Content is king! I’m sure everyone has heard this little pearl more than once from a variety of sources. The idea is a staple of marketing firms and news organizations across the globe. Bill Gates famously penned an essay about it in the naught ages of the 1990s.

“Content,” he writes, “is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the internet, just as it was in broadcasting.” He was right.

In the early days of the internet, having something to write or promote promised you popularity and financial success. Now, not so much. In the age before social media, content was king; now, it has been demoted. We are living in a time where we are saturated with content, and not all of it is good.

Content can range from very informative to very ridiculous. In between that, you have multiple people peddling the same content over and over again. So, who, or rather what determines the winners and the losers?

Move over content; here comes the Queen: Branding. (Queen B!)

Branding makes all the difference. Think about it: How many lifestyle blogs are there? Why do some deserve our attention and others deserve, in the parlance of the day,  “to be paid dust?”

Branding.

How many ways can you make guacamole? Far fewer ways than there are blogs about it, but there are still people willing to read specific blogs that tell them how to do very generic things. It’s all about the spin.

This blog will not follow that trend. What we will do is observe how it’s done. We will look at various branding strategies and analyze, comment, and, in some cases, critique those strategies.

Since this is a class blog, it will feature posts from people working out what works about marketing, advertising, and branded content, and what doesn’t. We will take a critical approach to understanding the relation between product/idea and consumer.

Hopefully, what we all learn from working on this blog will help us to create and promote branded content that is both useful and beneficial.

Upwards and onwards!

-R