Let’s be honest, grabbing your audience’s attention feels harder than ever. And keeping it? Even worse.
We’re all fighting against a tidal wave of content, ever-smarter ad blockers, and shrinking attention spans. The old playbook of interrupting people with ads just doesn’t cut it anymore, especially now that users can skip them.
So, how do you break through the noise?
You stop interrupting what people are interested in and become what they’re interested in. This is the power of a modern branded content production strategy—it’s how you earn, not rent, your audience’s time by creating video content and articles they actually want to watch and read.
By the end of this guide, you’ll have a clear roadmap to master this powerful marketing strategy. We’ll walk you through an actionable workflow, share game-changing insights from industry titans, and give you the tools to win in the new age of AI-driven search.
Before we dive into the “how,” let’s get crystal clear on the “what.”
Branded content is a sophisticated content marketing approach in which a brand funds or creates content that provides genuine entertainment, informational, or educational value to its target audience. The key is that the content aligns with the brand’s core values without being a direct sales pitch.
Branded content is quite different from traditional advertisement. The comparison table below shows why.
| Feature | Traditional Advertising | Branded Content |
| Approach | Shouts, “Buy our product!” | Whispers, “We understand you, we share your interests, and we have something valuable to offer you.” |
| Interaction model | Push model: Brand delivers the ad to an already captive audience | Pull model: Audience actively seeks the content |
| Primary Goal | Immediate sale | Building brand affinity, trust, and long-term audience engagement |
| Analogy | One-night stand | Building a meaningful relationship |
So, the hallmark of branded content is that it makes the brand a welcome part of the consumer’s life, not an annoying interruption. It’s about creating content so good that your audience would choose to watch it (pull model), even if it wasn’t associated with your brand.
Apart from knowing what branded content is, it’s also good to know what it’s not. As you know, the marketing world loves its buzzwords, and they often get jumbled. That’s the case with branded content, native advertising, and sponsored content.
In all cases, the audience is supposed to consume the content without feeling they’re watching a commercial. This similarity can cause confusion. However, it’s easy to untangle them based on who produces the content:
Furthermore, in 2019, Robert Rose, a marketing strategy consultant at Content Marketing Institute (CMI), outlined the differences between native advertising, branded content, and content marketing. His idea, which is still relevant today, is that we can stratify the content spectrum based on distribution channel ownership.
In this sense, branded content sits between native advertising (which is paid and uses third-party distribution channels) and content marketing efforts pushed out through owned distribution channels.
This isn’t just a philosophical shift; it’s a strategic pivot driven by hard numbers and changing consumer habits. The truth is, people are just sick of ads:
These trends show that basing your marketing strategy solely on ads is a losing game.
But the market is also sending clear signals about where you should put your marketing dollars: video content.
(Created by author. Sources: IAB, HubSpot, CMI)
First, video content (including branded video) is no longer just an option; it’s the main event:
As we’ll see in a moment, AI is heavily involved in this trend. That’s why 81% of marketers today use AI tools for branded content production and other tasks (source: CMI).
That was a look at where we are today. But understanding where we’re going also helps us know where we’ve been.
You see, branded content isn’t a new fad; its roots go back over a century with John Deere’s “The Furrow” magazine that debuted in 1895. In the 1930s, Procter & Gamble funded and produced radio dramas to connect with housewives, a move so effective it coined the term “soap operas” (source: Britannica).
(Created by author)
In 2004, Scott Donaton published a seminal book titled Madison & Vine: Why the Entertainment and Advertising Industries Must Converge to Survive. The basic premise is clear in the title. It argues that branded content—specifically branded entertainment—is the next evolution of advertisement.
Fast forward to today, and you have brands like Red Bull that have transformed into full-blown media houses, producing high-octane sports content that defines entire cultures. Lego has produced:
It’s clear that Lego’s strategy has paid off in marketing goals. These heavily branded content productions helped Lego:
But beyond that, the content itself turned into a revenue machine, with the five feature films alone grossing over $1 billion globally at the box office. And while we’re on the topic of box office hits, let’s not forget Mattel’s 2023 live-action Barbie movie starring Margot Robbie, which grossed almost $1.5 billion.
The common principle in this evolution is clear: build the value, and they will come. Let’s see how to do that.
