Digital Media Programming Development Part 3
Following is the third video episode from a discussion I had with Damon Berger, digital media producer and director of branded entertainment at a company called Moderati. You can check out Part 1 of our discussion here, where we talked about digital media career development, as we traced Damon’s career path from Disney’s Stage 9 Digital Media Studio, to Revision3, to Moderati. In part 2 of our conversation, we examined the key elements needed for a successful digital media program (online video, multimedia content) - Damon obviously has a lot of expertise in this area, and he is also a mentor at the American Film Institute’s Digital Content Lab.
The last part of our discussion delves into how professionals like Damon create and program branded entertainment.
I think we all know what branded entertainment on the web looks like by now. Even here at Cisco, we use branded entertainment campaigns to communicate with our potential and existing customer base. For instance, we rolled out an online comic book to go with a new marketing campaign for Cisco security products. Recently I came across a fun campaign from Old Spice, called Swaggerizeme.com. You can read more about what went into the creation of the Old Spice online campaign here at MediaPost.
Sometimes, the lines between digital media content and advertising get so blurred it’s hard to tell if I’m looking at advertising or straight up content - here’s one example like that - one of my favorite places to get caught up on online music is a site hosted by the Toyota Scion auto brand - it’s a site called Scion Broadband. Sometimes branded entertainment can be a service, for instance Reebok offers a mapping service for runners (read more about it - AdAge’s Brian Steinberg takes a look at this and other campaigns). There are so many more examples - so please list any other interesting branded entertainment campaigns you think we should check out following in the comments section of the post.
Since Damon Berger’s title is ‘Director of Branded Entertainment’ - I was really curious to ask him about how such campaigns get created. How does it work - are advertisers out in the marketplace looking for engaging content to align with and sponsor? Or are content producers creating content specifically tailored for advertisers? That’s my lead off question here, and I also got to follow up and ask Damon where we can expect more experimentation around both entertainment and advertising content.
Posted by Chuck Fishman at 03:43PM PST
kenekaplan Mar 25, 2009
Nice to see you putting your broadcast chops to good use, Chuck! This is a fascinating topic that seems to only be getting more meaningful and prevalent in our lives and at our jobs. I’m a fan of entertainment, sure, but I want healthy doses of knowledge squeezed in, too. And sprinkle in a litter interactivity when possible, and something I can take for my personal (brand) activities.
Great stuff, Chuck! Please keep it comin’!!