BCMA World View: Branded Content in Hungary

Through the expanding network of BCMA Chapters, Affiliates and Partners, The Branded Content Marketing Association strives to give its members a unique global perspective on branded content from across the globe. Its new exclusive series, BCMA World View, gives you an insight into what is happening in the wonderful world of branded content around the world.

Changes in content consumption, multiscreen media consumption and the advancement of digitalisation challenge all players in the Hungarian market.

The successful execution of campaigns requires extraordinary and interesting content. A basic banner ad is not nearly as effective now as it used to be years ago (the click-through rate of a banner ad is only 0.2% today, which also means that regarding sales conversion, the targeted consumers do not show any substantive responses to the 99.8% of the classic online advertising spaces). 

Branded content, in compliance with current trends, focuses on the consumer. However, quality consumer relations can be built with ‘branded content’-type advertising solutions that comply with the appearance and functionality of the (media) content and design.

The possibility that branded content can be used as a solution to balance the decreasing advertising revenues (that declined even more due to the economic crisis) had already been brought up in numerous Hungarian conferences since 2008.

In that sense, one of the innovations of the ‘Hungarian Media Law’ that is truly progressive and responsive to the trends in the market and society was the allowance of branded content/product placement. The first research related to the topic was conducted by Ipsos; the results were made public in 2011. These show that 77% of respondents “don’t mind” if brands appear in television programmes, and 50% of them wouldn’t even mind if brands were mentioned by the characters. Of course, it must be considered that tolerance varies with each media type: consumers tend to be much stricter regarding printed press and online media.

Many different branded content campaigns have been executed on the Hungarian market in the past years. Republic Group as a full service advertising agency has acted as a pioneer regarding the topic.

In order to increase the potential for growth and brand experience, we need to find new communication solutions. Creative messages have to be made credible in different forms. The general consensus within the industry is that branded content-based co-operations will have increasingly significant roles and impact. We feel that the interest, the needs and the demand is increasing, while solutions in the Hungarian market are not yet sophisticated enough.

In the past years, the market environment was not particularly favourable for branded content-based advertising solutions: the budgets – which decreased year by year – did not allow companies to consider these beside their sales promotion solutions. Furthermore measuring the efficiency of branded content based solutions (awareness activation, recall value, involvement, etc.) also proved to be challenging.

The opinion of decisive Hungarian market players is that with the aid of branded content, the brands’ message can be conveyed to the consumers in an entertaining and educative way. However, many reject content-based storytelling because it requires a significant amount of time and energy from both sides. If someone really wants unique and tailor-made solutions, there are no ‘trodden paths’ – these have to be discovered on their own. 

Furthermore, they require the co-operation of many fields, and the dynamics of brainstorming typically follows a “two steps forward, one step back” routine, until a solution is carried out; Surveys conducted among Hungarian marketing professionals also prove that if storytelling is smart, and the brand’s message fits well into the structured content, we can expect the audiences to like it and so it will provide relevant solutions business-wise and create value when it comes to brand launch, rebranding and repositioning.

We genuinely believe that the future is bright for branded content in Hungary.