Great branded content is the result of a disciplined, systematic process that turns a great idea into a high-performing asset. Adopting a structured workflow is the key to scaling your content creation efforts and ensuring consistent quality.
Here’s a four-phase blueprint you can steal for your next project.
(Created by author)
This is the foundational and most important step. A weak strategy guarantees a failed campaign, no matter how high your production value is.
It all starts by performing deep audience research to understand who you’re talking to, what they care about, and what problems they need to solve. AI is invaluable for this. Orbit Media’s CMO, Andy Crestodina, explains how to use it effectively in his article, The AI-Driven Content Strategy: 6 Powerful Prompts for Content Marketing:
Once you know your audience, you must create a detailed creative brief.
This is your project’s North Star. It should outline:
A well-crafted brief prevents miscommunication and ensures everyone on the team is aligned from day one.
This phase is all about execution, whether you’re writing an article or starting branded video production. First, decide if you’ll use an in-house team or hire a branded content agency for their specialized production services. If you hire a crew, make sure everyone understands their roles and deadlines.
For branded video creation, this stage involves everything from scripting and storyboarding to the actual shoot. You’ll find multiple specialized AIs for these tasks that can help make the process faster.
You’ll need to consider all the technical details that contribute to a polished final product:
Don’t forget post-production elements like motion design, visual effects, and sound design, which can elevate your video content from good to great.
The first draft is never the final draft. This phase is all about refinement and quality control. Your content should go through multiple rounds of review:
If you’re using Wordable, publishing to WP or another CMS is as simple as clicking a button.
But hitting “publish” isn’t the end of the job. You need a robust distribution plan to make sure your content reaches its intended audience and maximizes brand visibility.
The content lifecycle doesn’t end at publication; it enters a continuous feedback loop. In this final phase, you must track the content’s performance against the KPIs you set in your creative brief.
Go beyond vanity metrics like social shares and likes, and look at what truly matters:
Use these data insights to inform your future content strategy. Analyze what worked and what didn’t, and use that knowledge to update your content calendar and refresh high-performing evergreen pieces.
We already saw a glimpse of what leveraging branded content production in the future may look like for brands. If you really want to see where the world of branded content is heading, look to Hollywood.
Now, I know you’re probably thinking: “My company builds metal garages. What do we know about creating entertainment content? We’re not all RedBulls, Legos, or Mattels.”
That’s true, and it’s precisely why we wrote this post: To let you know that there’s already a solution to that problem.
Industry leaders are pioneering a new model to help brands become more than advertisers; to become full-fledged entertainment studios. Oscar-winning producer Michael Sugar, in an interview with McKinsey & Company, laid out this vision for the future of branded entertainment.
Sugar puts in a few words what we’ve laid out so far:
“I feel like the opportunity at this moment is for brands to reach the consumer directly through entertainment, rather than simply advertising against it.”
He explains that the trick is to partner with creators and talent who already have a project that aligns with your brand and values—one that your audience will love. This is the logic behind his company’s innovative “Way Upfronts” event, where world-class creators pitch ideas for short films and series directly to brands before they go to traditional studios.
This allows a brand to become a true producing partner on content funded by them, shaping the narrative from the very beginning. It’s a paradigm shift that materializes Scott Donaton’s Maddison & Vine hypotheses.
As Sugar explains, “We’re finding that as long as the talent are doing something they want to do and the brand is coming in to enable that, it rewrites the relationship between brand and talent.”
This is the future: brands creating culture, not just commercials.
And the best part for you as a brand? It’s cheaper and more effective than paying for ads!
The message for 2025 is clear: the most effective way to grow your brand is to stop interrupting what people want and become what they want. Embrace a strategic branded content production workflow and move from pushing ads at your audience to building genuine brand affinity through valuable, entertaining content.
Leveraging branded content production in 2025 means attending events like Way Upfronts and partnering with creators that already want to make content your audience is interested in.
Think like a media company, follow a disciplined process, and don’t be afraid to be ambitious. The future belongs to brands that are bold enough to create the culture their audience loves.And if you’ve created that amazing content in your Google Docs, Wordable can help you publish it to your WordPress site in a single click, saving you hours of formatting time so you can get back to what you do best: creating. Get started today.