Branded content in South Africa gets its own brand

The association was launched as an affiliated branch of the global BCMA, who have a head office in London.

We revealed the South African Branded Content Marketing Association Chapter at the AMASA Awards by sponsoring a give-away draw for a Go Pro camera as well as the Best Branded Content Campaign Award, won by NATIVE VML for Nedbank’s Ke Yona Team Search.

But the real story of The BCMA in South Africa started a few years back with advertising agency One Lady and a Tribe and our work with Pfizer on the Centrum Guardians Project. As this campaign (now in its eighth year) evolved from a print ad and 3Talk campaign into a 13 week TV series, it was clear we weren't working within a conventional advertising framework. We had begun creating branded content, but we hadn’t given it a name.

So we searched for an institute or association which could teach us more about advertising within the context of content to engage with consumers and came across the BCMA, with branches around the world (including USA, South America, Russia, Scandinavia, Middle East & North Africa and Spain) but there wasn’t a Chapter in South Africa - which made the next step obvious.

Anyone interested in marketing will be excited about transmedia or branded content: it's a narrative expressed across a variety of touchpoints in different ways, changing the way ideas are captured.Transmedia planning is, in essence, one story with multiple expressions of that story shared on different channels.

Marketers want to connect globally, share ideas, set industry standardsand develop best practice.To help us do this The BCMA has created a proprietary measurement tool with Ipsos, determining what makes branded content effective and how it delivers on ROI. We look forward to holding regular forums and workshops for BCMA SA members and share best practice as technology evolves and we need to be able to measure its effectiveness.

This note from Andrew Canter, Global CEO, BCMA, inspires us on our journey: “We are immensely proud to have launched the BCMA South Africa Chapter. It is an exciting time to be involved in branded content marketing and we are looking forward to working with the leading practitioners to showcase best practice and share learnings. We are so pleased to be working with such an inspirational team of people and are sure BCMA SA will be a great success.”

For more information on the Branded Content Marketing Institute of South Africa, visit the website. Alternatively, connect with them on Facebook or on Twitter.