22 commonplace as companies like Vice and Red Bull create high quality and engaging productions almost entirely financed by brands looking for exposure (or, in Red Bull’s case, themselves). The content need not even be directly related to the particular company coughing up the dough: the important thing is that the image a brand is looking to project is communicated via the content being produced. Entire web series have been created with this in mind. FremantleMedia in the U.K. and MTV and HBO in the U.S., for example, have teamed up with Brooklyn-based Vice — distributor of branded content, now stuck mostly on social media and the web, with traditional broadcasting strategies — while companies like Discovery also look to expand into the field. One group of media companies, however, is absent from this picture: European national broadcasters. Victims of austerity measures (just look at Greece’s ERT), one would think they would be looking everywhere for additional financing, yet this is not the case. Let’s take Italy’s RAI for example. Pending the most recent reforms (“branded” by McKinsey this time around), the company will be reorganized in five broad macro areas, the number of internal departments will be reduced, and, presumably, the funds available for local production will evaporate further. This needn’t be a problem, however: in the country that calls itself “Il Paese Griffato,” or “The Designer State,” there shouldn’t be a problem finding brands looking to project an “image” in order to create an emotive relationship with their high-income targets, especially as internal demand for goods in Italy has collapsed over recent years and producers and distributors can move to offer some “international distribution” for brands. Gianluca Migliarotti, an Italian director/ producer active in branded content, offered his explanation as to why this is the case. “The ‘Griffes’ [big brands] aren’t necessarily our friends,” he said, “Although I was more than happy to create a documentary for Vitale Barberis Canonoci [showcasing one of the most successful Italian cloth production companies], and am now working on a project for Pitti Immagine, the problem with most large brands is that they don’t have the right mindset to create good content, and no one is willing to explain it to them. Those few times you do, they have no concept of distribution.” Migliarotti’s complaint as a filmmaker is symptomatic of a wider problem: Large communication firms, not media groups like RAI or Mediaset, dominate branded content in Italy. Often, the emphasis is on quantity of people reached, not quality, spending large budgets to promote videos on Facebook that are little more than slideshows. Other times, potential clients are bombarded with a continuous stream of pictures and text via social networks: the evolution of spam. This clearly defies the trend of branded content getting longer, more elaborate, and becoming a stand-alone destination for viewers, as exemplified by Vice’s new webchannel “Munchies,” whose serialized content runs, on average, for 30 minutes. Red Bull even makes a profit fromworldwide distribution of the content they create. The situation is made even more absurd by the fact that content from Italy, branded or not, can be made successful with very little effort. If Paolo Sorrentino can shoot The Great Beauty, an Oscar-winning movie that adds little more than an existentialist storyline to a Fellini film remake — about the modern Roman upper class being the modern Roman upper class — then equally engaging content can come out of countless other aspects of Italian life, which seem banal to Italians, but captivating to foreign audiences. Migliarotti witnessed this firsthand. Upon the completion of his 2011 film O’Mast, a documentary on traditional Neapolitan tailoring, he was approached unsolicited by a distributor in Hong Kong after a disastrous pre-production where financing promised by an Italian state agency charged with promoting Naples collapsed after the politician in charge fell from grace. This experience is not anecdotal. Recently, newspapers all over Italy have reported how the public sector has a tendency to decide who to pay and who not to pay based on cronyism and convenience, regardless of services rendered. The audiovisual sector is no exception. Indeed, on occasion the treasury has even recorded delays in transferring collection from mandatory license fees to RAI. This is another problem facing Italian branded content: the vast majority of businesses — the motor of the Italian economy — are small- and medium-sized family-owned enterprises that rely on professional associations or state agencies for what little promotion they receive. The aforementioned Neapolitan tailors who construct unique suits characterized by high armholes and light fabrics (and most importantly, are skilled at hiding their clients’ physical defects) provide a ready example: even the most renowned master tailors tend to have three to eight employees. This is a trend that repeats itself all around Italy. Italian journalist Gian Antonio Stella wrote that, when agents of Japanese motorcycle giant Yamaha set out to spy on little Italian competitor Aprilia, the agents reported that they had been sent to the wrong address. They couldn’t believe a major competitor operated out of a garage in a little Northern town called Noale. Most producers would agree that the best solution is for large brands to fund branded content about the more rustic and artisanal aspects of Italian life. Migliarotti believes the power of values communicated would transcend any lack of visibility for their product. In essence, style and subtlety over visual bombardment. Indeed, a philosophy of subtlety is already the dominant trend in more developed markets. This year, Vodafone, a U.K.-based cellphone provider with operations in all of Europe, launched a webbased series called #Firsts, spanning all major social media platforms, as well as a well produced website of its own. In every video, the presence of Vodafone products is scarce. The series has yielded very positive results for Vodafone, and season two is supposedly in the works. However, #Firsts was not the brainchild of a studio. #Firsts was produced and launched by AKQA, the digital arm of WPP, a large advertising agency based in London. Although this is most definitely not the case in Italy, more innovative markets are seeing increasingly high quality content coming from ad agencies. This, coupled with the lackluster interest of traditional producers, begs the question: When big and small ad agencies are able to produce content to rival studios, both in Italy and the rest of the world, will it be too late? By Yuri Serafini in Milan, Italy June/July 2014 Branded Content I taly The DVD cover of Gianluca Migliarotti’s branded documentaryO’Mast, about Neapolitan tailors “The problem with most large brands is that they don’t have the right mindset to create good content, and no one is willing to explain it to them. Those few times you do, they have no concept of distribution.” –GianlucaMigliarotti (Continued from Cover)
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