What Parle Products wants from content creators

Parle Products, which recently jumped on the bandwagon of taking content route to reach out to consumers with the series of short films using user generated content for its #YouAreMyParleG campaign, will be looking up to content for others brands as well. The biscuits and confectionery maker, however, has set a thumb rule when it comes to its approach for choosing content.

Mayank Shah, Category Head, Parle Products, told BuzzInContent.com the company would avoid creating content around the brand on the basis of brief and rather would ride on it on the basis of its strength.

“Unfortunately, what is happening today is that content creators go to brands and say give us your brand and we will work something around it. We don’t want that. We want them to work on good content and then come to us, asking if we have anything targeting this particular TG and whether we can seamlessly integrate the brand with the content,” Shah said.

On the contrary, content creators put the onus on custodians of the brands, who ask for more visibility of the product that eventually makes the content look like an advertising piece. In such a scenario, Shah’s statement comes as a boost to the content marketing ecosystem.

Expressing his choice of content creators, Shah said, “There are a lot of content creators doing great work and that’s what we would be looking at. Most of the content providers have people who have come from TV background. Hence, they still think of content like TV and product placement. They don’t think of weaving in the product seamlessly, making it look more like a force-fit.”

Launched on Independence Day, the first short film for the world’s largest selling biscuit brand has attracted over 5 million views. There will be four more films in the series.

Parle will put about 20-25% of its budget on digital for this content initiative. Though the films are digital first, Parle is planning to take it on TV to drive consumers to digital. “TV will be used as a reminder for people who have already seen the film on digital and those who have not seen it will be directed to digital,” said Shah.

Parle has been reaching out to its consumers with both functional and emotional advertising but it is way too late to realise the power of content marketing. “Maybe it is an early trend but what we have seen is the way people were getting completely oblivious to the ads on TV; it is no different on digital. Given the option, nobody watches the full ad unless it is interesting. In such a scenario, advertising is not going to work. You have to dish out interesting content where you have to have your brand seamlessly weaved in as a part of that content,” Shah said.

“The beauty of digital media lies in it being the earned media rather than paid media. You may boost it a little bit to have that critical reach, but beyond that it should be the content that should be driving your reach. Unless you have an interesting content, there is no point in buying reach and frequency the way you do it on TV,” he concluded.