Rule #4: “There’s No Business Without Show Business”

If you have ever watched a movie, played a video game, seen Viral videos, you have witnessed the use of Branded Marketing. With the ongoing shift in media from television and print to IPods and Mobile Phones, marketers must change their thinking when targeting a specific market. By strategically aligning a good or service with another form of media, one can create a tremendous bond between customer and corporation. Mathieson introduces the concept of building a community around an organization’s brand. www.Scion.com/broadband


Establishing a target market, and reaching that market is essential for branded entertainment. Focusing on the “P-O-S-itive” a brand can create a memorable branded experience.

P- Personalizable – can customer preferences alter the content that is presented
Ex. Head Case

O- Ownable - The ability for a marketing campaign to vary based on customer inputs
Ex. Hotel 626

S- Sharable – Is the customer able to share his/her experience with others
Ex. Band Of Buds


These are three examples of different methods of branded marketing that all use the internet to target the users of each product. Are there any other ideas that focusing on might benefit branded marketers?

Townsend introduces four key elements that maximize an organization’s probability of conducting a successful Viral Internet campaign. These four elements are as follows:

1. Star quality: Getting a celebrity attached to the project

2. Preexisting tie-ins: Campaigns centered around previous successful medias

3. Cross-platform promotions: Multiple media and targeted audiences

4. Community Building: Targeting the core user group, users can directly influence
the brand, users become advocates for the brand

Do you think that any fundamental elements are missing? Do you personally believe that these elements need to work in correlation with one another? Or can each be performed on their own?

We believe that one key element is missing from Townsend’s list, the number one element must be “Understand your Audience” As depicted in the Anheuser-Busch and the www.Bud.tv
example. Anheuser-Busch utilized all four of Townsend’s suggested elements, however the company did not truly understand the core market that they were targeting. Anheuser-Busch attempted to build the wrong type of community around the right kind of campaign. An example of a successfully built community is Candystand.com. http://www.candystand.com/play/sour-patch-battle-karts Candystand.com built their community around its core targeted customers. The sites community is based upon what they enjoy, keeps them involved and is continuously updated.

“Branded entertainment in its truest form really gives the brand a platform to elevate itself outside of the traditional sale of a product into a culture-giving it relevance with ownership of entertainment that is really multipurpose, and played out in a lot of different media to create an ongoing relationship with its customers.”-Doug Scott, President of Ogilvy Entertainment

Do you agree with this quote? Is this really the best way to connect to a customer?