Getting branded content right: ‘The Beauty Inside’ example

Pereira & O’Dell’s Cannes Lions Grand Prix winner for Intel and Toshiba, The Beauty Inside, is an undeniably beautiful piece of work. In addition to winning 3 Grand Prix Awards, it also won a Daytime Emmy for ‘Outstanding New Approach to a daytime series’ — a first for a piece of marketing. The series of shorts points to the bright future of the relatively new field of branded content and also demonstrates the impact this type of more ‘baked-in’ marketing can have.

The Beauty Inside follows Alex, a man with a very unique condition; every morning he wakes up as a different person, literally. Inside it’s all the same, the same thoughts, memories, wants and desires but on the surface it’s an entirely new landscape. His condition is also the cause for a very unique problem, he’s never had a relationship. Even if he fell in love it could never work because no matter who he was on the inside, every day he’d be someone else on the outside. Crucial to his story are the records he keeps of each day in an online diary using his Toshiba Ultrabook.

His unique condition offered the series’ creators an exciting opportunity to interact with the audience. Because Alex was never the same person it meant he could be any person; male, female, old, young, big, small, tall, skinny, African, Asian or European. What better place to source the different Alexes than the biggest pool of attention-hungry, technologically inclined, always-connected people; Facebook. Alex’s inherent condition also created an opportunity for the audience to examine and express their fears, hopes, feelings and daily challenges. Over its six-week course, the campaign received over 4 000 Facebook auditions, of those 26 were cast in the series and over 50 were featured on the Facebook page’s timeline. In addition, the series garnered over 70-million YouTube views, 97 000 Facebook likes and a 97% YouTube approval rating. But, what does this all mean for marketing and more significantly, what does it mean for branded content?

Speaking broadly, branded content falls into two categories; the kind that blatantly pushes product and the kind that more subtly sponsors content. The Beauty Inside sits firmly in the latter, and illuminates the way for campaigns to come. Never throughout the six webisodes is there a single product push, at least not a blatant one. You see the laptop Alex uses but there’s never a slow-motion close-up of the branding, or a deliberate shot of it. Rather, the film focuses on its characters, the environments and most importantly the story. In doing so it forges a unique relationship, and trust, with its audience. The audience is aware that the film is sponsored by Intel and Toshiba — each webisode’s opening credits acknowledges this — but that’s as far as the brand push goes, and that’s one of the most significant elements of the series.

People have long grown tired of blatant product pushing, a technique which often has as much chance of increasing sales as it does decreasing them. By instead focusing on high production value, story and delivery the brand forms a much stronger and longer lasting impression with its audience, so much so that the marketing aspect is almost akin to subliminal messaging — and the results speak for themselves; during the campaign sales increased 360%.

The campaign demonstrates that strong brand affinity can be built without blatant marketing and that there is a place for long-form content when it’s done right.