As consumers get more sophisticated, brands find themselves in hot soup. Promoting brands and products are no longer as easy as blatantly claiming themselves the “best”.With so many choices in the commercial market, consumers easily jump ship resulting in decreased brand loyalty. Apparently even product placement, which was once thought of as ingenious advertising method, has numbed consumers. Consumers are also feeling increasingly cheated as advertisements are not only invading every inch of their lives but are now sneaking out of ad breaks and into their chosen programmes.
But there is light at the end of the tunnel and it comes in the form of branded content. A story about a nerdy teen with oversized glasses, tram-track braces and frumpy clothes is the most successful branded content initiative in Asia today. The television series is a Chinese version of Ugly Betty; a comedy drama adapted from a Columbian telenovela for Chinese audiences and is reaping a handsome profit for its sponsor, Unilever.
The first series of Ugly Wudi, as it’s named in China, launched in September last year. It attracted 73 million viewers on its opening night on Hunan Satellite Television, and ranked number one in its time-slot (10pm to midnight) across all channels on each of the 22 nights it aired. Ratings for the second series which began in January are just as impressive, with 9% audience share, a considerably high figure for China’s fragmented TV audience. Unilever’s Dove brand which uses the show to communicate its ‘real beauty’ message had just 2% of China’s bath and shower products market before the show’s debut. There are no current figures available of its market share success but shipment figures for Dove Shower Cream had grown by 21 percent when the first season ended. Mindshare, the media agency that negotiated the deal with Hunan Satellite Television, says that the show has delivered four times the value of regular TV commercials. In Malaysia we have seen a few brands taking the smart route of branded content and reaping the benefits. There are no statistics released yet as to which brand has been the most successful in garnering their market through branded content but Kisah Kaisara on TV3 funded by Kimberly Clark’s Kotex seems to be the talk of
the town. Even with such encouraging response, branded content in Asia as a whole is estimated to be worth only five percent of what it is in the US. I think it is time for marketers to ask each other, if they are maximising their creative options? Perhaps this year’s MSA awards which has introduced a new category ‘Branded Content on Television’ may shed light on the road to branding.