Branded content aims for a bigger pie

As viewers skip online ads, brands shift to branded content—non-ads that integrate products into entertainment. India's market hits ₹10,000 crore, evolving with digital media.

How many ads do you skip while viewing content online? And how much content are you consuming per day? Chances are that you’re skipping almost all the ads even as you spend time watching considerably more content online. This is how Neena Dasgupta, founder and CEO of The Salt Inc, a content and design agency, explains the unprecedented rise in “branded content” in India which refers to content led by brands which is not an ad. “As online viewers skip ads, brands are finding other avenues to drive content to connect with the consumer,” she says.

Branded content aims for a bigger pie

In July, e-recruitment brand Naukri.com forayed into content through a five-episode stand-up comic series on Disney+ Hotstar titled ‘Hardly Working by Naukri’. The show was produced by Disney+ Hotstar CreativeWorks -- the branded content arm of the streaming service that helps brands leverage the power of storytelling at scale through bespoke content.

Last month, GroupM’s media services firm Mindshare helped Britannia The Laughing Cow Cheese and Times Network Digital Platforms to launch ‘Cheeseitup.in’, a content destination offering snackable content like gourmet recipes, blogs and food videos and promote the cheese brand.

A recent report by Mindshare pegs India’s branded content market at approximately ₹10,000 crore comprising ‘all things content’ curated or created specifically for brands including what’s created by social media influencers.

Branded content has its roots in advertiser-funded programming on TV and advertorials in print. However, with the change in media landscape it has evolved into more engaging entertainment content. “Media inflation which makes it more expensive to buy an ad is also giving branded content a lift,” says The Salt Inc’s Dasgupta.

Hari Krishnan, managing director at Publicis Content, says digital media explosion fragmented the audiences as sources of information and entertainment multiplied. Brands that were doing only TV commercials, print ads and hoardings realized they needed to be present at other avenues as well where the consumers were searching for information. “But other than following Google’s 10-year-old popular content marketing model that classifies content under hero, hub and hygiene, brands need to be present when a consumer is watching entertainment content like a web series or a music video. They need to seed their products in,” says Krishnan.

Publicis, for instance, created the Hero Dirt Biking Challenge for Hero MotoCorp which was an episodic show building on the culture and fandom for dirt biking, and put it out on MTV and the streaming service Voot (now subsumed in JioCinema). Publicis also integrated brands like Mountain Dew in gaming, which is also a passion in India, Krishnan says.

Advertising and content experts expect brand integrations and branded content on OTT platforms to also grow rapidly as their paid subscribers stagnate and they rely increasingly on advertisers to generate revenue. An Ormax Media report says the active paid subscriptions have remained flat at 100 million over the last year, and the 13.8% growth in OTT audiences has come from viewers watching ad-driven free content mostly on YouTube and social media.

Yet, when branded content becomes blatant, it may put people off. “Clearly, such content must have the entertainment value of storytelling and build subliminal integration of the brand,” says Dasgupta. She feels that eventually analytics will be driven into branded content. “There will need to be parameters to be able to understand and analyse the spends on content. We create conversations that work, and ‘work’ means analytics,” she says.

Lastly, brands must be cautious of the trade-off between quality and cost while creating content. Point and shoot videos are not an option as the brand experience may decline, Dasgupta says.