How brands are making it easier to assemble an audience
In this world of fragmented media, if you're lucky enough to find your consumers, how do you encourage them to sit forward, engage with and respond to your brand?
And how can you maintain their engagement long enough to build the valuable emotional bonds required to engender word of mouth, loyalty and sales?
When brands and agencies set out expressly to entertain us, campaign ideas translate into content consumers enjoy watching, remember and share. Cadbury's Gorilla or Compare The Market's Meerkats, for example.
Taking the premise further, branded entertainment grows loyal audiences by pulling them in with great content, not by pushing content out. The content stands on its own merits, to an extent that audiences ask brands for more of the same.
Step up Lexus, Ikea and Kraft's Philadelphia. This week, each has announced the return of their web-based entertainment series’ that further validates branded entertainment as a successful alternative to traditional advertising.
Ikea’s Easy To Assemble and Kraft’s The Real Women of Philadelphia are entering their third seasons, while Lexus has green lit a fourth season of its award-winning series, L Studio.
These three brands are demonstrating there’s a sustainable – and growing – audience for quality entertainment that’s funded, produced and distributed by brands.