What is Branded Entertainment?

A little more than two years ago I started a branded content / entertainment company called Human Factor Media. At the time I had been writing prose and technical copy under contract in D.C.

My equation was, I thought, remarkably clear:

• Brands need attention in order to sell products.
• Writers can entertain.
• Brands should pay writers to create entertaining videos and get them attention, thus allowing them to sell their stuff.

As it turned out, a neat syllogism does not add up to a business.

Many brands I first approached did not believe they needed to be entertaining. They would rather sell their products the old fashioned way, which is by talking about product features and slight differences from competitors, and making videos about these products, features and slight differences--i.e. ads.

And then there was another subset of brands who did believe in entertaining video content, but was far ahead of me in their thinking, and thus opted to pay people far more qualified more money to do this work for them.

That left me in a tricky spot. I knew at least some portion of the market was buying what I was selling--they just weren't buying it from me.

No company is a company without revenue, so I improvised and started producing any kind of content that the people I spoke to would buy. This included testimonials, digital commercials, interviews, "talking heads," demos and the like. I did a lot of this work at low margins and with sycophantic agreeability, since I was enamored of the fact that at least the business was working.

As any number of client services professionals will tell you: Once you discover the gripping and seductive strength of a "retainer," you begin to understand why good people trade dreams for deadlines and sacrifice vision at the altar of predictability.

In a few months that buzz wore off. And all I saw, when it did, was that I was nowhere near the goal I set out to achieve. I was abetting the kind of content I disdained and ignoring the vision I knew could come to life: brands paying artists to make stories that were not ads, that did not sell a product, that were the same form of entertainment you'd find on Netflix.

Some days it feels I am not much further along than I was then. But I remind myself we are getting there. We are doing comedy, drama, originals and closer looks. Last month we created a branded minidoc on COVID-19's impact on a senior living facility. Recently we launched production on a new Masterclass-style educational series. This month we kicked off a comedy web series for a Sonoma wine brand. Next month we will do an artist profile, a series of vignettes for an audio company and in the winter a short film. And much more is "in talks...," for whatever that is worth.

HFM has grown from one employee -- me -- to five (with an additional five contractors backstopping and a broad collective of artists tagging in on a project basis).

But the question lurks every day: What qualifies as Branded Entertainment? How do we pick our projects and what subtle distinctions separate "commercials" from "narratives"?

Here are some principles I use to determine if we are making an ad or telling a story:

1) Is there a point to the project besides the product?

As I brushed over, my background is in creative writing. In my MFA program, I read many times Flannery O'Connor's seminal wisdom on storytelling (emphasis mine):

I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one. Then they find themselves writing a sketch with an essay woven through it, or an essay with a sketch woven through it, or an editorial with a character in it, or a case history with a moral, or some other mongrel thing. When they realize that they aren't writing stories, they decide that the remedy for this is to learn something that they refer to as the "technique of the short story" or "the technique of the novel." Technique in the minds of many is something rigid, something like a formula that you impose on the material; but in the best stories it is something organic, something that grows out of the material, and this being the case, it is different for every story of any account that has ever been written.

I find this applies just as neatly to the craft and confusion of video narratives. Most anyone in branding today will tell you they are storytellers. But when they set out to tell one, I think they often find themselves creating an advertisement with a knock-knock joke "woven" through it.

If there is a point to the video besides highlighting the product -- the fate of a character, an irony on display, the outcome of some consequential event, the revelation of a quiet insight -- the odds are much greater that you are skewing more towards story than ad.

Ultimately, I agree with Ms. O'Connor: if we are doing it right, there really is no excuse for any story not to be different from everything else that came before it. Yet how many branded videos can we say that about?

2) Is it "skippable" or "shareable"?

Ninety percent of YouTube pre-roll videos are skipped as soon as the five second ticker runs out. Some studies estimate an even higher percentage.

Skippability is at odds with shareability. (No, neither is an actual word.)

If you are aiming for the latter, the content should appeal to someone not as a consumer but as a human being. The only type of video we would pass along to the rest of our network is one we care about because of human reasons--it's funny, interesting, inspiring or exciting--not because it gave us rational, market-logical reasons for becoming customers.

By contrast, skippable videos trigger our irritation in SECONDS. The blaring intro of a voiceover talking about "APR financing" or "15% off" doesn't even make it past our eardrums. This is true for everyone, but even more so if you're under 35 and haven't sat through a commercial since the early seasons of "CSI."

If a brand video wants to compete online, it must aim for shareability. Otherwise its budget will simply contribute to the $42 billion in lost publisher revenue from blocked and skipped ads.

3) Is it saying something true?

I have a theory, totally unsubstantiated, that the most shareable videos online contain some ingredient akin to literary insight--that they manage, either through humor or narrative, to articulate something the viewer has always known but never said out loud before.

This is the x-factor of great novels. It is why I think writers have a place creating great videos. Because the rules of human nature are the same online as they have been for centuries of book-reading. If you can convince someone you understand them, they will trust you with where to go next. This is the true leverage point of storytelling and brands ignore it at their own peril.

There is no greater impetus for sharing a piece of content than the rush of truth. This happens when someone sees something so hilarious or critical that they can't deny their life has taught them the exact same thing, even if they have never put it into words before. And they want their friends or family to have the same experience they did -- that feeling of resonance -- so they PUNCH the share button or fire it off in an email with the subject line, "So true, so freaking true."

One of many ironies in content production is that the skippable videos often cost more, take longer to make and require more resources. A shareable video can often be done with half the time, talent and budget. Because the dynamism and impact of a shareable video rests not on its production value but on its ability to resonate.

If you are making something true, you are making a story and not an ad. This is inevitable.

So this is what Branded Entertainment means to me. It is our loyalty to these principles, I think, that explains why my company has seen the modest success it has, and why our future doesn't look so corporately predictable as it once did.

If you've read this far, you must know me personally, so reach out and tell me what you think!