Thursday, May 17th, 2012
Branded Entertainment – Does ROI to the client matter?
Brawny Academy is now winning awards and is considered one of the best examples of Branded Entertainment – but Georgia Pacific (the client) has defected from Fallon to DDB. How good can it really be if the client leaves and there is no return on investment.
Brawny Academy is great entertainment. Last June, the first episode of "Brawny Academy" went up on the Web. The cameras followed eight men who spent several days at a Northern California lodge in the woods learning useful skills from the ‘Brawny Man’.
The web piece was designed to be watched by woman and the plan was for the show to ‘go viral’. Unfortunately … it did not.
Fallon did a wonderful job on the show, but besides a couple of press releases, there was no apparent effort to get women to watch the show
But both Fallon and G-P executives conceded in interviews last year that while the series produced a marked improvement in brand image among women who watched it, not as many women watched as they’d hoped.
Brawny also lost it’s No. 2 position in the $2.3 billion paper towel category to Kimberly-Clark Corp.’s Viva, according to Ad Age. According to Information Resources Inc., Brawny lost 1.4 share points to Kimberly-Clark Corp.’s Viva in the 52 weeks ended May 20.
A branded entertainment effort can be wonderful, but unless the agency can demonstrate a return on their client’s investment, media dollars will keep flowing towards traditional media buys.
