Edition 1: We’re binge-watching what is essentially content marketing

Welcome to Inspired by Anywhere, a short, fortnightly LinkedIn newsletter from Rough Paper. Here, we seek marketing inspiration from places that are not exactly marketing - at least formally. This could be from a YouTube channel, the world of rock music, someplace we visited, a nice line in an article. The sources will be eclectic (much like our own tastes), and hopefully inspiring for those working in marketing & branding. If nothing else, we hope you find some new content to gorge on!

Both of us (Chuck & Divya) are fans of - and we realise how nerdy this might sound - good branded content.?

Wait, wait, come back!

Many of our favourite YT channels tend to feature sponsor plugs. With intelligent creators at the helm, these plugs are very watchable and often clever. Being folks with one foot each in marketing and the creator economy, we love it when these plugs are done well. Heck, we even applaud at times (no seriously, we’re fun to hang with please come back).

A recent YT discovery is Jet Lag. I know we may be late to the party, given how popular the show has become (it’s like a gameshow, but using an entire country / continent as a board game - and there are no real prizes).?

Each episode ends on an absolute cliffhanger - only for the participants to goofily come in front of a white screen and plug the creator-focused video streaming service, Nebula, where you can instantly watch the next episode (the alternative is to wait a week like the good ol’ days).

The end-of-show plugs by themselves are quite well done, but what blew our minds is that the show itself was developed essentially to market Nebula. Which essentially makes Jet Lag - a channel with 737k subs and 74M views - a fantastic exercise in modern content marketing.?

A core belief of ours is that content marketing should first and foremost be… good quality content (either entertaining or useful). And secondly, it should fulfil a marketing objective. Achieving both is difficult, to be sure, and we think Jet Lag / Nebula checks off both boxes.

Oh, and to boot: We learnt about Jet Lag’s model through a very good video which itself was developed by a creator insights tool called Karat.

It seems that we now spend our Sunday evenings binge-watching content marketing.