Content marketing on TV: How to strike the right balance

It is a known fact that no other medium can give the kind of reach like TV. It is the most desired medium of communication for marketers if they do not have to worry about the cost. A campaign becomes larger than life the moment it comes alive on TV. Despite the benefits of marketing a brand on TV being apparent, it is not a must-have medium for most of the marketers when it comes to content marketing.

With the advent of digital and OTT players, a lot of marketers’ money has moved from TV to these two mediums. Digital is much cheaper than TV, provides a clear definition of the target audience and real-time engagement. Running a content piece on TV is a lot costlier than airing an ad, and so marketers are cautious about doing branded content on television.

Karan Kumar

Karan Kumar, Senior Vice-President and Chief Marketing Officer, DLF, emphasised that the TV channels needed to revisit their business model. “They should realise OTT is already becoming a big challenge to cable and satellite TV. So, what is TV’s reincarnation version 2.0? If TV continues to bank on the business model of advertising revenue, it will never pan out for long-format content. I don’t think they have still woken up to the challenge. They think it can be stretched more,” he said.

He went on saying, “In branded content, first of all, a brand is investing in content creation. So why will a brand incur that cost and at the same time incur the cost of airing content on TV based on the advertising revenue model?”

But despite multiple benefits of distributing content on digital, the magnificence and reach that TV brings to the table cannot be matched. Only those with a full-fledged marketing plan, balanced integration in content, audience match and apt air time can derive maximum ROI from branded content on TV.

No marketer will shy away from doing content on TV if his/her ROI is not compromised. No TV broadcaster will refrain from giving importance to branded content if the brand doesn’t force itself too much into the content and have unreasonable demands. It is all about finding the right balance.

Sumeet Singh

Sumeet Singh, Chief Marketing Officer, Info Edge, said any piece of content that is co-created by both a content platform and a brand brings out the best results. She said, “A marketer too feels the heart of the broadcaster when he/she is involved in the creation of content. The marketer also wants to do something seamless to the audience. When a marketer puts a lot of effort into creating something meaningful, and it turns out to be a seamless experience for the consumers, then automatically it gets prime time viewing on a channel.”

Giving an example of Info Edge’s first branded content experience on TV, ‘The job show’, which her team and CNBC together created in 2005, Singh said, “It was the first reality show of a real job interview on TV in the world. The channel viewed it as a piece of content that added value. It was not a joint property just because we were putting in money. It was truly a joint property from the perspective of both the parties putting in their expertise. Hiring was our expertise. We were helping to conduct the interview. They were producing it.”

Time and again, content practitioners have been emphasising on bringing content to the forefront of marketing practices, but there is still a lot of time to catch up. There is a need for a leadership team within the organisation to take marketing decisions led by content.

Kumar Deb Sinha

According to the Country Head of Dentsu StoryLab, Kumar Deb Sinha, the essential thing that channels should do is to have a branded content solutions team with decision-making powers.

Sinha said, “Most of the time, the first level of conversation happens with the FCT (free commercial time) sales team. They don’t understand the solutions piece at all. At times, they end up over-committing. In the process, solutions get killed due to the lack of knowledge and ignorance. If a conversation is happening between the FCT sales team and the buying team at an agency, neither of them has expertise on the content solutions front, and most of the time it ends up becoming a sponsorship deal.”

He said, “A lot of times the solutions team doesn’t have the seniority to make decisions. High dependence on bosses and the lack of authority to make decisions on behalf of the platform make them lose out on the conversations. The moment you put senior professionals driving this vertical, you’ll definitely see the change.”

Will channels ever sell their prime time slot to brands?

Another big challenge while doing branded content on TV is that it rarely gets prime time or important slots on TV. The problem here is two-way. It is not that channels don’t put branded content purposely on prime-time slots, but it has to be good enough not to disrupt the content consumption experience for the audience. A lot of times, brands push themselves too much, which deteriorates the quality of content and makes it more about the brand and less about the content.

Explaining the two-pronged problem arising from both brands and TV channels, Sinha added, “A lot of times, the brand is only interested in talking about his brand, and they don’t understand the importance of content and programming on TV. On the other hand, the programming team thinks that it is already getting money upfront and they lose interest. Their targets are already met. The programming team doesn’t get involved much because it is a sales call.”

Singh of Info Edge said, “The TV channels will give you a prime-time slot together keeping the viewer in mind, the objective of the brand and the platform. But if the brand only wants to talk about them in the content, then very seldom you’ll get the prime slot.”

Giving an example of the web series, ‘Disha Di Wedding’, on Punjabi channel Pitaara, in which the Info Edge brand Jeevansathi was integrated, Singh said, “The channel came to us before the web series was created. They had a lot of places where we could integrate, but we took a conscious decision not to integrate the brand everywhere. We did the web series with them but in our way. We didn’t want to be on the face.”

She said, “If a brand wants to be so much on the face on TV, then it must play the 30-second ad, which it has created so well. The content must be seamless for the consumers. The brand needs to be careful to place itself in the right context and place.”

In the past, one of the most successful branded content initiatives, ‘Wheel Smart Shrimati’, ran at a prime-time slot of 9 pm on Doordarshan because the brand integration wasn’t disrupting but facilitating the content.