Brand are changing how they communicate. Insight needs to keep up.

Next week One Minute To Midnight will be at Brand Storytelling’s Elevate Event facilitating workshops with the creators and commissioners of Branded Entertainment. Here’s why we’re so excited to be part of this work.

We all know that how brands communicate with their audiences is changing. Branded Entertainment (in all its forms) is no longer a nice to have, but a necessity.

The most exciting brands and those that connect most meaningfully with their audiences, are now storytellers. The advertising industry has both driven and embraced this new opportunity. For example just recently our friends at The Martin Agency launched Martin Entertainment to help brands tell stories that are "as compelling as what you're seeing on your favorite streaming platform".

But what about Insight, both as an industry and a discipline? Whatever the downsides of traditional advertising, we are very adept at feeding in to the creativity and effectiveness of comms through Qualitative Creative Development and Quantitative measures. Traditional comms feels like a comfort zone for insight, and frankly for brands too. Finance Directors know what they’re getting when they sign off on the budget for a few 30 second spots, and know that insight can provide solid metrics which support that investment.

So, to come back to the original question - why are we so excited to be working with Brand Storytelling at this time?

For two main reasons:

1. Insight has a huge role to play in helping this exciting space to grow, providing metrics and validation that enables creators to keep making great work.

New tools and methods of measurement can ultimately enable teams to confidently argue for the power of this work, and for Finance Directors to sign off on it.

One Minute To Midnight’s human insight has the potential to enable this work to more meaningfully connect with its audiences too. To put it frankly - we can make this work better, just like we support some of the world’s best comms agencies to create better traditional ads.

1. This is a huge opportunity for the insight industry to help create meaningful work that makes great things happen for brands.

If Branded Entertainment is to grow (as it will) then it needs to be grounded in deep human truths. This is of course the core of any good comms, but especially important with brand storytelling as it is the core of good storytelling more generally.

That means working with world class insight agencies that know how to go deep into human truths while measuring real world impact, something we're excited to continue to specialize in and develop in the industry.

These workshops and our ongoing work with the Brand Storytelling team are just the start, and we're excited to use our expertise in developing the industry.

For updates from Elevate please follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram. We will also be following up this event with an update on our our collaboration with the Brand Storytelling team.

From human to human,

Andy