I use to catch up with movies in airplanes. So as usual, I watched one Iron Man 2 on my flight back to Beirut. Typical blockbuster, nice guys, bad guys, at the end the nice ones win, then you spice this up with visual effects and gun fights. With this, you are never disappointed. You know what to expect and you get it.
But blockbusters are also behaving as advertising spaces for brands. few years ago, it was low profile but now you have logos all over the place, to a point where it becomes ridiculous. You can see logos every two minutes ( Roll Royces, Audi, Oracle, Youtube, etc..).
It’s counter-productive. It’s just outdoor adverting in a movie.
The essence of branded content is to associate a brand with contents in correlation with its values. No matter is it’s an original creation and a brand integration into an already exiting content, it has to bring an added value othervise it’s just an old good promotion.
Branded content is not new, it exists for more than 50 years with the creation of soap operas but still, it’s hard to make it right. The minute, you think too much as an advertiser and not a story teller, your content become basic advertising and you immediately loose the benefit of it: brand acceptation and desire.
We, at diwanee, strongly think that branded content could be a win-win situation for brands and people, especially in the Middle East where there is a huge lack of Arabic content.
To succeed in this, you need to create those connections between brands and people. We also have to act as door keepers to ensure that the content we produce is helpful, enjoyable and entertaining for people who is reading/viewing it.
if you forget this you are loosing everything. From what I just in this movie, they have crossed too far the line by looking too strongly at the short tem money and forgot about their spectators.
Great branded content is a thin line, we have to keep that in mind.