Welcome back to your essential weekly Briefing on what’s happening in brand content and why it matters.
Production company Sugar23 announced last week that it plans to host “The Way,” a new upfront where celebs and producers will pitch projects – including movies, documentaries and books – to brand executives. The upfront is scheduled to take place in May, reports AdAge. The idea is to give brands opportunities to invest in original entertainment. In return, brands will be able to market themselves via the entertainment content – but also make money off residuals. It’s both a financial opportunity and a marketing one.
Sugar23, producer of Spotlight and Collateral Beauty, has done this before: The company worked with AB-InBev last year for its new entertainment division and launched P&G and Time’s Trever Noah show, “The Turning Point.”
In many cases, claims Sugar to AdAge, investing in a movie or TV show can be less expensive than a commercial, and much more influential.
Brands that are using content as a way to attract customers usually go one of two ways: They seek to educate readers on key trends, data and information that ideally makes them more interested in becoming customers. Or, they try to entertain them.
While still rare, the entertainment route is becoming intriguing for some companies, particularly those who want to use content as mostly an awareness play, designed to raise brand cachet. Movies like Barbie and the Lego Movie are proof that this can work – and on a smaller scale, brands like WhatsApp and YSL are not just funding, but creating and producing feature-length films that align with their brands. As we reported earlier, LVMH launched an entire new division that will explore content opportunities for its brands.
It’s something the production side of the industry has also noted, particularly as AI-generated content starts creeping into commercials. Writing in shots, veteran director-agent Otis Bell says: “Impactful stories need to be made by experts in film craft and entertainment, which is most effective by a director and production team that have years of collaborative experience.”
Shifts in PR
Another day, another debate about PR. Last week, the role media relations plays for startups was one of the hot topics on X, driven in part by A16Z partner Andrew Chen, who wrote: “You have to go where your customers are, and increasingly, they spend all their time on social media… And if you start with the idea of going to them, you realize quickly that you can’t simply hire a PR agency and get placed there.”
While probably simplistic – PR can mean different things to different companies, and still plays an outsized role in how a brand shows up in public – the role and importance of media relations indeed appears to be undergoing a significant shift as more companies seek to build their own audiences.
A few things are coming together to create a perfect storm of sorts. One, consumers are becoming more open to receiving information from a wider variety of sources that aren’t just traditional media organizations. Brand marketers have capitalized on this by focusing on building owned audiences to whom they can push information. These audiences often hew much closer to the company’s intended target customers – and they’re willingly opting to receive that information. There are also more outlets where companies can speak “directly” to their audiences via social media.
On the publisher side, incentives have changed. Media companies have to focus on telling the stories their audience is most interested in, particularly if they’re selling subscriptions. As for PR professionals, more of them are now shifting to focus on strategic communications, including content marketing and employee communications, rather than spending time on pitching. “PR is not comms, and PR is not just media relations either. It’s about 5% of my job now,” said one chief communications officer.
Sherwood News launches
Nearly 15 months since it was first announced, Robinhood has launched Sherwood News, a website that will house all its articles and content. The company has also rebranded its flagship Snacks newsletter and updated integration with Chartr, the data newsletter it acquired a few months ago.
In a statement, the company said it plans to “transform the media industry by becoming the definitive news source for a generation reshaping money and power in the world; an engaged, intelligent, evolving audience hungry for information delivered on their terms.” The publication’s topics include business, culture, tech and “world.”
Read more https://toolkits.com/brand-content/robinhood-launches-sherwood/
The Toolkits Show: Episode 4
This week, we covered:
- Why Sherwood Media is the past and future of news
- How the decline in subscriptions is actually a symptom of a deeper business problem.
- Print is coming back and what it means for marketers
New policy at Medium
Medium says that starting May 1, stories that are generated by AI are no longer allowed to be paywalled as part of the platform’s Partner Program. That’s even if the piece discloses that it was generated using AI.
How Square is using AI for content management
Payment company Square runs The Bottom Line, a publication that features research, case studies and content about how to run a company. The brand has been testing out Knotch One, a new product from content tool Knotch, to figure out how to use generative AI to manage and optimize existing content. The brand is also using Knotch One to figure out what content is performing best and therefore should be improved on – and now plans to use generative AI to create multiple versions of existing content for different platforms.
While most of the hype around content and AI has focused on idea generation and first drafts, Square’s approach to AI is likelier to be more common in the coming months. Brand marketers – wary about relying on AI for actually creating original work – are likelier to find that they can use tools to improve on existing stories, freeing up time and resources.
One fun thing
Talk about brand content. Bark is launching charter flights between NYC, L.A. and London so humans can travel with their dogs. On board, dogs will be served Bark treats.