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 Content is king, allegedly, and content is set to become the next major focus for marketing, as it moves away from traditional advertising messages and towards branded entertainment.
This was the message from Omnicom Media Group’s Media Innovations Forum, held yesterday in Dubai, with another session today in Abu Dhabi. According to a report in Emirates Business 24/7, the emphasis was on the shift to branded content as a long-term substitute for increasingly-ineffective traditional advertising.
“It would be radical to say the present form of advertising would disappear, but I guess it would be downplayed,” said Eric Mirabel, business development director at OMG, quoted in EB 24/7.
“Consumers receive 1000 to 1500 messages per day. How are they supposed to remember any of those? We need to be able to get through this, and the closer we speak consumers’ language through content and things that are interesting and fun, the better the job we are doing,” he added.
The forum also featured input from du, which has become increasingly involved in alternative marketing methods, such as social media and content-driven websites.
“We need to create a smooth transition from entirely depending on traditional media to injecting shots of social media and branded content into our communications strategies,” said Ghayath Sioufi, senior director of media management and broadcast sponsorship at Du, according to EB 24/7.
“Although an estimation might not be accurate, I believe we employ media innovations in almost 30-40% of our campaigns. We still rely a lot on mainstream campaigns due to the nature of our products,” he added.
Du hasn’t been notable for the success of some of these newfangled campaigns, as we’ve opined before
– but at least it’s making the attempt, and will hopefully pick up valuable “learnings” (whatever was wrong with the word “lessons”, people?) as it goes along. Maybe.
“In our organisation, we have some non-flexibilities in certain areas. We are slowly trying to sell the idea of employing new media to the management. We have just started using Twitter and it has proven to be efficient and now the management is more enthusiastic,” said Sioufi on the slow adoption of new techniques.
OMG is one of the few groups to have a dedicated branded content business unit, in the shape of Fuse (another being Starcom’s Core, which is behind the excellent Hiroshi and Osamu
Facebook and Twitter campaign), although to date we haven’t heard too much of what Fuse is up to.
While OMG may be talking up branded content’s growing relevance to the region (with lots more in the EB 24/7 piece) it still seems to be on something of a slow burn.
Ahead of Ramadan this year, we spoke
to a number of meeja types, all of whom opined that branded content was playing little or no part in the Holy Month’s TV adfest – although being a very tradition-oriented period, it might be less likely to attract radical new forms of ad experimentation.
It’s therefore interesting to see OMG putting such emphasis on branded entertainment – could this be the start of a concerted push to move it up the agenda (and in the process cement the media agency’s role in marketing)? Could be.
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