#davidshing

Branded Content

We're making stuff for screens at the moment. And despite the size of the screen, the differences aren’t that many. 

For example content for cinema can be adapted to Mobile. It’s, the same aspect ratio, only much smaller. 

However, vertically-oriented media consumption (and production) is on the increase – YouTube stats show that 50% of all views now come from mobile, and Mary Meeker’s stats for 2015 show that 29% of all content consumed in a given day is in portrait. When was the last time you saw a selfie in landscape orientation? Turning a phone just to view content is a behaviour of the past.

For brands, the opportunity is obvious. The fastest off the mark (e.g. Burger King, Macy’s) have already seen a huge impact (up to 9x the completed views of horizontal video) from running vertical ads on the platform, intelligently targeted at those to whom it will most appeal. 

And to make things even harder, when we move to Internet Of Things or Wearables we have a really different aspect ratio AND architecture. 

Brands usually distribute the same content to all their channels instead of contextualising (because it's expensive). But context matters. A lot. So we need to really adapt our content. They need to understand the effect context, or rather the lack of it, has on their customers.

 Humans in the wild. 

Our job is to reassign some of the user attention. 

Users will always have 24h/day of attention. That won't ever change. Storytelling…is more about the story than about the telling. 

People don't care if content is branded or not. They only care if it's good or not.