Ad-skipping, declining terrestrial television audiences and tight marketing budgets mean that companies want their advertising to work harder. Funding original programmes is increasingly seen as a way of doing that.

It is all about advertisers hedging their bets. They don’t want to abandon 30-second TV ads, but they want to try other things, particularly when they are trying to connect to hard-to-reach audiences. Advertisers are having to become more sophisticated to keep up with their target customers. Consumers are wise to when brands are trying to sell them something without providing anything sufficiently diverting in return, and if that happens they will switch off.

The best examples of branded programming are where advertisers manage to keep it entertaining.

In America, advertisers including Ford, Budweiser, Toyota, Coca-Cola, American Express, Unilever and Procter & Gamble are all investing in entertainment projects.

Coca-Cola got together with NBC to make Stepping Stones, starring Gregory Hines, and Procter & Gamble’s Crest toothpaste launched a vanilla mint flavour on the US version of The Apprentice.

Advertiser-funded film and theatre projects such as Somers Town and Pot Noodle: The Musical are relatively unusual. Television and the internet are more familiar destinations for this sort of entertainment.

The digital arena is giving marketers the chance to experiment. Prominent successes include Bebo’s online dramas Kate Modern and Sofia’s Diary. The latter had a character endorse Nair hair removal. Now that Five is going to broadcast the web show, some of those investments now have a chance to reach a wider audience through television.

ITV’s recent deal with Apple was its most significant ad-funded deal to date, in which iTunes paid for the production costs for ITV2’s coverage of the iTunes Festival: London Live, one of this summer’s most talked about music events.

Channel 4 is doing pretty well with the likes of Nokia (The Nokia Green Room) and Vodafone (Vodafone TBA).

- Gordon MacMillan is editor of Brand Republic, the leading online business portal for the advertising, media, marketing and PR industries

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