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When Ford felt it needed to spice up its image, it put James Bond in a Mondeo, driving around the Bahamas. The car is featured for a total of 44 seconds in Casino Royale, and Ford paid a reported £14 million to feature the Mondeo in the film.
Apple’s 2000 iMac was shown drowning in a scene from Jennifer Lopez’s debut single “If you had my love,” and Mac laptops are a regular staple in the Sex and the City television series as lead character Carrie Bradshaw’s column writing tool of choice.
American Idol judges sip from Coca-Cola cups every week.
In her madcap nine-minute Telephone video, Lady Gaga features nine different brands, including the Miracle Whip mayonnaise she uses to make poison sandwiches.
More recently, Absolut launched its Spike Jonze-directed short film, I’m Here, as part of the vodka brand’s “Ordinary is no place to be” communication strategy.
From simple product placement, to brand integration, and all the way through to branded entertainment, branded content is undoubtedly a popular form of communicating a brand’s values – and selling more of its products. In an increasingly cluttered and fragmented advertising space, the practice of brands creating their own content is shaping up to be an enticing proposition for marketers looking to interact with their consumers on a more intimate level. Marketers in the region haven’t remained indifferent to the wily ways of branded content. While industry experts say the market is still in its infancy, there has been an increased interest in – and understanding of – the branded content medium.

THE NEW BLACK. Fuse – media agency OMD’s sponsorship, branded entertainment and content creation division – worked with Henkel to create the “Black Abaya” competition in partnership with MBC1 last year. Persil Abaya Shampoo – a Henkel brand – had been launched to maintain the black color of the traditional abaya worn by many women in the GCC, and in June 2009, the brand announced a competition for the design of black abayas during MBC1’s morning show, Sabah Al Khair Ya Arab. The show was so successful the TV station and the advertiser both signed on for a second season.
“Very simply, branded content is entertainment content provided by a brand,” says Christian Fedorczuk, group director of strategy and development at OMD Dubai. “It allows you to engage with your audience, create a more in-depth connection, and communicate more cost-effectively. As a brand, to capture your audience and connect to consumers, you must provide them with a compelling piece of information: content. More often than not, this is not a 30 second spot or print ad.”
Fuse has also worked on projects for Kellogg’s Special K. One involved product placement on the Perfect Bride show on LBC in 2008, a Big Brother-type show where brides-to-be shared a house with their future mothers in law, and a nutritionist appeared to discuss the importance of a balanced diet. The second project, in 2009, was product integration on MBC’s Be Saraha Kteer Ahla show with TV personality, stylist and makeup artist, Joelle Mardinian. The cereal brand ran a segment where three women try three different weight-loss programs, one of them being the Special K Two-Week Challenge, which promised to help women drop a jeans size in a fortnight.
“The Perfect Bride project was great because we got a lot of exposure, and the product was seen on television a lot,” says Will Brockbank, marketing director at Kellogg’s for the Middle East and Mediterranean. “But the Joelle show was really a lot better because we totally integrated our campaign and the Two Week Challenge in the segment. By integrating a product, you’re giving consumers a message about your brand without it being an overt ad, and you’re placing the product in a context they can relate to. So it seems more credible to the consumer.”

CORE BLIMEY. In 2008, Publics Groupe Media created core, its branded content division. Wael Hattar, who heads up core, says the market was barren at the time. “Basically, someone had to start it,” he says. “So we didn’t just open up and start; we had to be credible. We did research for six months to understand the market, and worked on smaller projects like sponsorships and product placement. Once clients and the media owners began to understand the value of doing branded content, we got to do stuff like the Hiroshi and Osamu campaign for General Motors (GM).”
Between August 2009 and January of this year, GM’s Chevrolet brand ran this integrated campaign featuring Hiroshi and Osamu, two fictional employees from “Japan’s largest car maker” who had been sent to the Middle East to figure out why Chevrolet is so much more popular than their own brand. Along with a social media campaign, the carmaker ran branded content across several mediums. “We created a kind of online comedy show for Hiroshi and Osamu. There were eight episodes weekly, which lasted three to five minutes,” says Hattar. “After that, we created a comic strip revolving around the two characters. It carries on with the series, and we distributed it in universities. On the radio, we had a “Learn Japanese” segment, and the characters would teach listeners a Japanese word every day. That covers a lot of mediums.”
Facebook fans were integrated into the story, says Hattar. “We asked them to send pictures of themselves and their favorite hangouts in Saudi. From those, we chose five and placed them in our story.” Speaking to Communicate last month, Hattar says Hiroshi and Osamu “have people still asking to be in the story even last week.”
Fadi Ghosn, chief marketing officer of GM Middle East, says GM has been using branded content for a long time, and that it has presented many opportunities for the car manufacturer to push its brand message. “We actually started working with Rotana artists [media conglomerate Rotana manages musicians in the region and beyond], and we did product placement with them,” says Ghosn. “We had Cadillacs and couple of Chevys involved in video clips, so they were highly visible opportunities. We did that a couple of times, and it worked extremely well with Rotana.” But when it came time to shake up Chevrolet’s image in the Middle East and appeal to younger consumers, Ghosn says branded content worked wonders with the Hiroshi and Osamu campaign.

