CorpComms Magazine

Last year one of the most acrimonious takeover battles ever witnessed ended with the emergence of the world's largest steel company: ArcelorMittal. For the global employees of the two constituent steel industry titans, there was little else to talk about, especially as these firms had long been fierce rivals. For others in the corporate world, however, the ArcelorMittal merger sparked intense debate for quite different reasons.

For the first time, a company was not just using the web as an additional marketing tool. It was putting 'web TV' at the heart of its merger campaign, using it to communicate with and galvanize employees, and making it central to the launch of its combined brand. The new company's website, www.arcelormittal.tv, includes a series of films detailing the merger process, from the original Challenge right through to the brand launch and the first results, cinematically entitled The end is the beginning.

'The ArcelorMittal campaign was incredibly successful,' says Adam Penny, executive producer of ArcelorMittal web TV and director of London-based Connected Pictures. 'We spent nine months documenting employee reactions to the merger, followed by two months bringing it all together. And we created a real two-way communication, combining the films with a blog and an online 'Talk with the CEO' section.'

By asking employees to be completely honest in their views, Penny agrees this was a brave move on the part of ArcelorMittal's leadership team. The project also received global recognition for its effectiveness.

Branded content: the lowdown

For years, brand development strategists have worked hard not just to define a company's brand proposition, but also to market it effectively to an external audience. Many corporates have found success in a 30-second advertisement on television, but fragmentation arising from channel proliferation, combined with increasing control on the part of consumers over what they watch and when, has moved some corporate advertisers to more closely link their brand messages with entertainment.

This integration of brands into entertainment - or bringing entertainment value to brands - has become known as 'branded content'. The US market, due to more relaxed regulations over product placement, leads the way in terms of branded content, although EU and UK regulators have indicated that restrictions over here may ease soon. Indeed, Ofcom's special licence to Audi to launch its own TV channel in the UK suggests this might happen sooner rather than later.

The online branded entertainment site Bud.TV, launched by brewers Anheuser-Busch in February, is the most ambitious and costly example to date of a marketer creating web content tailored to its own specifications. The first show to appear, Finish our film, asked viewers to act out the middle portion of a film to fit with the prerecorded start (which involved a stripper and a stag night) and finish (with the would-be groom in front of a firing squad).

Nigel Hollis, chief global analyst at consultancy Millward Brown, is critical of the site, arguing that its sign-up procedures are prohibitive and that it is overly controlled and lacks intuitive navigation. These comments are unlikely to prevent other corporates taking up and improving the model, however.

As well as trying to make brands more entertaining, other US corporates are successfully integrating their brands into existing television programmes. A Proctor & Gamble (P&G) Herbal Essences campaign centred on the Mexican soap opera Rebelde, in which the teenage characters formed a band and entered a Herbal Essences-sponsored contest to write an original song featuring the words 'liso sensual' - the name of a new shampoo line.

The project didn't just involve the characters from the show; the TV audience was also invited to participate in the song-writing contest, with the promise that the winning entry would be performed on the soap and recorded by real-life band RBD.

'The more engaging the role of the brand, the more memorable the integration will be,' says Hollis. Certainly in this case, P&G managed to both engage viewers and stimulate their direct interaction with the brand line. The campaign won a prestigious Silver Effie award, presented by the New York American Marketing Association, in 2005.

New communication channels

Cynics might look at a global steel giant, assess its probable marketing budget and dismiss its web TV campaign as irrelevant to any standard-sized corporate - but they would be wrong. Over the past few years, a quiet broadband revolution has been enabling all sizes of companies to make their messages more immediate, global, interactive and visual.

'There has been a preconception that video or TV delivered over the internet is somehow inferior to the way we used to watch corporate films on video or DVD, or even over satellite,' says Stephen Watson, founder of CTN Communications. 'But with 70 percent of all internet connections in the UK now being delivered by broadband, we can share high-quality, high-production-value visual content online.'

Jersey Finance, which represents the island's financial services industry, provides a recent example of the way in which many companies are currently using the web for corporate television. Working with Spike Productions, Jersey Finance was able to stream to the internet full-length videos of speakers from its 2007 London conference.

'It was great for people who couldn't make the conference or those who just wanted to see the speakers,' says Warren Mauger, production manager and co-founder of Spike Productions. 'Best of all, it's a far more cost-effective solution. Before, we might have produced 200 DVDs instead, entailing higher production and distribution costs.'

The connectivity speed and quality of broadband is enabling companies to really make the most of these webcasting opportunities. Indeed, CTN has just launched London's first web-broadcasting studio. 'It's a television studio hardwired into the internet,' explains Watson. 'We've just spent a day there doing a webcast with Vodafone. The company would normally have held a conference bringing together all its UK sales teams. It's now all being done over the web.'

