The Branded Content Rundown 🤑

What sponsored content is, how it works, and how to find clients.

By T.M. Brown

Branded content is, whether you like it or not, an ever-bigger part of our lives. Journalists, artists, and other creatives are supplementing their incomes with lucrative contracts with big brands. Whether you’re just curious about the world of branding and advertising, or you want to dive in and try to make more coin, this guide will show you the way.

What Is It?

Branded content. Sponcon. Native advertising. Advertorial. Integrated marketing. They all describe the same thing in slightly different shades. An advertiser approaches a publisher—or as is increasingly popular for larger media companies who can afford to create in-house agencies, the publisher approaches a brand through its ad sales department—and asks about commissioning a few pieces of content that look and sound like something that would be written by a journalist.

For journalists, it’s easy to tell the difference between an ad and an article and proceed with caution. For the average reader, it’s a little more difficult to spot which is why brands are legally required to slap their logo on anything they’ve paid for like the one in the top right corner of the image below.

The best outlets erect a firewall between their editorial and commercial operations, ensuring that the needs of the advertisers never bleed into the objectivity of the edit staff. Other places have sieve-like policies, where you can’t tell where the journalism stops and an advertiser’s whims begin. At outlets like Monocle, well-executed branded content is almost their entire business model and given no one is heading to Monocle for anything but recommendations on the Top 10 Places to Eat Ortolan Right Now, it’s not a huge issue. The same goes—or at least, went—for beauty and fashion outlets who operated on a pay-to-play basis for brands who wanted prime placement without the unmistakable feel of an ad. This Business of Fashion article breaks down how some influential fashion magazines are still blurring lines between editorial and ads.

If you’re looking for a good example of a piece that decided to ditch editorial scruples without telling anyone, this cached version of a 2017 Uproxx essay is the one that always comes to mind for me. It’s a badly written piece, the kind of milquetoast confessional essay that kept the wheels turning at places like Thought Catalog. But the inclusion of something as flatly uninteresting as the make and model of a car only serves to underline the shadiness of the whole thing.)

The teams that create sponcon have many names, but for our purposes we’ll call them “brand studios.” Studios have more moving parts than a typical edit desk, and include positions like content strategists, producers, and creative directors. They also have cutesy names that differentiate them from the rest of the publisher: the BBC has BBC StoryWorks, Vox has Vox Creative, the Times has T Brand Studio. Publishers are increasingly aware that this is part of the future of journalism, and they’re investing commensurately.

How It Works

If you’re not interested in how the sponcon sausage gets made feel free to skip this next section, but it’s such an opaque process that has almost nothing to do with journalism and everything to do with advertising that it merits laying out in detail for this particular audience. There’s a bit of alphabet soup as far as acronyms go so wade in carefully:

An agency working on behalf of a brand (this is called an “agency of record” or AOR) approaches a set of publishers with a request for proposal (RFP). Typically the RFP is based around an advertising push the brand is on the verge of rolling out, say Samsung debuting a new TV or McDonald’s debuting a new ad campaign. The RFP will contain some baseline information: Who they want to advertise to, where they want the ads to run, how much they’re budgeting. Some will include what kind of content they want to run or what topics they want to cover. That’s all I’m going to say about RFPs because deciphering them is nightmarish most of the time.

(There are instance of brands and publishers working together without an RFP process, but an AOR will always be the go-between to maintain creative consistency.)

Content strategists (or just strategists) are tasked with coming up with the ideas that will convince the agency and advertisers that their publisher is the right one. In my experience, content strategists are split pretty evenly between journalists who wanted to get paid more and wide-eyed marketing evangelists who desperately want to believe they’re in an especially boring episode of Mad Men. You lose a lot more programs than you win as a strategist, but rest assured you will make a PowerPoint presentation for every single RFP that crosses your desk.

There’s more to talk through here—how cost-of-sale (COS) differs between studios, the dozen different measurements for ad engagement that are stunningly similar in their uselessness—but it gets even more mundane fairly quickly. Yes, really.

