Branded Entertainment in America is an emerging market that is gaining increased importance. Consumers are smarter than ever and reject the notion of being sold to. With branded content, vendors must now create compelling narratives that draw customers into a more complete connection with their product. The challenge with this form of advertising is how do you foster that connection, how do you deliver an advert that is as sophisticated as the audience watching it?

Additionally, the regulations for these spots are different from traditional advertising. Typically, commercials break into thirty or 60 second spots. Branded content is almost always longer, which is a challenge creatively but also from a market awareness point of view – without the stringent guidelines laid down with traditional TV, as the creators of branded entertainment we are still trying to find the ideal running time of these spots.

For this particular project, we actually tailored the content to our audience. Before creative was written, market research showed that over 2 million people posted about bacon on social media sites per day. It was recognized that bacon was already part of people’s digital experience. From there, content was created with a specific vision of how to make a spot become viral.

It was decided that an outlandish, very funny spot was that treated bacon like a serious topic seemed to act as a cool counter balance to the way bacon is viewed traditionally viewed by the public at large.

The Wake up and Smell the Bacon spot has gathered over 5 million views in a little over 2 months, so in terms of viral saturation is has been wildly successful. In addition, the accompanying app has been a huge hit on the iTunes App store and has been downloaded almost 10,000 times.

It is a little hard to gage the success of the spot in terms of awareness of brand, Oscar Mayer, or product, Bacon, because both are household names with huge market saturation. Our goal was to change consumers relationships with bacon, to give a sly wink about how bacon is everyone’s favorite guilty pleasure.

With write-ups about the campaign in publications as varied as Ad Week, Yahoo, NPR and AOL, we feel as if we created a spot that spoke across a wide range of consumer interests.