Marketers Are Banking On Branded Content

Companies are shifting more resources from traditional advertising to branded content. 

- Erik Oster

Once seen more as an added-value proposition for media placements, publishers’ branded-content labs have expanded to meet growing client demand. Publishing studios increasingly have become an appealing option for creatives at agencies that must regularly churn out work for reviews and struggle to retain talent.

Ark Advisors partner Ken Robinson, who specializes in managing agency reviews and talent searches, said that publishers’ in-house marketing divisions are “becoming more proactive in their prospecting efforts” and winning more client-side assignments.

These creative teams are “packaging and promoting themselves as viable ‘alternative’ resources, joining the list of other encroaching factions fighting for a share of increasingly diminishing agency revenue,” added Robinson. With the price of traditional display ads “sinking, if not plummeting,” as content “gains traction over pure advertising,” Rebecca Lieb, founding partner and analyst at advisory firm Kaleido Insights, said in-house content studios are becoming an increasingly important part of business for many publishers.

“It’s kind of a dogfight out there in terms of who creates content. It’s all kind of up for grabs out there and everybody wants a piece of that pie,” she added. “Publishers are uniquely positioned to create content on behalf of advertisers because they are, in fact, content creators,” while also able to leverage and repackage existing content to a built-in audience.