Branded content marketing as creative labour: An invitation to disciplinary trespassing

Branded content is any form of media text originally created by a commercial brand for marketing-related purposes. It exists in multiple media forms, but surveys show that videos are the most popular among marketers, as well as digital media users. Compared to traditional adverts, branded videos are more diverse in terms of length and genre: from short to full-length features, from comedies to dramas, and from fiction to documentaries. Branded videos do not interrupt the viewers’ experience, as in fact they are the source of entertainment in which viewers are interested. To create their videos, some major brands like Unilever, Starbucks and BMW have set up in-house production units, but most advertisers rely on creative agencies, production companies, as well as audio-visual freelancers. This paper argues that branded videos should be regarded, and scholarly addressed, as a form of screen entertainment media; consequently, branded content marketing should be approached as a media production practice in all respects. This paper does so by drawing conceptual and theoretical frameworks from the growing tradition of critical media industries studies (Havens, Lotz & Tinic 2009; Holt & Perren 2009; Mayer, Banks & Caldwell 2009), and notably, from a production-centric perspective rooted in John Caldwell’s “integrated cultural-industrial approach” (2009). The paper performs a micro-level analysis of creative labour in the production of audio-visual branded content. Particularly, the paper addresses three main questions: (1) How do creative workers engage with commercial constraints in the production of audio-visual branded content? (2) How do they conceptualise creativity in the production of audio-visual branded content, as opposed to ‘pure’ entertainment media? (3) Does such conceptualisation of creativity affect their work-based identity (Du Gay 1996) as creatives? The paper applies a qualitative methodology based on semi-structured interviews with creative professionals, such as filmmakers, cinematographers and post-production artists, working in the production of branded videos. Moreover, the paper also uses data gathered from “interface ethnography” (Ortner 2010) conducted in February 2018 at “The Great Content Revolution”, an event organized by the Branded Content Marketing Association within BVE, the UK’s largest entertainment and media industry expo. So far, branded content has been predominantly, if not almost exclusively examined by scholars in marketing and management, and particularly by a kind of “administrative research” (Lazarsfeld 1941) concerned with finding and measuring criteria for promotional effectiveness. This paper invites media and communication researchers to extend the borders of their field of inquiry to include audio-visual branded content. Such ‘disciplinary trespassing’ finds justification in the inherent hybridity of branded content that straddles art and advertising, and indeed it is increasingly needed to foster critical understanding of a practice that has come to occupy a central role in the audio-visual media production industry.