The cost of being boring

Hey everyone - Joe here - welcome to Edition 105!

Before we dive in, a heads up that we have some VERY exciting SEG3 London news dropping tomorrow. Drop us a follow on Linkedin to hear first if you aren’t already!

Right, onto what you came for - with this week’s spotlight diving into The Entertain or Die report, and what the data says about why entertaining brands are pulling ahead.

Plus, a Pokémon takeover of the Speed Reads with:

Let’s get into it ⤵️

Small World and Tracksuit have released v3.0 of the Entertain or Die report, analysing 16,200 consumers and ranking the top 100 brands on entertainment value.

What’s worse than no content?

Boring content.

And yet, it’s the unfortunate by-product of how most marketing is now set-up as brands and marketers try to maintain visibility and capture attention in an over-saturated feed.

But by focusing on sales and short-term performance vs creativity and brand, marketers are forgetting what actually helps to make their brands memorable - the way they make audiences feel, the communities that association with their brand unlocks, the escape from day-to-day life it provides, and the entertainment it delivers.

And its the latter that is the subject of the Entertain or Die Report v3, which caught my eye this week by introducing ‘The Entertainment Funnel’.

Now, funnels are nothing new - if anything, they’re losing out to the flywheel - but they are a useful way to visualise the journey a fan goes on, and where value actually accrues - which is in the actions taken further down the funnel.

The problem is, if you don’t hook an audience to begin with, you can never get to the most valuable stages of the process.

And when 80% of audiences on TikTok, 65% on Instagram & 55% on Facebook are visiting the platforms to seek out entertainment, its easy to understand why those first few steps matter so much.

Yet much of what brands are putting out into the ether is built to inform or sell - not to entertain and capture attention - which is why 50% of the report’s respondents said they would rather watch cows eat grass than your ads (seriously).

When people talked about brands they found entertaining, their responses tended to fit into one of four themes, these being:

In other words, these are the traits that decide whether someone connects with your brand, or whether you’re getting instantly swiped past.

And whilst everyone wants to reach as many eyeballs as possible, it is impossible to create content (nay, a brand) that appeals to everyone from the get-go.

Which is why the most successful brands today are being built from subcultures outward rather than from the masses inwards - as it gives them immediate relevance with a specific audience that they can then expand out from over time.

Think Gymshark (Fitness Niche → Lifestyle Brand), or Stanley 1913 (Outdoor Equipment Niche → Everyday Essential).

All of these created content and experiences to suit their specific niche and audience - and were then able to start to getting insights into:

Which opens up more options to expand authentically into other parts of culture and unlock new audiences.

Because once you have that 360° view on your fan, and your content is genuinely built to entertain, you can begin to serve their needs in more targeted ways - and in doing so, you’re incentivising behaviours, like sharing, that enable you to get in front of broader audiences - effectively reverse engineering the reach that everyone craves.

But there an omission from the entertainment funnel in my opinion - creation and remixing.

As we know, the Carat & Fandom report found 87% of fans engage in activities around their fandoms, with 42% creating content (50% for Gen Z).

With UGC tools and platforms giving fans the opportunity to engage, interact and now build on their favourite IP and brands, its clear that size of audience won’t be the only deciding factor for cultural relevance anymore - instead, it will be the intensity of the fanbase, and how compelled they feel to share that fandom with others.

But all of this only starts if you can pass the first hurdle - creating something entertaining enough in the first place.

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That’s all for now, everyone - thanks again for reading the latest edition of The SEG3 Report. If you found it of interest, please do consider sharing with a colleague or friend who’d enjoy it too!