The Future of Branded Content: A Conversation with Scott Donaton
Scott Donaton is an experienced brand and growth marketer, creative leader, and content producer who has dedicated his career to tapping the power of storytelling to grow brands and transform businesses. He most recently served as Hulu's Head of Marketing. Prior to that, Donaton spent a number of years on the agency side, first as the Global Chief Content Officer at Interpublic Group's UM and head of UM Studios and later as the Global Chief Creative & Content Officer at Digitas and a member of its Executive Leadership Team. He started his career in media as a journalist and then as Editor-In-Chief of Ad Age and as Publisher of both Ad Age and Entertainment Weekly.
Donaton coined the phrase "Madison & Vine" and is the author of an acclaimed book by the same name. The book helped launch the branded content revolution by declaring that the entertainment and advertising industries needed to converge to survive.
The Continuum sat down with Scott recently to discuss the past, present, and future of branded content.
You started your career at Ad Age and ultimately served as the Editor-in-Chief and then the Publisher of Ad Age. How did that come about?
I actually joined Ad Age while I was still in college. The summer between my sophomore and junior years of college, I got a part-time job there. I was basically an assistant to the guy who edited a page about the media industry. I had wanted to be a journalist since I was about twelve, and I thought this would help me get one of my dream jobs: either a columnist for the New York Daily News or a feature writer at Esquire, the New Yorker, or New York Magazine. I went to school in New York, so I rearranged my schedule to stay at Ad Age during the year. Honestly, I have no idea how I did it all because I was also the editor of my school’s newspaper and had a weekend job at a catering hall.
When I graduated, I applied to all those dream places, thinking my two years at Ad Age covering media would make me a shoo-in. I got a few offers, but they were for lower-level research jobs. Ad Age offered me a job as a byline reporter job right out of school, so even though I did not think I wanted to be in this thing called B2B media, I loved it. What I quickly realized was Ad Age really covers all things pop culture, just through a business lens.
You got to Ad Age when digital technology was just beginning, and you had a big role in creating their new offerings. Can you tell us about some of the things you worked on?
Early on, I launched a section called Interactive Media and Marketing. We didn't have the Web yet; what we had was all these technologies like CD-ROMs and dial-up services like AOL and Prodigy. Within a year or so of starting that section, the commercial Web was born, and that became the main focus. As a result, I became the Executive Editor of New Media at Ad Age, which meant that I was also responsible for turning a seventy-something-year-old print weekly into an always-on multi-platform brand. We actually launched Ad Age online before the Web on Prodigy and E-world, which was Apple’s early product. We were one of the first media websites to launch; I think maybe Wired and Time Magazine were ahead of us.
I left Ad Age for a while after that to start TV Guide Online, which at the time was the largest print magazine in the country with a weekly circulation of twenty million. Then a year later, Ad Age approached me to come back as Editor, and I did that for about ten years.
I absolutely loved that job. I was dealing with every possible part of the advertising-marketing-media ecosystem, but I was also working with our reporters, so I knew what was happening in the automotive industry and the magazine industry and pharmaceuticals and ad agencies and at client companies and media companies of every type. The relationships I built then continue to be a really valuable part of my network today.
But there was something else. I came to realize that I was having the same conversation with seven or eight different people in seven or eight separate industries, but they didn’t realize that these conversations crossed industries, and it helped us see around corners. At some point, I became obsessed with the idea that every new form of media that was coming out was about putting the end user in control of the information flow rather than the distributors and creators of information. It was quickly becoming clear that when people are empowered, they choose not to interact with advertising in its intrusive and interruptive forms.
As the editor of Ad Age, I felt that one of our biggest missions was to help our audience figure out what to do next because the intrusive, interruptive forms of marketing that had worked for one hundred years were no longer going to be as efficient and effective.
“At some point, I became obsessed with the idea that every new form of media that was coming out was about putting the end user in control of the information flow rather than the distributors and creators of information. It was quickly becoming clear that when people are empowered, they choose not to interact with advertising in its intrusive and interruptive forms.”
So, what was that, the thing that came next once we could all bypass traditional advertising with the skip buttons on our TiVo?
There obviously wasn’t or isn’t one thing, but the answer that I became particularly enamored with was the idea that brands could tell stories that were worthy enough of people's time that they would actually seek them out. BMW films are one of the best, earliest examples of that—people wanted to watch them even at a time when you had to get your hands on a CD-ROM or download them overnight on your computer.
I basically formed the rest of my career around this idea that brands can create and tell longer-form stories that people would seek out, spend time with, and share. I wrote a book called “Madison & Vine” almost twenty years ago about how the ad industry and entertainment industry needed to come together in content-commerce partnerships. And to your question – TiVo is one hundred percent what set off the current interest in branded content almost single-handedly.
After Ad Age, you ended up on the agency side. How did that happen, and what kind of work did you get to do?
I got a call from somebody at Interpublic who basically said, “When you wrote your book, I thought it was all BS, but now every client and prospective client is asking what our point of view and capabilities are in branded content, and we don't have any. Can you come help us figure it out?” It was different being on the agency side, but as I said, I was really dedicated to this idea of telling stories people would want to hear, and this allowed me to move from an observer to a practitioner.
One of the first things I did is still one of the things I'm proudest of. It was a Web comedy series with Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, and Ben Silverman. They had a production company at the time called Dumb Dumb that was working with brands, and Denny's wanted to improve the chain’s image among eighteen to twenty-four-year-olds. At the time, it was thought of as the place mom took the family after church, but Denny's wanted the younger crowd to know it was open 24/7/365 and to think of it as the place you should come for bacon and eggs at two A.M. after you've been out with your friends.
