Everybody's at it and it's not going away. More and more retailers and brands are taking a big step towards the dedicated creation of video or film content as a marketing and engagement strategy, rather than just creating ads to sell products. In many ways, they are becoming media companies.
Recent announcements from a range of retailers and brands shows the scale of ambition here, adding to established examples from the likes of Waitrose TV and Net-a-Porter's high-end publishing arm.
Ted Baker's four minute "Mission Impeccable" film demonstrates great story telling and shows off high production values – not surprising bearing in mind Guy Ritchie was exec producer and director. No doubt this has the potential to be turned into an ongoing episodic strand to maintain engagement throughout the season, and to launch new ranges. Ted Baker have also demonstrated how to integrate tech solutions into content with their shop the look-type tagging, enabling viewers to save outfits seen in the film to a wish list.
Lush, meanwhile, has announced a 24/7 video channel with chat show-style broadcasts based on the "Lush Kitchen". This innovative development takes the classic how-to video, and adds more talent, editorial and entertainment content (as well as real-time interactive engagement and Q&As) to expand audience engagement opportunities with the brand and products.
Lastly, Unilever is establishing its own in-house studios – U-Studio and U-Entertainment – to create its own branded content, programming, music and games. As well as the obvious trend towards content-driven marketing, the firm is reported as saying this move responds to the way it is seeing people search for and engage with brands and products, and also to counter the ongoing challenge posed by ad-blocking.
A legal challenge
Whilst the production skills themselves can be bought in, there are numerous behaviours, concepts, and media industry norms that the organisation as a whole, including the management teams coming from retail, product and marketing backgrounds, will have to get up to speed with and integrate into their culture and processes to make these new content initiatives work.
For example, production contracts and talent agreements are unusual beasts, steeped in industry-specific peculiarities. Rights agreements can be convoluted and multi-layered, particularly where social platforms and social talent have moved the media industry goal posts. And third-party content acquisition and clearances relies heavily on layers of intellectual property and legal precedent. Add to that the challenges that even traditional media organisations are having with issues around the linking and curating of content, and you have a treacherous sea to navigate. This is without mentioning content "compliance" as a whole – ensuring you don't defame anyone, infringe their privacy, or indeed contravene any statutory content regulations (more on that below).
After the content is created, distribution and the creation of practical and valuable relationships with platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and Snapchat, provide another hurdle, and opportunity. These relationships are relatively straightforward for basic marketing purposes, but as video and, in particular, live content, becomes more and more important, the opportunity to partner with the platforms on a different footing – ie. as a media company rather than just another marketer – becomes an interesting proposition.
Finally, video entails compliance with regulatory elements that retailers may not have come up against before.
Whilst there is little issue when pushing content out on owned channels, everyone should be familiar with the ASA's position on transparency for branded content when paying for content to be distributed through third-party media channels, including in association with social influencers (the vloggers, for example). The CMA (which has more teeth to its sanctions) is also upping its interest in this area.
The other regulator that may take retailers unawares when publishing video content live or on-demand in dedicated video spaces is Ofcom. Ultimately, if you are providing TV-like content, there is a whole range of TV-like regulation, similar to those imposed on a TV channel or broadcaster, which will become applicable. These amount to a significant raft of codes and rules that may need to be built into any organisation's dedicated content creation and distribution processes.
Much of the content, clearances, compliance and regulatory responsibilities highlighted here can be subcontracted out of course. However, careful negotiation of these sub-contracted arrangements themselves, with partners or agencies, will be required and, crucially, ultimate liability and risk lies with the retailer or other company owning the content and making it available to the public.
So, becoming a media company, even in a small way, is an exciting and achievable prospect – which may help accelerate customer engagement towards the next digital frontier – but it is essential that the relevant skills, behaviours and rules are baked into retailers' organisations to help existing marketing functions transition effectively.
For more information, you can contact david.deakin@lewissilkin.com