Once a campaign is rolling, it follows a similar back-and-forth between editor and writer as your typical article would. Except in this case, editorial scruples and newsworthiness aren’t the deciding factors in a story. The client is. Clients have to sign off on everything, from the headline to where their product is first mentioned in a given piece.

Imagine, for a moment, that you’ve constructed a perfect lede for a story about something as eye wateringly boring as credit monitoring or network security. It’s a setup you’d be proud to submit to an editor at a magazine you’ve been dying to write for, and you smile as you click send. Your editor, bless his or her heart, is happy with the draft and sends it off to the client for review. So you wait, dreams of dollar signs dancing in your head because the client will have no choice but to send effusive praise for how the writer nailed it this time.

The draft comes back riven with edits and comments made by names you’ve never seen before with positions that only orbit yours. Senior communications manager. VP of marketing. Chief content officer. They want the brand mentioned at the very top of the story, expertly crafted lede be damned. They’re not sure why you’ve spent so much time talking about things that aren’t related to the brand. They want the article to steer clear of anything that could be construed as “unsafe” for the brand like, say, data hacks. (Financial services clients that want personal security content sure are touchy about that stuff!) Oh yeah, and please don’t mention any other, possibly competing brands in the piece.

It’s the job of a studio’s managing editor to push back against the most absurd requests from agencies and brands who may think this is more akin to slapping a press release on a website than a collaborative arrangement. But editorial scruples do not run content studios; ad dollars do. There are times when the sales and marketing teams at publishers will run roughshod over skeleton crew editorial teams, and force studios to publish content they’re neither comfortable nor proud of. I’ve seen it happen to some of the most talented editors I’ve had the pleasure of working with because at the end of the day this is a client services job, not a journalism one.

How I Got Into It

The first campaign I worked on was for AXE body spray, who apparently throw their weight around when it comes to cultural tastemaking. This was back in 2014 when I was still working as a city planner, clocking in to the titanic NYC government offices down on Water Street from 9-5. I wrote in my spare time — urbanism blogs, the odd music thing — and a friend working in SPIN magazine’s advertising unit asked if I had time to turn something around quick. 500 words for $500. Sure I said. Easy money.

I didn’t realize that single piece would end up becoming my whole career. SPIN led to contracts with Fast Company, which led to working with Vox and, eventually, with the BBC as a freelance strategist and with Axios as an editorial consultant. I left city planning for good a few years ago to focus wholly on this odd niche I ended up having a knack for, and have cleared six figures easily in both full calendar years I’ve been freelancing. There are times when I’ll work for three or four studios simultaneously, a balancing act that has effectively sidelined my actual journalism career.

Not that it’s all bad. I ended up interviewing and shadowing John Legend for an evening during that first SPIN campaign, and they brought me down to SXSW to cover a few days of an event Legend was hosting thanks to AXE’s largesse. I’ve hosted branded podcasts and panels, and worked on stories that, if it weren’t for hand wringing comms people constantly concerned about whether something was “brand safe” or not, would have made for good journalism.

Sponcon also boasts something that has all but disappeared in journalism editorial: Good rates. When I first started working with the content studios at places like SPIN and Thrillist, my rates hovered around $1/word. Now I get anywhere from $1.5/word to $3/word for a branded campaign and, because these content programs are sold in packages of three or four articles, I can typically peel off more than one piece at a time with a lot of overlapping work. Branded podcasts can pay upwards of $5k/episode as “talent,” and panel hosting can pay a couple thousand for approximately 90 minutes of your time.

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you already have the background and skill set necessary to work on sponcon. Whether you actually want to is a completely different question. In many ways the work I do is significantly easier than any piece of editorial I’ve worked on; there’s not a ton of deep thought necessary, and often brands and their proxies want something that’s good enough rather than a piece of prize-winning writing. But you have to remember that this is marketing, not journalism. My checks are signed by the advertising department, and no one I work with is eligible for newsroom unionization because they’re on the commercial side of the wall.

There are days when I feel like a true sellout, using whatever limited skills I have as a journalist and writer to shill for a company I don’t care about. But with the media landscape is shifting violently underfoot, sponcon has become a valuable bit of solid ground.

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