Title	STYLEDIARIES
Brand	OTTO
Product/Service	OTTO.DE
Category	A03. BRAND OR PRODUCT INTEGRATION INTO AN EXISTING PROGRAMME OR PLATFORM
Entrant Company	PILOT Hamburg, GERMANY
Contributing Company	PILOT Hamburg, GERMANY

Name	Company	Position
Carsten Riemann	Pilot Hamburg Gmbh/Co. KG	Director Strategy
Sabine Krug	Pilot Hamburg Gmbh/Co. KG	Executive Producer
Jennifer Michalla	Pilot Hamburg Gmbh/Co. KG	Account Manager
Jürgen Irlbacher	Pilot Hamburg Gmbh/Co. KG	Creative Director
Julia Schimon	Pilot Hamburg Gmbh/Co. KG	Editorial Department

The Campaign

Branded Entertainment still is a new tool in the marketing mix used by companies and brands. Thus, this recent field needs clarification with regard to its structures and the involved parties (e.g. the brand itself, the publisher and the protagonist). However, according to pilot this effort is profitable for all parties of these projects. In times when communication to the target group gets harder – because of a fast changing media market (digitalization, defragmentation) and dynamic communication models (communication via social media) – you have to offer more than advertising, for example relevant content. With this specific offer (e.g. "music" for a younger target group) a brand can benefit from a high level of interest, attention and commitment regarding the topic and the brand identity. Thanks to this approach, brands turn away from their traditional push communication, spending a lot in paid media – to a pull communication generating content for earned and owned media.

Results

As mentioned above – the first step was to analyze relevant topics for the target goup concerning fashion, beauty and lifestyle. Once we got these important insights referring to the target group, we published video episodes every other week. The next step was to get the target group's attention concerning this content in order to evoke interest and commitment. We therefore distributed the video- and fashion-content on platforms where female e-shoopers are present. Consequently, a yahoo-cooperation with a microsite in the fashion channel came into existence. A video seeding campaign in related blogs was created and finally a distribution strategy to other highly affine placements, websites, blogs and multipliers was introduced. Additionally, this content was placed within the OTTO-Channels, e.g. YouTube, Facebook and blogs.

Women love fashion, new outfits, trends, the styling of celebrities … thus, it was easy to generate a concept being relevant to the female target group of e-shoppers. The content for each video episode, being published every second week, was drawn from an analysis of target group activities, e.g. queries via search machines or social buzz topics. Therefore we were able to identify what was truly relevant – the concept of "relevance" defined by the target group itself.

We were continuously keeping in touch with the target group over a long period of time (7 months). The videos captured the target group's attention and curiosity – with more than 67.000 views per video and more than 900,000 views in total. The videos were shared by guests, bloggers and communities. The stories generated PR in public and B2C-press. Market research executed in this context confirmed that branded content approaches contain great potential for reinforcing brand identity much more than standard media. Furthermore, this approach enabled a refunding of project budgets on a long-term perspective thanks to an analysis of the entire customer journey.