Fenty Beauty, e.l.f., ViacomCBS and The Washington Post are among this year’s Digiday Content Marketing Awards finalists

Branded content has evolved and continues to challenge the standards each year, as seen with the 2021 Digiday Content Marketing Awards finalists. In the last year, there’s been an enormous jump in branded content series across multiple platforms as video has continued to grow with the rise of platforms and content creators and as influencer collaborations have shown that they aren’t going anywhere.

Emerging from these themes are four standouts, Fenty Beauty, e.l.f. x Chipotle, ViacomCBS and The Washington Post — garnering finalist nominations in four, three, 13 and six categories, respectively.

Fenty Beauty and Barbarian earned nominations in categories such as Best Community Building Campaign, Best New Product or Launch Campaign and Most Engaged Brand Community for Fenty Beauty Eau de Parfum ghost stores.

To continue Fenty Beauty’s disruption of the industry, when it launched its first fragrance, it created a campaign inspired by ghost kitchens — delivery services that do not require physical addresses — to get consumers to purchase a fragrance they hadn’t smelled before. By creating five secret Fenty ghost stores, which were online-only e-commerce platforms hidden in locations central to the scent’s creation on Google Maps, fans could scroll through a multi-sensory diary of the scent’s creation.

Brands e.l.f. and Chipotle’s collaboration, with help from Movers+Shakers and D1A, earned the duo nominations in categories such as Best Use of Social and Most Effective/Measurable Campaign. The pair also collided in a 360-degree social-media collaboration featuring an avocado makeup sponge, spicy salsa lip gloss and an eye shadow palette inspired by Chipotle’s serving trays. This campaign between e.l.f. and Chipotle generated a surge of earned media while attracting new fans to both brands.

For Best Branded Podcast, one standout was LEGO and Velocity with ViacomCBS. LEGO Friends partnered with Nickelodeon for a second season of their ‘LEGO Friends Girls on a Mission’ podcast to amplify the friendship’s narrative and critical message and show how LEGO Friends can spark, build, and strengthen friendships among girls 4–12.

ViacomCBS’ in-house content studio, The Central Audience Development Team, nicknamed the “Candy Factory,” is up for Best In-House Content/Brand Studio. The team works on driving Paramount+ user acquisitions by developing a wide array of effective editorial content and paid social media campaigns optimized to generate higher click-through rates and more conversions while keeping CPAs under target. The team broadened internal partnerships to execute more campaigns, increasing creative output while the streaming service rebranded from CBS All Access to Paramount+ in March 2021.

The next notable nomination for ViacomCBS was for its work with MTV Entertainment Group in the Best Use of Real-Time Streaming Video category. The pandemic had caused MTV’s ‘Wild ‘N Out’ show to be off-air, and its social channels along with it. The show’s fanbase is different from other MTV properties and is incredibly vocal. So, when the show was back on the air, MTV and ViacomCBS teamed up to produce a live interactive special relying heavily on the fans, where they were given the keys to …read more

Source:: Digiday