Tag Archives: nich carlson

Branded Entertainment Gone Sour

This is a cute parody video about branded entertainment– courtesy of Nicholas Carlson, who looks a lot cooler on his Business Insider profile than hisĀ dorky Twitter pic from G4.

It shows the College Humor guys (I’m a big fan) struggling with a fictional company that wants to brand the crap out of their video (but of course sets the stage by saying they don’t want to interfere with the creators’ voice). But don’t forget that Nalts was spoofing “sellouts” more than 2 years ago… before YouTube was bought by Google and the sellouts were rare.
In my experience, the marketer interferes in more subtle but equally funny ways. The biggest challenge is meeting the marketing/legal requirements without muting the humor.
I’ve had great experiences where the video actually gets funnier through a healthy discussion. But I’ve also seen a video lose it’s quirky feel because few are comfortable with the tradeoffs. Will taking away that edgy moment reflect better on the brand, even if it drops views by 20%? It’s really subjective. Or objective. One of those.