Branded Content: Not Always Trickery

Brittany Oblak
bo095812@ohio.edu

Feminine product brand Always launched their 'Like A Girl' campaign with this Super Bowl commercial that ran this year, and something incredible happened. Not only did they create huge buzz around their brand and around gender equality issues, but they did something that may be even bigger in the journalism world: they created a perfect branded content website, which is linked above and shown below.

(always.com)

Firstly, they followed the number one rule of the PRSA of ethical branded content: there is absolutely no confusion that this editorial content is branded and sponsored. They clearly have no qualms about displaying their brand logo, as well as even giving you the option to shop their products. They also clearly list who they are affiliated with as far as brands go, and who is supporting them.

They acknowledge that while this is a philanthropic campaign - but that their brand can help with the struggles that this campaign is centered around. They provide extremely educational content - that is even cited by professionals in women's health fields - but also make no effort to hide that they are selling a product.

They also do a great job of keeping content current and relevant, and have by no means slept on keeping up a great PR campaign. They continue to make videos that vary slightly from their original Super Bowl ad, but still keep the main message. They have also updated their campaign's tagline to "Our Epic Battle", which is also a key characteristic that reflects feminist thought:even when we win a battle, the war is not yet over for equality.

While there is no space for real-time commenting, they have more than enough links encouraging that consumers contact them; and considering their editorial content is fact-based as opposed to opinion-based, that truly does make more sense, despite the PRSA calling for open comments.  Although, on each of these videos posted on YouTube, the comments do seem completely unfiltered so perhaps that is where they live up to that bullet-point.