Could a Brand Make the Next 'Mad Men'?

On Sunday, AMC aired the series finale of Mad Men and concluded an eight-year run chronicling an advertising industry that today is either dead, dying, or at least mostly unrecognizable from the 1960s "creative revolution" period inhabited by Don Draper and company.

While brands are very much still spending lots of money to get you to buy their products, the new hotness in the marketing game is to do advertising that isn't actually advertising, but rather what is now being called "content marketing" or "branded content."

This branded content can be news articles or entertaining videos that look like anything else created by media company. Only instead of being made by journalists, these pieces of content are created either by a brand itself, or by a media company on behalf of a brand that is sponsoring it.

Perhaps you've seen some of them floating in your Facebook timeline—those awful, patronizing Dove videos about how women never feel beautiful or a real estate company's list of the 10 best places to live in California.

In both cases, the brand is wheedling its way into your brain and perhaps ultimately your wallet by producing something that you might want to read or watch of your own volition, rather than paying a TV network or website to let it interrupt what you were doing with an advertising message.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, a for-profit marketing research company, nearly 70 percent of consumer-facing brands intend to spend more on content marketing in 2015 than they did the year prior. Per another marketing research firm, eMarketer, brands will spend $4.3 billion on native advertising this year, a category that includes content marketing. Meanwhile, Google searches for "content marketing" have skyrocketed in the past three years.

Disclosure: I should note here that I have not been a bystander in this process, having supported myself the past four months writing content for various advertising and technology companies. Most of this work has come in the form of fairly technical reported stories about online marketing and publishing, but I've also written op-eds on behalf of industry executives, a sponsored post about how men can buy custom-fitted suits online, and a listicle roundup of productivity books.

That brands would want to engage in content marketing is unsurprising, as doing so offers them full control of their message and free, unlimited air time during which to deliver it.

What is surprising, though, is how comfortable at least some consumers seem to be mainlining what are ultimately sales pitches. After all, the "creative revolution" of the 1960s was prompted in part by a skepticism of the industry's "hidden persuaders," ushering in an era of self-conscious advertising that in some cases almost apologized to consumers for having to bother them at all.

It's possible some of us have just been worn down. According to an estimate made by the market research firm Yankelovich, the average person living in a city in 2007 saw 5,000 advertising messages each day. Since then, the ubiquity of advertising has only increased, as we have become more and more reliant on services like Facebook and Google that profit by scraping our personal data in order to target us with ads.

Though it is depressing to consider, marketing has become so totally ingrained in our daily existences that it has become hard for some to view any interaction without scanning for the sales pitch coming from around the corner. It's been going on for so long now that we are totally okay with this, or at least we are resigned to it.

Take, for instance, Francisco Arceo, a 25-year-old data scientist who works at a bank in New York City and told me he'd be happy to watch a branded video so long as it was entertaining.

"I'm maybe a little more cynical in how I view it, where everything in the world is the imposition of one view on someone else," Arceo said. "I think the important part is, 'Was this an interesting way to spend my time?'"

To be certain, there remain plenty of skeptics, and for every wildly successful viral Dove video, there are many more pieces of brand content that go nowhere. According to a study Yahoo conducted in partnership with two ad agencies last year, 45 percent of millennials polled said they don't usually find content marketing interesting enough to share with their friends, and a Contently survey found that two-thirds of readers are less likely to click on a story if it is sponsored by a brand.

And yet, Arceo is not alone in reaching the conclusion that branded content is worth consuming if it's good. For proof, one would only have to look at Red Bull, which has built a freestanding media empire that includes a print magazine with 2 million monthly readers, or Purina, which once drew 38 million Facebook users to its site in a single month.

If you hear Content Marketing Institute founder Joe Pulizzi tell it, these early success stories are merely a prelude to a future dominated by companies that make most of their money selling energy drinks or hotel rooms rather than news or entertainment.

"You're going to see huge mergers and acquisitions go on over the next two to four years where you're going to see a number of brands buy media companies," Pulizzi said. "Everyone's going to be all surprised, but it's going to happen."

While they might want for storytelling experience, companies like General Electric, Intel, and Uber all rake in so much money selling wind turbines, computer chips, and cab rides that they might actually have more to invest in content production and journalistic talent than traditional media companies.

Recently, former New York Observer editor-in-chief Elizabeth Spiers announced she is working on a news site underwritten by the mattress startup Casper that will focus on the subject of sleep and almost assuredly do gangbusters traffic numbers (people on the internet love reading news stories about two things: coffee and sleep).

"I think there's so much content out there, and so much of it is crap, even if it's from an established media entity," said John Miller, a former journalist who is now president of the content marketing firm Scribewise. "People are looking for a good story, and for consumers, brands are where more and more good stories are coming from."

Perhaps in some cases, but as The Awl cofounder Choire Sicha points out, there's a reason a high-end show like Mad Men wasn't created by Mercedes-Benz.

Because brands must constantly guard their reputations—that's their whole purpose for existing, really—Sicha says anything they create goes through several layers of review that ultimately results in something dull and safe.

In this sense, Pulizzi's vision of a future dotted with brand media empires could replace the entertainment and journalism we consume with insipid, "brand-safe" drivel.

"A brand's biggest nightmare is people saying bad things about it," Sicha said. "The brand's going to be like, 'That scene is totally inappropriate, get that out of the script!' And then we don't have quality TV anymore."

Beyond the issue of quality, there's also the question of whether the authenticity of branded content is somehow tainted by the fact that it is a piece of marketing.

Just last year, Verizon shut down a tech publication only one month into its existence — a decision that followed reports that the publication was not allowing writers to cover controversial subjects like net neutrality.

Pulizzi, perhaps predictably, argues that it really shouldn't matter whether a piece of content was created by a brand, so long as the story in question isn't hard news.

"I don't see any difference for the most part," Pulizzi said. "Nobody is completely unbiased, and at the same time, the business model of your BuzzFeeds, your Vices, your Wall Street Journals are the same as your GEs and your Red Bulls, except for how the money comes in."

This last bit, how the money comes in, does sort of matter, though, particularly when brands are not clear from jump street that they're the ones producing it. Even if it's soft news or entertainment, brands do have their own perspectives, which typically begin and end with the idea that you should buy their products.

Take, for instance, a very popular viral video put out last year by the greeting card company American Greetings to make people feel emotional about how much time and energy their mothers put in to raising them. It's only at the end the video, after bringing some viewers to tears, that American Greetings reveals itself as the sponsor and implores people to demonstrate their love by purchasing a Mother's Day card.

In short, a media landscape dominated by brand publishers would be unlikely to express the sentiment that maybe you can tell your mother you love her without paying American Greetings to do it for you.

"There's definitely a different agenda in the creation of those contents," Sicha said. "Even if it's inherited assumption values about what the world should be. Even if it's not involved in overtly selling the product, there's a point of view there, and that will get expressed."

Ultimately, though, it will be up to consumers determine whether branded content is something they will accept, and how much of it they are willing to take in.

While a media controlled mostly by packaged goods brands is obviously very scary, content marketing in its current state does offer a major benefit we don't get from the sponsored Facebook posts and the billboards we encounter every day—if nothing else, it's easier to avoid.

Disclosure: Contently, whose research is cited in the story, is a client of the author's.