The creative challenge of our time is how to capture consumers’ attention in a fully mediated environment. Connected consumers control what they watch, when they watch, and where they watch it. If they don’t want to engage, they don’t have to. They fast forward, and click away from content – most often advertising – that intrudes on the content they want.

As a result intrusive interruptive forms of marketing are becoming less effective and efficient. This gives brands a crucial mandate: They must be invited into the conversations consumers are having by creating content that audiences will choose to spend time with. As this evolution has happened, Branded Entertainment has moved from a trend to an essential tool in the marketing mix. With the exception of children’s programming, cigarette brands and alcohol, there are almost no restrictions to what is now a very robust Branded Entertainment movement.

Brands that want to connect with Millennials need to always be on and to provide engaging content that audiences want to share. We partnered with youth media powerhouse Vice, leveraging its editorial credibility and scale to reach our target. With its music channel, Noisey, we created Style Stage – a first-of-its-kind entertainment platform that celebrates the connection between music, hair and style. Daily editorial content and original video series live on a custom style hub and are promoted via paid media targeting youth, aggressive use of owned assets and a robust social media plan to drive engagement and conversation.

In its first month, the program quickly surpassed expectations, seeing fantastic engagement among our target audience, and exposing hundreds of thousands of Millennials to Garnier Fructis’ cohesive “Strength to Shine” message.

We are well on our way towards surpassing our goals in 2013: 12 m video views of original content, 100m PR impressions, 200m social media impressions and 25m page views to our Style Stage platform.

In just the first month after the program’s launch, we saw:

- Over 1m views of our original 31-minute Style Stage documentary

- 3,100+ SXSW event attendees

- 40,000+ SXSW attendee impressions

- 421 outlets covered the kickoff, reaching nearly 75 mil people

- 20 mil-plus Twitter impressions, with 100% positive sentiment among related Tweets

- In the first two out of seven stops on our Headhunter College Tour we've engaged with 731 students at our style stations, distributed over 4,500 samples, received over 150 audition submissions and garnered over 1.5MM brand impressions