Web 2.0 has enabled the internet to become far more interactive and collaborative. That means a simple webcast is now rarely sufficient for the forward-thinking corporate. The Vodafone conference, for instance, will include not just the speaker films, but also discussion forums and flotation reports. The aim is not just to fill the gaps for those who cannot physically make the event, but also to provide a bona fide virtual event with all the features you'd expect of a typical 'real-world' conference.

'With webcasting, we can target a narrow or niche audience of decision makers and business leaders, but we can do it globally,' says Gareth Lofthouse, director for Europe, industry and management at the Economist Intelligence Unit. 'These senior executives don't just want to talk around a screen, though. They want interactive dialogue with a company CEO. They want to ask questions and get immediate feedback. They might want to download a survey while watching a speaker - and they'll want to be able to do it all online.'

With web TV enabling companies to provide high-quality films and videos not only online, but also in an interactive environment, it seems the ArcelorMittal experience will neither be unique nor confined to the larger businesses. Indeed, Connected Pictures is already talking to companies keen to follow the ArcelorMittal example.

Going digital

Much as the web continues to prove its seemingly endless potential, there are parallel developments going on in the more traditional broadcasting environment, particularly where digital TV has both broadened opportunities and made innovation more important than ever.

With digital television, there are numerous new channels and programmes to choose from. Although it's great for the consumer, this media fragmentation means advertisers have to think harder than ever to engage their target audiences. In addition, viewers can take more control with personal video recorders like Sky Plus and TiVo: not only can they choose when to watch the programmes they enjoy, they can also skip the adverts - obviously, that's not great news for corporate marketers.

Marketing teams have responded with some determination, however. In particular, corporate brands are becoming more closely entwined with entertainment. Product placement in TV programmes has always been a familiar tack to US marketing campaigns - EU and UK regulations have so far prevented such developments on this side of the Atlantic - but even in more regulated countries, films have long been used to promote brands. Just think of the cars used in James Bond movies.

Even in television programme making, corporates are becoming more innovative in the ways they can get their message across. Cable and satellite channels offer corporates the ability to commission and/or sponsor a show. The British Heart Foundation (BHF), for example, recently sponsored two series aired on the Discovery Home & Health channel: Kitchen Detective and Kids' Fit Squad. Both shows focused on diet makeovers, but also communicated the BHF's core educational message about the link between diet and exercise and a healthy heart.

Some companies have gone even further and used the availability of digital to launch their very own TV channels. In 2005, for example, Audi succeeded in getting a special licence from the UK broadcasting regulator Ofcom to launch its own channel in the UK, which includes content on the Audi product range as well as sports coverage and celebrity interviews (http://tv.audi.com).

Audi 's project represents the ultimate in directly linking a car brand with the broader entertainment sphere and reflects an increased appreciation by advertisers of the need not just to market their products alongside a TV programme or film, but also provide added-value content that really engages viewers.

Watching the big game

Of course, the problem with all these new opportunities for corporate marketing is knowing where to start. The ideal is viewed as combining traditional methods of advertising, such as print, with an interactive website or web TV, and perhaps some mainstream television advertising/branded content. One of the best examples of this integrated approach is Audi's launch of the A3 in the US. 'This was an intriguing and extremely effective example of multimedia branded content,' says Nigel Hollis, chief global analyst at consultancy Millward Brown.

'Audi essentially put together a game that involved offline print, the internet, a TV announcement and gaming as well,' Hollis continues. 'It was a completely immersive campaign that focused on solving the mystery of a stolen A3: The art of the h3ist [pictured on this page].' The website can be viewed at www.mckinney-silver.com/a3_h3ist.

Anything that comes close to this, however, might put off most companies simply because of the probable cost. Mauger has worked on a broad range of campaigns, though, and believes it is always possible to find the right solution for different budgets. 'We might sometimes get clients who have seen a film and want us to do the same for them, despite having only a tiny budget,' he says. 'Alternatively, we sometimes talk to corporates that think anything we might offer will be too expensive, when in fact we can come up with a campaign that's perfectly feasible for their budget. It's all about sitting down with clients and working out how best to meet their goals.'

There is no doubt the market for corporate TV, whether on the web or via digital channels, is going to grow. 'In the long term, at CTN we are staking our future on a view of the world that embraces a whole new genre of communication,' says Watson. 'Companies will have the means of delivery and a choice of media that will allow them to communicate directly with their key stakeholder audiences.'

Mauger agrees. 'The corporate film market is going to grow exponentially,' he predicts. 'More companies will have their own TV channels, and more companies will become their own broadcasters.'

It's a brave new world of corporate TV out there, but for businesses that think through their goals and messages carefully, it is surely the dawn of more effective, interactive, immediate and engaging communication, both for internal and external audiences.

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