The first panel up at Webby Connect today was to address branded comedy content and its production. My original intention was to have my wife attend since she’s the funny one in our civil arrangement. I’m glad that I didn’t!

I’m glad not because I could have learned what comedy gold is but that the panel literally had nothing to do with comedy. They spoke my language about distribution, production, creatives, agencies and building out campaigns for brands. This would have killed my wife and I in turn would have turned into her comedy gold in her next act.

On the panel were Jennifer Kavanagh from Oxygen Channel, Douglas Scott from Ogilvy and Steve Wax (@campfiresteve) from Campire. The moderator for this session was Gillian Reagan from The New York Observer. I will spare you the titles, but just know that these people are at the top of their game and industries.

Gillian asked the panel questions that had a comedy focus in them but they were taken by the panelists and shaped to match their experiences with production of branded content for clients. This isn’t a bad thing, believe me. They were able to riff off of each other and share information about their processes.

Some of the most useful information about how to create these campaigns came from Douglas Scott. He broke Ogilvy’s process down at a high level and touched on the life-cycle of that production and on through distribution. He highly recommended to have the brand involved in the creative process from the beginning of a project.

If you’re a creative you can stop gnashing your teeth. He made sure to point out that working with the client before hand to understand the process and the iterative nature of developing content.  The goal of this is to create a more authentic product that would make the brand not feel “propped up” or think that the content was poorly written due to too much or too little brand exposure.

Steve Wax addressed this issue after being asked about “creative freedom” and it brands get in the way. He simply stated that for a boutique agency like Campfire there isn’t a real need to continually bend to a brand since they are project based. Unlike agencies which are tied to the brand as matter of record and have built massive budgets around multiple campaigns.

Later in the panel Douglass Scott addressed his experience with CMO’s that are new to the digital and branded content space. Here’s the take away from this three minute lesson:

• Teach them the language of the writing room – scripts, dailies, etc.
• Show them examples of what has been successful
• Madison Avenue, Creatives and Hollywood are being driven together by economic realities and to continue high quality content production they need to work together

This was a jumping off point for the moderator to ask about mobile. Jennifer from Oxygen put this into perspective by giving out the percentage increase in mobile traffic over last year, up 500%.  She reiterated that now is the time to begin figuring out how to produce for mobile to get the most out of it for brands.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/4

Webby Connect NYC – Branded Content is a post from: TechStartups.com