Truly Deeply/Madly

The Crit­i­cal Role of Authen­tic­ity in Brand Spon­sored Con­tent
Just the other day LA adver­tis­ing gun Miry White­hill and I were swap­ping thoughts on a new content-based social media cam­paign for Levis.

What a huge project, with a nice, soft brand own­er­ship from Levis, but some­thing just wasn’t quite strik­ing the right note for me.
The Brand Design/Brand Content/Social Inter­ac­tion space is a really inter­est­ing place right now. Van­guard brands look­ing for ways to inte­grate their mes­sag­ing into con­tent that is sought and val­ued are all over this space at the moment. What I found inter­est­ing with the Levis ad was as I was watch­ing the video there was some­thing that wasn’t quite ring­ing with authen­tic­ity — some­thing that felt slightly pro­duced. When I watched the ‘Making-of’ clip it became obvi­ous that the focus of the ad was on the pro­duc­tion tech­nique to illus­trate a sense of ‘walk­ing across Amer­ica’ rather than the act itself (the guy didn’t actu­ally walk across America).

And it struck me right there that the thing about brand spon­sored con­tent — the main game about for all con­tent, but espe­cially that spon­sored by brand — is authenticity.

As a result of so many peo­ple around the world doing seri­ously cool things and putting them into social cir­cu­la­tion, the bar has been raised . Our expec­ta­tion level of ‘cool’ is at a high-point, and viral that doesn’t live-up to that falls kind-of flat — even more-so if it’s brand spon­sored. We don’t mind watch­ing some­thing half lame from a guy in Uzbek­istan, but tell us that it’s spon­sored by a big brand and we become far more crit­i­cal. Here’s a gen­uine exam­ple of authen­tic cool:

Even though the guy fails on his chal­lenge he suc­ceeds with bucket-loads of authen­tic­ity. What a missed oppor­tu­nity for a brand like Gillette to jump in for spon­sor­ship and pos­i­tive brand association.

We just pub­lished a blog about a cre­ative col­lab­o­ra­tion between a shoe brand, shoe designer, shoe retailer and a bunch of influ­en­tial style and fash­ion blog­gers. This is an exam­ple of a brand lever­ag­ing both the authen­tic­ity of the expe­ri­ence (they didn’t just ship the design­ers and blog­gers to a loca­tion for the video and have them put their names to a series of shoes that had already been cre­ated) to cre­ate some rich brand storytelling.

Ron­nie Fieg Presents The Nexus Project Trailer

So the mes­sage for brands look­ing to engage, cre­ate or con­nect with on-line con­tent with brand expe­ri­ences through social media:
01. Build your social cyclone from a start­ing point of authen­tic­ity — keep it real (Authen­tic­ity).
02. Ensure there’s a strong con­nect of rel­e­vance between your brand propo­si­tion and the story-telling of the con­tent (Rel­e­vance).
03. Stand back and let the con­tent run the show — don’t turn it into an on-line ad cam­paign (Association).

If you’re keen to cre­ate some high value con­tent for your brand, get in touch — we’d love to help you get it right.

Dave Ansett, Bran­da­men­tal­ist
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Designer of Brands with Authenticity

Tags: Brand Agency, brand authenticity, Brand Design, brand designer, brand designer Melbourne, brand designers, Brand Experience, Brand Identity, Brand Strategy, brand-designers-Melbourne, brand-gesture, Brand-Storytelling, brandamentalist, branded content, branded social content, Gilette, Graphic Design Melbourne, Levis, Social-Media, walking across America

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 18th, 2010 at 7:00 am and is filed under Brand Agency, Brand Design, Brand Voice, Brand-Storytelling, Creative, Graphic Design Melbourne. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.