By Marianna Bretz, Brazil

When I started thinking about writing this article, I took up some reading on content marketing and branded content and asked experienced communication professionals what the latter concept meant to them. They weren’t that many because my goal wasn’t to conduct research on the topic. However, as the responses varied from “corporate content” to “content with a purpose that tells a story,” I felt I had to search further for a consistent definition.

After all, what is branded content? 

To my surprise, I discovered that the definition of branded content – a term used in Brazil in its translated form, “conteúdo de marca” – isn’t homogeneous nor explicit. However, there seem to be two different interpretations in Brazil and worldwide. When I talked to my dear friend Carlijn Postma, who happens to be one of my primary references in content marketing, the author of Binge Marketing, and Content Marketing Woman of the Year in 2001, she put me back on track with her authority and practical thoughts.

That’s when I realized that at these times, you have to go straight to the source. In other words, you should look at the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), an organization founded by the pope of content marketing, Joe Pulizzi, whose books I carry with me everywhere I go.

Even though I relied on Pulizzi’s ideas frequently in my work, I still hadn’t dedicated myself to fully understanding how the CMI defines branded content. Maybe it’s because I had the impression that this “format” was so explicit that there were no doubts or a need to delve into a single definition. I later realized how wrong I was, and this quest has taught me some things that I’d like to share in this article.

I began by looking at the Brazilian scenario: course references, interviews with authors and industry professionals, and articles. I later found out that branded content is almost always understood as that which carries the purpose of a brand and employs storytelling techniques to talk not only about a product but also the context where a given brand is being presented or used. Simple as that.

However, the scope of the term prevented us from defining what branded content really is.

If something is everything, then it is nothing

I was curious to find out if the term branded content was also defined generically outside Brazil. Eventually, I came across the studies conducted by Bjoern Asmussen, a professor and marketing researcher at Oxford Brookes University, in the UK.

At one of his presentations, as part of the Branded Content Research Network seminar in 2016, he spoke precisely about the difficulty of defining what branded content is in communication since academic references on the subject are scarce and incompatible.

That puzzled me. After all, being faced with a widely practiced strategy in the market to empower brands while realizing that branded content might be poorly understood or underestimated in Brazil and abroad was somewhat discouraging. I’ve been working with content marketing for 13 years now. Still, I felt confused and started to question if this thing we call “branded content” is really what we mean to convey.

In his presentation, Asmussen pointed out that after interviewing 30 professionals in the United Kingdom, he concluded that branded content is “created/financed entirely or at least in part by the brand that holds its legal ownership.”

This certainly reinforced the model usually adopted by most professionals in Brazil.

Branded content x advertising

For Asmussen, branded content goes beyond paid media or advertising spaces, as in the so-called #publi, special advertising, or even paid partnership features on social networks.

According to him, branded content is a deliverable outcome of content marketing, which the practitioners in Asmussen’s research see as a discipline of the new marketing – it still needs advertising to happen. The difference is that in advertising, you are getting in the way of something that an audience actually wants to consume. Otherwise, in content creation, somebody chooses to engage with informative, educational, or entertaining content. It means that people will choose to engage rather than be disruptive.

From that moment on, I saw even more clouds on the branded content horizon: everything seemed to fit in the same box. It would be challenging to distinguish between a branded content distributed as an ad, storytelling, shared content, or even user-generated content in practical terms. Just as it would be complicated to differentiate between content that tells a story, entertains, and connects people from that which promotes a product disguised as a news story.

So, what in the world is branded content anyway since this term is used as synonymous for all these things?

Branded content involves paid media and is NOT synonymous with content marketing

But eventually, things fell into place. In an article by Joe Pulizzi, he addresses the misuse of the term “branded content.” He separates the chaff from the wheat by explaining that many marketing agencies and companies coined the term “branded content” as a synonym for content marketing, which is a severe distortion of the concept.

According to Pulizzi, “branded content” specifically defines content disseminated through paid media channels, such as magazines, news portals, or TV, for example.

This type of marketing placement offers advertising space for a brand to tell a story in different formats than traditional ads, whose explicit purpose is to sell something. Along these lines, branded content is usually an ad disguised as a story or another form of entertainment medium.

Pulizzi also says that one of the characteristics of branded content is to be anchored in campaigns, unlike editorial content, which serves an audience. Using the product as the main character of the stories reinforces this notion. Interestingly, it totally pushes back against the content marketing motto, which is “talk about what you know, not about what you sell.”

Content brands: the brand at the service of an audience

But I saw the light at the end of the tunnel when Pulizzi introduced the term “Content Brands,” disseminated by Andrew Davis, Bestselling author & keynote speaker.

The content brand is not just an inversion. It resignifies the roles of companies in creating valuable stories or information. From that point of view, content does not serve the brand but an audience.

This definition changes everything. We move away from creating specific content towards something much more transformative, that is, to develop brands that use content strategies to entertain and educate a network of people interested in what they have to say.

According to Pulizzi, if you’re talking about an “Advertisement” disseminated in major news portals that show products into the content to sell them in a less imposing (but not always compelling) way, you should use the term “branded content.”

However, if your goal is to build a community, generate buzz, earn customer loyalty, and establish better relationships between brands and people, focus on building a Content Brand.

Want to know where to start? Check out the Binge Marketing methodology developed by Carlijn Postma.