Trail blazers: The art of branded entertainment

Australia has the potential for creating effective branded content but first brands need to step away from the comforts of traditional media and creatives need to realise it’s not ‘selling out’. Alice Terlikowski writes.

There was once a time when creatives worked on films, TV shows and the occasional 30-second TV ad. These days the advertising and film worlds are swifty colliding to make way for a new opportunity for creativity – branded entertainment.

Branded content/entertainment is best described as an extension of a brand’s marketing activity. Turning the clock back, radio soap operas were so called because the content was produced specifically to be sold around soap brands, targeting the mother of the house.