Branded entertainment is the term on every marketer’s lips at the moment. Everyone wants to create their own ‘branded content’ so it can go ‘viral’. The web is now cluttered with pieces of branded video, all fighting for views on social media. This means it can be difficult to gain cut through, whilst standing out and being memorable.

The best way of gaining traction with a piece of video content is through YouTube paid media and tactical online placements. By clocking up a large number of views, quickly on YouTube, you can start to use the search algorithm to your advantage. Your video will begin to appear in the ‘recommended videos’ to the right of the page, it will be served up at the end of similar films and appear higher in search results, driving up organic views. However, viewers only have to watch the first 5 seconds of a YouTube pre-roll, they can then skip the content and the view will not count. The creative challenge here is making the first 5 seconds of your film compelling enough to distract the viewer from the content they intended to watch, and keeping them engaged so they don’t skip.

Each Bespoke Ballad involved: searching people’s Twitter feeds, picking a unique theme, scoring an original track, writing lyrics, collaborating with the creative team, performing and finally, uploading to the Internet for those who tweeted – ALL WITHIN ONE HOUR.

80 films were shared across the week, holding a sustained interest in the brand and the campaign for this time.

There were 3 levels of interaction with the campaign:

Exposure: The campaign drove around 42m impressions and achieved an earned reach of over 15m across Twitter and blogs.

Participation: The combined viewing total of the films was around 900k. 9% of views were organic, out-performing the industry average of 4%.

Engagement: the activity received 8k campaign mentions, with the hashtag being used over 5k times and over 1k people requesting their own ballad. Direct engagement was 99.4% positive