Jean-Marie Dru is the Chairman of TBWA Worldwide He writes a memo to all his colleagues at TBWA every week. Sometimes, he shares them with us:

We have been talking about branded content for years. And also of brand content. In the first case, the brand participates in pre-existing editorial content, created by others. In the second case, the brand creates its own content.

We have recommended to numerous clients that they play an editorial role, to create content that wouldn’t otherwise have existed. For instance, consider the short Visa Winter Olympics films; or “Replay,” where Gatorade created a re-match between the Easton and Phillipsburg College football teams, 15 years later, with exactly the same players and the same referees. I am also thinking of all those great brand content initiatives from Nissan, Pedigree or Absolut.

The challenge is huge: our competitors are no longer just other brands, but all producers of content, be it TV or press, from journalists to scriptwriters. Our latest productions show that we can meet the challenge.

But often, the question of the legitimacy of brands creating content is raised. There is a preconceived notion that traditional media have more legitimacy than brands as providers of content.

Pascal Somarriba is the former advertising director of Benetton and Color’s magazine, sold for 5.50 euros, with a distribution of 350,000 copies. Here is what he thinks about this “legitimacy issue.”

“People believe that the media are by definition independent. As a consequence, this freedom would guarantee the quality of the content they create. This reasoning is not justified.

In fact, the media are profit-making businesses with commercial constraints that brands don’t have, because brands’ resources come from other activities. The desire to offer different brand experiences leads them to create qualitative content, and pushes them to invest in media projects which are financially inaccessible to traditional media. This is even truer for international companies, able to pay back their content on a worldwide scale.

And on top of it, media must be careful not to upset their reader base, their subscribers in particular, as well as their advertisers (there are numerous cases of advertisers boycotting media following an article or a TV report they didn’t like…).

Brands needn’t be restricted by editorial complexes. It is the level of their editorial ambition that will make the difference. The quality, creativity and innovation of what they do will give brand content the same credibility that the media have gained over time.”

In other words, there is no content that would “naturally” be of quality and for which we could say “in advance” that it is worth being consulted. It always comes back to the audience to judge the quality of the content. As such, brands and media are more and more on the same equal footing.