Brands using celebrity-led content marketing

Today we’re looking at brands making content-marketing films with well-known actors and celebrities, and challenges for the coming year. Plus an ‘interesting’ take on content marketing from a well-known satirical show

Brands making films

Marriott was one of the first to look at creating feature films, with its Two Bellmen series. Now others are getting in on the act. Moët & Chandon, JetBlue, Johnnie Walker, Canada Goose and American Girl have all released films in the past few weeks – the idea being that video on a website is more likely to increase dwell times.

Diageo’s latest effort on behalf of Johnnie Walker sees Jude Law star in a second “short”, titled The Gentleman’s Wager II. In it Law fixes and races a vintage car through Italy to Monaco. After a month the film has around 650,000 views, compared to 45 million for the first one.

Airline JetBlue has also been active in the field, bringing out a film starring Veep’s Sam Richardson. While Moët & Chandon employed Roger Federer for its 90second video montage.

Sparse branding is common to all, which is probably essential to their success.

Adweek has embedded a number of examples. Out of them, only the Moët ad resembles an ad.

Predictions and challenges for 2016

The UK’s Content Marketing Association has produced a comment piece for Brand Republic looking at where the sector is going over the next few years.

Some of it is fairly obvious, such as the need to focus on quality. It also looks at delivery platforms beyond mobile, such as virtual reality. Personalised content should also be a key aim for any content-marketing agency, for which data will become increasingly important.

A decline in growth will not be a problem. As article states: “UK brands have spent some £5.2 billion on content marketing this year and this figure is expected to grow by 25 per cent next year, according to leading industry analysts Enders Analysis.”

And finally…

Content marketing was recently the subject of a South Park episode. If you do not have access to it, Adweek provided a very handy write-up. As funny as it is, it probably provides a warning as well as laughs.

As one of the characters says: “… and I just want to know what’s happening in the Middle East, but instead I’m looking at the ‘Top 10 scariest movies of all time’!”

Celebrity-led content marketing is just one theme examined by Content24 – a daily review of  content-marketing news from the past 24 hours.