Integrating content to marketing campaigns

There are four ways for a brand to use content in their marketing activities:
- Ad funded content: the brand places and advertising message in the content stream
- Sponsorship or association: the brand sponsors a section of content or the medium that delivers it (this programme brought to you by...).
- Placement: references to the brand are built into the content (e.g. the brand's product is used by the hero of the film).
- Gifting and media: The final option is to reward consumers with gifts of content (eg. when you buy my product, download premium content off my company's website).
Note that licensing content, using images related to content (eg. a Spiderman visual on a box of cereal) is fundamentally not a content play at all but simply the association of a content brand with a commercial one.

Since the invention of the remote control, consumers have had an increasing number of ways of zapping away from unwanted commercial messages and more alternatives to zap to. This is one of the reasons that marketers have a growing interest for techniques that tightly link the message to the content.

The key in this is to integrate the brand’s message as tightly and unobtrusively to the content as possible to ensure that the consumer does not try to cut out unwanted promotional messages.

DigiCompanion believes that the best way to achieve this is for the brand to create its own content stream rewarding consumers for their loyalty by offering them the content they want.