The Future of Branded Content According to Buzzfeed
Buzzfeed has run over 1000 branded content programs. It sees two trends as to where the market is going.
I’ve talked a lot about branded content these past years. And if you’ve noticed, we at Toast have taken an angle in how we approach it: video.
The roots of the agency come from television and marketing, and this is no surprise we would combine these two to form what we are today (although written and photo content remain extremely relevant, and we also offer those services).
But this has been motivated by recent trends in how the audiences the brands we work with consume content. Video consumption has seen a very, very, very strong increase the past 24 months.
This trend is not something we’re the only ones to have noticed, of course. And in a recent interview, Buzzfeed’s executive vice president of business operations, Eric Harris, pointed at two strong trends in branded content: mobile and video.
“On mobile, which is now more than 50 percent of our traffic and growing, I think native advertising is really the only monetization strategy that’s working right now,” Harris said.
If your brand is not producing video, it should be thinking about it. (At Toast we even think that if your brand is not producing video, it should be. Period.) And if it is not considering the mobile aspect of content consumption, it should also be thinking about it.
A Contently has a summary of the interview Harris gave to the American Press Institute. If you want to dig even deeper, here is the link to the entire 8-question Q&A mentioned in the article.