The Future of Branded Content Might Not Be Content At All

We are officially in the post social media era. What was once a set of channels connecting you with your friends has been fully replaced by a world of strangers and AI slop. And you don’t need a crystal ball to see how the internet itself will soon be nearly all machine-made content. Meanwhile, brands are still out here playing the same game where content is king. 

It’s not hard to see why this is not a winning formula anymore. We’ve gone from connection to consumption. What was once about keeping people engaged and connected has turned into something even simpler… keep people scrolling. 

For the platforms the benefit of your time online is the creation of endless data points, with every view, swipe, or tap being sold to the highest bidder. 

But for brands? What’s the value in the endless content we make?

A quick observation: A completed 15-second view of your video equates to an average of 0.08% of a person’s daily phone time.

While the practice of advertising through reach and frequency, engineering breakthrough creative, and relevant messaging against owned audiences is still an incredible value, many brands lack the platform to maximize the value of the creative firehose they’ve built. Afterall, this is a trillion dollar war we’re in for a fraction of a percent of a person’s attention.

So, how do brands actually win?

We must move beyond content for content sake. I believe brands that shift from Content as King, to The Utility King are the ones that will endure in this next era of marketing. Brands that stop making things to watch and start building things to use will win the time and valuable attention from their audiences. The shift to make is to move from someone giving your brand 0.05% of their daily phone time, to instead giving people a reason to keep coming back to you. By taking time to solve a nuanced, annoying little problem at no added cost, the brand can forge new relationships and show up for consumers in more impactful ways. 

Three ways to start doing this today:

1. Give the people what they’re searching for: By tapping into user-intent research, brands can categorize and prioritize critical areas of consumer needs in their category, or within the product lifecycle. Pin-pointing these needs unlocks opportunities for the brand to be of service to their customers by helping them overcome their biggest challenges and questions. Content creation can be meaningful, by feeding a channel like YouTube, a massively underused option where long-term utility content has durability to continue to show up years after publishing (unlike the daily churn for attention in feeds). 
2. Go beyond content: By making a simple solution that answers specific consumer needs, at no added costs, brands can infuse themselves in new ways to a consumer’s daily routine. For example, the other day I noticed that the Golf Now app didn’t have the courses closest to my house (there were about nine of them just missing). So in 30 minutes (and with zero coding skill) I built a functioning app to serve up those tee times. Brands that are able to prototyping a consumer-ready solution will yield more than just watch-time, it will put your brand into their daily habits.
3. If you must do content, coordinate it: We call this flooding-the-zone. Your PR team chasing Gen-Z, while your social team partners with mom-fluencers, and your DR campaigns segmenting your audiences based on behaviors alone will leave your brand fragmented in the market-place. By atomizing consistent content themes across all those channels will deliver outsized impact from brand consistency (and positively impact your brand’s discoverability with the LLMs)

When the internet is 99% AI slop, the only way to survive is to be the 1% that actually works. If I’m working brand side, I’m on a mission to stop trying to win the Attention War and start winning the Reliability War. “How does this help the customer?” is my guiding question going forward. Because building trust through value is a much better look than begging for 0.05% of scroll time. 

What do you think will be mission critical for branded content in the future?

If you enjoyed this and want to chat more sometime, I’d love to hear from you.