The Future of Branded Entertainment

The Future of Branded Entertainment

This post originally appeared in our September issue of "Live Report from the Future of Marketing," our monthly Post-Advertising newsletter. Subscribe for free here.

Blogging has been a fundamental shift in marketing, ushering in social media and the post-advertising age; it's the cornerstone of inbound marketing. This regularly updated text-based content is the gasoline that fuels search engine optimization (SEO).

At Story we have a Facebook page with regularly updated content, we’ve written hundreds of blog posts here since 2008, we've published our own eBooks (with more to come), and we post daily updates to Twitter identities for both Story Worldwide and Post-Advertising. So take that into consideration when I tell you this:

Blogs and social media aren’t the be-all-end-all to content marketing.

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Photo Apps Add Nostalgia to Social Sharing

As we have evolved as a society, so too has our technology. In this past decade you could have found a digital camera that accepted 3.5" floppy disks (can you believe they're still for sale?). Rewind another decade and you probably could have hunted down a Polaroid camera with relative ease for your immediate photographic desires. However, now the best cameras in our households are often the ones in our cell phones. The iPhone 4 boasts a 5-megapixel camera that takes pictures just as well as the Canon S90, which retails at over $350.  The iPhone 4 screen itself is so high-resolution that even after a month of owning it, I still can't believe how sharp the images are.
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“Go Shit in the Ocean!” (Mad Men Season 4, Episode 8)

It took half a season to pick up, but Mad Men is certainly on to something in these last few episodes. Sure, Sunday night was light on the actual advertising process, but all the HR/office dramatics more than made up for it (and touched on an altogether different side of agency life). Also, there was a voice over! A voice over is a sure-fire narrative technique! Or, wait, maybe a voice over is just a slapdash emergency, the equivalent of Vodka and Mountain Dew?
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