Branding is clearly a fundamental aspect of branded content, yet there's great variety in how content is branded. It ranges from extremely subtle to highly overt, and uses various means to achieve the desired (or permitted) branding level. 

Contalto identifies and scores each article on the basis of 9 branding criteria. A weighted score is then applied across these to calculate the article's overall Branding Level.

This Branding Level can range from 0% (where no branding is detected) to 100% (where all branding criteria are fully utilised). Branding level is always displayed together with the benchmark, as per the examples below.

The 9 building blocks for the Branding Level can be seen in the adjacent widgets titled Branding Profile and Branding Diagnostics.

Brand Focus
The degree to which the content is centered on the brand. A composite measure that takes brand name, logo, mentions and assets into account.

Story Alignment
Are the content themes aligned with the brand’s domain? E.g. if it’s a tourism board talking about things to do at its top destinations, then it’s aligned. If it’s a chemicals company talking about diversity and inclusion, then it’s unaligned.

Brand Mentions
The number of times the brand is mentioned in the article. We relate this to the total word count, and have a number of ranges to determine the final score. For example, 20 mentions in a 2000 word article will have a lower ‘mention density’ than 10 mentions in a 500 word article, and therefore a lower Brand Mentions score.

Brand in Title
Presence of brand or advertiser name in the campaign name or article title.

Brand in Content
Presence of brand name within article content.

Brand in Label
Brand name appears in label, e.g. ‘Sponsored by brand X’, ‘Paid post from brand Y’.

Brand Assets
Inclusion of images or video featuring the brand’s products, employees or other tangible assets.

Logo in Content
Presence of brand logo within the article content. Could be stand-alone or within an image or video.

Logo in Label
Brand logo appears in label. Could be in combination with text or simply the logo on its own.

Branding Diagnostics 

Values for each branding diagnostic will either be 100% or 0% for an individual article. However, values between 0% and 100% are often seen for campaigns where the diagnostics are averaged across all the articles within the campaign. This is because the presence of brand names, logos, assets etc. can vary from one of the campaign's articles to the next.

Using Brand Analytics

Besides appearing in item and campaign details screens, as well as in some dashboards, branding analytics can also be found in the list of filter types (accessed via the filter icon in the toolbar). 

As per the image below, users can use the sliders or check boxes to query Contalto based on the branding criteria they are interested in. Doing so will filter the content feed to show only those items that conform to the criteria contained in the filter. 

'Brand story telling' is another way to describe long-form branded content. In telling a story about (or relevant to) the brand, the content invariably conforms to one or more of four story archetypes. 

These archetypes can be thought of as the route taken by the content in order to meet the marketing objectives.

The 4 Archetypes

INFORMATIVE: to inform, educate of clarify
PRACTICAL: to impart practical knowledge, advise or recommend
INSPIRING: to inspire, promote ideas, excite or impress
ENTERTAINING: to entertain, amuse or give pleasure

How it works…

Each branded content article is scored independently against each archetype; hence scores do not sum to 100%. The % score is, in effect, the degree to which the content correlates with the known characteristics of the archetype. It is based on a semantic analysis of the text content of campaigns, including video transcripts where available.

Archetype information is available at the level of an individual web article, a campaign, a brand or a publisher.

Archetypes in action

Content is almost always a blend of multiple archetypes but usually has an identifiable ‘lead archetype’.

In the example above - for an individual article - the lead archetype is ‘Inspiring’, but the content also correlated quite strongly with the ‘Entertaining’ archetype. Meanwhile, it had low scores for ‘Informative’ and ‘Practical’. 

The article is actually for a retail banking brand - as sub-sector that normally skews towards the ‘Informative’ archetype, as indicated by the benchmark indicators (vertical lines). This illustrates how Contalto's Archetypes can be used to analyse content and to find exceptions to the norm.

Using Archetypes

Besides appearing in item and campaign details screens, as well as in some dashboards, Archetypes can also be found in the list of filter types (accessed via the filter icon in the toolbar), grouped with the E-R Balance analytic.

As per the image below, click one of the 4 check boxes to filter your current feed based on the selected lead archetype.

Unlike display advertising, digital branded content has the luxury of several hundred or thousands of words to convey a brand story, or several minutes of video. 

Contalto performs a semantic analysis of the text content (including video transcripts, if available) of each article, and E-R Balance is one of the resulting metrics. We can think of E-R balance as being reflective of the writing style of the article.

E-R Balance is a scale from 100% Emotional to 100% Rational, whereby each article is placed somewhere on the continuum, which is represented as a 5-point scale.  

Using E-R Balance

E-R Balance appears in Item and Campaign details screens. It can also be found in the list of filter types (accessed via the filter icon in the toolbar), grouped with the Archetype analytic.

As per the image below, use the ‘Emotional’ and/or ‘Rational’ slider to filter your current feed based on the selected E-R range.

Branded content spans a vast range of subject matter that's usually (but not always) relevant to the featured or sponsoring brand. 

As such, it's important to be able to navigate content based on its subject matter, i.e. the broad Topics and specific Themes that it talks about.

Contalto automatically tags each web article (for full publishers) with the Topics and Themes contained within. An article may be fully focused on a single Theme belonging to a single Topic, or it may span multiple Themes from more than one Topic.

Our taxonomy comprises 126 Themes that roll up into 20 Topics. These are displayed in Item and Campaign Details screens, as well as in all dashboards excluding the Overview dashboard. 

Themes in Article / Campaign Details:

Themes in Dashboards:

Topics and Themes are also available to explore as dedicated Dashboards, which can be accessed from the main menu.

Filtering Topics & Themes

As well as appearing in Item and Campaign details screens, and in most dashboards, Topics and Themes can also be found in the list of filter types (accessed via the filter icon in the toolbar).

Users have a choice of selecting one or more broad topics, or a single or multiple themes. This will immediately filter the current feed base on your selection.