In South Africa, branded entertainment is in its infancy, consisting mostly of heavily sponsored TV shows. Few marketers understand its richness and subtlety. Yet South Africa as a market is growing rapidly more sophisticated and ripe for new expressions of branded content, with more than 5m PC internet users and millions of mobile browsers, the rise of video on demand, high definition TV, peer-to-peer networks and IPTV. Increasingly resistant to conventional advertising messages, South African youth are also increasingly exposed to branded content and are becoming more difficult to seduce. Overt or unsubtle branding is – literally – a turn-off. Since we were promoting a MK, a cable TV music channel, to youth it made sense to create content – but we knew that this content had to be good enough to compete with the entertainment on offer on competing channels like MTV. Asked to revitalise the brand’s identity, we created 3 living characters (all called MK), whose lives unfolded in episodes that MK audiences could watch, and read about in their blogs and Facebook pages. They could also conduct real-time relationships with viewers through social media.

We created a generation Y, an undefined brand using a blend of media. MK became 3 different living characters whose lives unfolded 'live' as 60" idents, each depicting a moment of the character’s day, to form an entire story over a period of 20 days. Each had a soundtrack by an unknown new South African band.

The idents directed the audience to MK’s blog, Facebook and Twitter feed where he had written the rest of the story. Viewers could BBM or direct message MK in real time. We made MK a real-time person, who was just like one of our target audience.

We got the highly influential youth we wanted to attract, watching MK again. Before the campaign, the MK Facebook page had 83,000 friends - each of whom had, on average, 84 friends. The ‘MK is’ Facebook page, launched by the campaign, attracted 467 people, in the youth target market and the youth demographic, each of whom had, on average, 457 friends. These highly influential people not only loved the new MK personalities, but they were posting the campaign stories in their feeds - giving us a potential reach of 208,000 friends or fans. Of those, 20,000 interacted for the first time with the MK story in a post from a friend’s feed. In short: the ‘MK is’ fans were 4x more influential than the existing MK fan base. We got cooler, more influential young people to love MK.