They need to get into it, but they need to understand who their audience is, understand what their audience would love, realize that no one else in the world is doing that for them…”

Here’s a great example of amazing content that has begun to spread on YouTube for two days now. And it’s all about “amazing”:

Here’s a classic piece of amazing content too, but in this case a brand is more clearly involved. This is amazing too, and it feels it’s done right:

I think that more and more brands are beginning to move into the direction of “amazing content”, which is a nice thing for the audiences they’re targeting.