STRENGTH OF CHARACTERS. “We really used the characters,” says Ghosn. “We created situations around these two guys to convey messages about the brand. I think online and viral did extremely well for us, because when you search for these guys online, you can find so much and it will drive you to the website. There are things you can do with branded content that you will not be able to push in a 30-second commercial. So it’s a huge opportunity to expand and talk more about the brand.”
While branded content might seem most at home on television, experts say it cannot – and should not – be limited to the silver screen. “It just depends on your piece of content,” says Fedorczuk. “It might as well be a radio show, as we have developed for Pepsi in Egypt, or it can be an online lifestyle show as we are currently developing for Beiersdorf.”
While branded content is branching out into different mediums, Brockbank from Kellogg’s says doing branded content work on television in the Middle East is far easier than in most other regions. “That’s because television channels are open to doing it,” he says. “They’re still feeling their way in terms of how they’ll let you do it, but they are very open to suggestions.”
Ziad Abou Khalil, director of client leadership at Mindshare, says that while branded content can travel across many mediums, the region isn’t fully exploring its potential yet. “It can be radio, online, video games, or even mobile content, which are all becoming very popular, but we are still in an immature market when it comes to branded content,” he says. “However, this will soon become the trend of the market.” He adds that it is challenging to find the right platform and to design a perfect fit between a program and a brand. If done wrong, a branded content campaign will not create the right “synchronization” between the communication and the platform.

THE RIGHT FIT. While branded content has been on the rise internationally for a while, and is becoming a more widely used medium in the Middle East, practitioners warn that it should be handled with care. “Branded content on its own will not deliver exceptional return on investment,” says Abou Khalil. “However, if coupled with the right off-air marketing and commercial activity, as well as multimedia communication, it will definitely boost brand awareness, campaign weights, and cut-through factor.” He says it is of utmost importance that a client should not rely on branded content alone; it should be supported by other communication and marketing activities to provide “a 360 degree experience for consumers.”
Hattar says that core would never suggest clients choose branded content over advertising. “Advertising brings the awareness that consumers should have to know your brand and what it carries,” he says. “With branded content, you take an existing idea and show consumers what it’s like in the real world, but you can’t do it the other way round. If you don’t know why a character is using a certain brand, it won’t register with consumers. So you need to have advertising, to fuse it into the mainstream.”
Engagement is key. Fedorczuk says branded content should always be compelling for consumers. “It needs a clever idea, an excellent execution, and guaranteed exposure,” he says. “If you don’t have all three, stay away. To be successful, it has to be able to exist as a form of entertainment in its own right; consumers might sit through your boring 30-second ad, but they won’t sit through your boring 30-minute television show.”

PUTTING IT IN PRACTICE
Layal Takieddine, manager of Fuse, OMD’s sponsorship, branded entertainment and content creation division, discusses the branded content work done for the Pepsi radio show, Agmad Sabah in Egypt, and Beiersdorf’s Nivea Angel Star range.
Pepsi were sponsoring a morning radio show in Egypt, but were unhappy with its content, as the tone of the show didn’t match the personality of the brand. We designed a new morning show format around the passions of young Egyptians and the tone of the Pepsi brand. We recruited new, young and exciting presenters and created a three-hour “program clock.” This means we broke up the three hours into entertainment, football, and music segments. We drew guidelines of what lifestyle news should dominate the entertainment hour, developed radio football formats, and provided a Pepsi music playlist. We also designed a digital strategy to increase interaction between listeners and the presenters throughout the show.
To launch the new Nivea Angel Star range and make it appealing to teenagers, we were looking to engage the audience through an advertiser-funded programming format. We communicated how the brand empowers teenagers to shine by giving them the opportunity to make their style the official look of Nivea Angel Star in the region. They are recruited, promoted and judged through an online TV show format: Search for the Nivea Angel Star.
The show is promoted through a multimedia campaign and the young Angel Stars are directed online, where they apply. From this online community, a jury selects five girls and each of them will be given the chance to promote their own style and looks through various online episodes. The winner of the show will replace the international Nivea Angel Star and will become the face of the brand in the Middle East.

THE BURDEN OF PROOF
Core’s Wael Hattar on some of the challenges facing branded content in the region
It can be hard getting both media owners and clients to trust into something new for the region when the competition isn’t doing anything similar. Everybody is naturally skeptical at first, so we work with that pace, basically taking small projects and guiding the client through it in detail to understand how this is beneficial, as well as safeguarding the media owners’ entertainment property and showing them how this can be beneficial for both without compromising either party.
It was tricky – and still is – to create a monetary stamp on the work as there was nothing to compare to, in order to cost things out. But we have seen some repeat projects, and the stations, clients and media agency are starting to adapt as each project is unique and has to be costed out per project.
The value of branded content is in brand building and connecting with the audience. ROI isn’t very numerical here, as it isn’t a straight science and there are so many variables to include. Take a TV show, for instance: It isn’t really about how long the brand is on screen; it is mainly how the viewer perceives it. The more smoothly a product fits in, the better the show is. Having said that there are always ways to measure what we want, from a brand tracker to actual numbers if it was an online interaction.

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