Lots of branded content emphasizes the latter over the former (see the late, unlamented Bud.tv or Mountain Dew’s Dew Tours).

No so the Brut News Network at facebook.com/Brut.

From MediaPost’s Marketing Daily:

“We believe that young, male-focused online content is a burgeoning market,” says Marc Broccoli, marketing director at Brut parent Idelle Management Co., a division of Helen of Troy, Ltd., which acquired Brut in 2003 from Unilever’s Conopco division. “BNN offers us a way to engage with a young male demographic that is important to our brand by allowing them to connect through a creative, humorous digital media platform.”

You can see the so-called humorous part here:

Not surprisingly, this branded-content campaign is a follow-up to last year’s brutslap.com, “an interactive site that let users ‘slap’ obnoxious people with different objects as a way to evoke the way guys are supposed to apply Brut with a face slap.”

Subtle, these guys are not.

John R. Carroll is media analyst for NPR's Here & Now and senior news analyst for WBUR in Boston. He also writes at Campaign Outsider and It's Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town.
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