Pandora’s box? The promise and peril of branded content partnerships

Branded content has long been an essential instrument in Marketing’s toolkit, as it allows companies to inform and entertain and, most importantly, engage their audiences in ways that traditional advertising rarely does. While proprietary content activities require organisations to invest heavily into editorial resources and processes, the co-creation of content with an established publishing brand is an alternative approach that many brands have started utilising in the past few years. These branded content partnerships, often referred to as native advertising, offer considerable benefits, including the content credibility of a legacy editorial brand, as well as its storytelling, production and distribution capabilities. Journalists and researchers alike have emphasised the risks posed by such a collaboration, as it threatens to blur the boundary between editorial and advertising content and lead to an audience’s negative perception of both content sponsor and editorial partner. Much less attention has been paid to the operational challenges that brand practitioners are faced with when producing branded content, particularly when partnering with a media house. On the basis of more than a dozen bespoke native content projects developed with leading editorial brands such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, this paper summarises potential pitfalls along the entire value chain, from original content development to questions of brand visibility and editorial support to active promotion and distribution of the content. In light of the increasingly broad creative offering from media houses and their direct collaboration with advertising clients, the paper concludes by investigating potential risks of disintermediation posed to traditional creative and media planning agencies.