The Missing Link in Branded Content Growth. Accessibility for Advertisers
Branded content has long promised advertisers something traditional formats can’t: the ability to connect with audiences through storytelling that captures attention, sparks emotion, and delivers meaningful brand value. It’s engaging, it’s effective—and yet, it still accounts for a surprisingly small share of advertiser budgets.
Why?
Branded Content Is Powerful—But Still Painfully Hard to Buy
Despite its effectiveness, branded content remains one of the most underutiliszed tools in digital marketing. The reason is simple: it’s still too hard to buy, and too time-consuming to run.
From the complexity of navigating publisher offerings, to the manual back-and-forth of campaign negotiation, to inefficient execution and inconsistent measurement, branded content remains stuck in a legacy process. For advertisers used to fast, automated systems across programmatic, search, and social, this kind of friction is a non-starter.
And for publishers? That friction is costly—leaving hundreds of millions, potentially billions, in unrealised revenue on the table.
Branded content is a premium product. But to become a truly scalable, high-performing revenue stream, it needs to be easier to access, buy, and measure.
Accessibility Isn’t Just Convenience—It’s a Growth Engine
Making branded content easier to buy isn’t just about efficiency. It’s about unlocking the flywheel effect—a self-reinforcing cycle that accelerates adoption and investment.
Here’s how it works:
- The easier it is to explore, buy, and launch branded content, the more advertisers engage.
- The more they engage, the more comfortable and skilled they become with the format.
- That confidence leads to repeat investment, greater scale, and stronger results.
Over time, branded content shifts from a one-off activation to a consistent, high-impact part of the media mix. But for that flywheel to turn, we need to remove the barriers slowing it down.
Five Friction Points Holding Branded Content Back
1. Discovery Is Fragmented
Advertisers can’t buy what they can’t easily find. Branded content offerings are scattered across publishers, each with their own naming conventions, formats, and pricing structures. There’s no centralised marketplace or discovery tool. The result? Advertisers often default to channels that are simply easier to navigate.
2. Buying Is Stuck in the Past
Even once advertisers want to buy, the process is manual and outdated, and more importantly, different across each publisher. Spreadsheets, email threads, deck swaps, and endless calls dominate the workflow. Compared to the seamless buying experience on platforms like Google or Meta, this analog approach creates friction that turns many buyers away.
3. Execution Is Inefficient
After the buy comes the heavy lifting. Creative development, approvals, publishing, and distribution are often handled manually across siloed teams. Without project management tools tailored for branded content, delays and bottlenecks are common—especially when scaling across multiple publishers.
4. Distribution Lacks Scale
Too often, a great piece of content gets one organic post and then fades. Without paid amplification or multi-platform distribution, reach is limited—and so is impact. Advertisers are left wondering if branded content is worth the effort, especially when compared to other high-reach channels.
5. Measurement Isn’t Standardised
Proving ROI remains a challenge. Branded content often lacks consistent, real-time reporting with actionable insights, with each publisher measuring success differently. Without a standardised reporting system, advertisers struggle to justify repeat investment, and the flywheel stalls before it starts.
The Infrastructure Is Finally Catching Up
The good news? These challenges are no longer unsolvable. In fact, they’re already being addressed by a new wave of technology built specifically for branded content.
What transformed display, search, and programmatic—centralised discovery, standardised buying, collaborative tools, and real-time analytics—is now becoming possible for branded content too.
Today, advertisers can:
- Browse publisher offerings through a centralised platform.
- Streamline planning and buying with purpose-built intuitive tools.
- Collaborate on execution through automated workflows.
- Measure success with real-time, cross-platform reporting.
These aren’t future-state hypotheticals—they’re available now, and they’re reshaping how branded content is bought and sold.
The Opportunity for Publishers
For publishers, the takeaway is clear: accessibility drives growth.
Those who invest in improving the advertiser experience—by embracing digitisation, automation, and standardisation—won’t just make it easier to sell branded content. They’ll unlock the full commercial potential of a format that delivers unmatched value to both brands and audiences.
Branded content has always been powerful. But when it becomes easy to buy, easy to execute, and easy to scale, it can finally become the revenue engine it was always meant to be.
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