We created this Web series, and Dave Koechner was the host. He would interview celebrities while eating in a Denny's. He interviewed Jason Bateman, Sarah Silverman, Chris Pratt, and Amy Poehler, all of these great comedians in this improv setting. They never talked about the food. They never talked about being at Denny's. We made two seasons. It got tremendous amounts of traffic, but more importantly, it transformed the perception among younger people that Denny's was right for them. Sales increased specifically during these hours and with this audience without any other marketing targeted to them.
What are your takeaways from those early days of branded content? And what advice do you have for brands today about making content that stands out?
Sometimes I marvel at how far it's come, and other times I'm frustrated by how much we're still dealing with the same issues. I think the biggest challenge still is that a lot of brands just don't know how to measure the impact of branded content. Marketers aren't sure that they can prove that the investments they make in that content are going to pay off, and certainly not in the short term.
One of the things that I told brands then, and I'll tell them now, is to be very clear about what you mean by return on investment going in. Success can't just be how many people watched it, so you have to figure out what else you’re going to measure in terms of business results.
This goes to this feeling in all of marketing right now that there's been an overcorrection toward performance marketing at the expense of the brand because of the short-term impact. I think that there has to be a much more holistic recognition that it's all about demand creation and demand capture. When you’re talking about something like brand love, the metrics can seem too squishy, but you have to understand that most branded content is not going to result in somebody walking into your store the next day to buy a sweater or a box of cookies. What it might do is set them up so that the next time they want to buy a box of cookies, they pick yours, or the next time they need a sweater, they go to your store because they know that your values align with theirs.
As an industry, we haven’t solved this, and I get why it frustrates marketers—in a world of quarterly results, these are harder investments for marketers to defend.
“This goes to this feeling in all of marketing right now that there's been an overcorrection toward performance marketing at the expense of the brand because of the short-term impact. I think that there has to be a much more holistic recognition that it's all about demand creation and demand capture.”
You mentioned people wanting to buy from brands that share their values. We hear about values marketing a lot today. Do you think that the rise in branded content and brand storytelling is behind this push by consumers?
I think you could go back to the earliest days of advertising and find great print ads, great radio ads, and great early TV ads that reflected the values of the companies producing them because great advertising was always about great storytelling. But I do think there was a shift as branded content became popular. My favorite TED Talk of all time is Simon Sinek's “Start with Why.” Around that time, brands started realizing that they had to stop talking about what they do and start talking about what they do for people and what role they actually play in their lives. Then, they have to tell that story in a more authentic and meaningful way. Longer-form content became a great vehicle to do that, and I think everyone who was doing branded content early on was very conscious of making sure that clients saw this as a goal.
It goes back to that distinction between interrupting someone who is trying to watch one thing to deliver a commercial message versus becoming the content that someone wants to spend time with. Once someone has to seek out, spend time with, and hopefully share your content, you have to focus a lot more on what they want to hear rather than what you want to say.
Your most recent role was as head of marketing at Hulu. What made you switch to the brand side, and what did you do there?
Randy Freer, who was the CEO at the time, and Kelly Campbell, who was the CMO and later became the President, were the people who hired me. They were very focused on the idea of improving the experience for viewers. Everything about the viewing experience on streaming was different than linear TV except for the advertising experience, which was exactly the same. They wanted to offer as many other opportunities and innovative ways for brands to present themselves on Hulu as they could using data-driven insights, technology, and storytelling.
Randy said to me one day, “Listen, I don’t care if you make things better for our advertisers. I need you to make things better for our viewers.” I loved that. We wanted to have brands creating cool stuff that audiences wanted to spend time with, not just to tap into incremental revenue or to offer another gadget for the ad sales team to sell, but because we wanted the viewer to have a better experience. That’s what won me over.
I joined Hulu as Head of Creative and then built out a creative studio internally and a branded content team. We did some great work. We distributed and marketed a documentary about gender inequality in restaurant kitchens with KitchenAid; we created a six-episode reality show for Samsung. We also created the first ever after-shows at Hulu as a companion series. No one had done that in streaming because they thought it was too different from linear since you didn’t necessarily go straight from watching one show to what was on next. We created one for The Handmaid's Tale, then one for Ramy, and then one for Only Murders in The Building, which is currently nominated for an Emmy for short-form content. It was created by our marketing team and nominated for an Emmy as great programming.
I've had this career that, on the one hand, seems like I went down a lot of different, surprising paths. On the other hand, there’s a common thread: tapping the power of storytelling to gather people around your campfire and keep them coming back. It was my job as editor of Ad Age, and it was my job as head of marketing for Hulu.
With all of that experience under your belt, do you have any advice for those in the ad industry today?
I continue to think that the industry talks about using new media forms and about being innovative and using technology and data to transform storytelling, and yet it's amazing how many ad campaigns still start with “Here's our 30-second spot, here’s our :15, here's our :06, here's the out-of-home, have a nice day.” And if they have a little money left over, they may try to do something cool with it. That might be a slight exaggeration, but it's kind of not. Everything about how audiences consume media is changing, and too much of the advertising experience is exactly what it’s always been.
The industry has to get bolder. I understand that it’s hard to let things go, especially if they still work. The thirty-second spot may still work for a lot of brands. I'm not saying walk away from it, but you’ve got to be bolder; you've got to watch what audiences are doing and dive into it.
Years ago, I was at a pitch, and Rishad Tobaccowala said something that I’ve never forgotten. He told a client, “You’re not in danger of falling behind your competitors – you’re in danger of falling behind your customers.” That’s even more true today. Brands have to create better things for audiences, and the advertising industry has to take better advantage of all of the tools we have and all of the changes in people's behaviors to give them better things.
November 15, 2023
