The LA Times’ Strategy for Impactful Branded Content
Discover how the LA Times is redefining branded content with emotional impact at the core. Kristen Berke, Vice President of National Advertising and Branded Content, shares how her team blends editorial storytelling with platform-specific strategies to create engaging narratives. From Oscar-winning short documentaries to innovative brand collaborations, they are proving the power of stories that connect deeply with audiences.
TRANSCRIPT
Kristen Berke:
It was an article that went viral. We turned it into a show, and then we basically distributed it on Hulu. So we're starting to think about ways that we can partner with these streaming companies to help amplify the branded content that we're doing as well and piggybacking off of the success that we've had with some of our editorial programs.
Jesse Roesler: Greetings, and welcome to "Content That Moves," the podcast from Credo Nonfiction and BrandStorytelling that pulls back the curtain to reveal how the very best in brand films and episodic content is being funded, created, distributed, and measured.
I am your host, Jesse Roesler, the founder of Credo Nonfiction, where we partner with brands to find and tell stories that reveal brand purpose and deepen brand meaning through short and feature-length documentaries or episodic series. Visit CredoNonFiction.com to learn how we can help you create real, moving stories for your brand.
This podcast is co-produced by BrandStorytelling, bringing you the latest news, trends, and insights in branded content with top-of-industry events and in-depth industry coverage online. BrandStorytelling encourages a higher level of collaboration among advertisers, agencies, media partners, and creators in pursuit of a richer media environment. For more of the latest in the world of branded content or to explore event offerings, visit BrandStorytelling.tv today.
This season the word on everyone’s lips is definitely distribution. It’s not any different at the LA Times. But Kristen Berke, Vice President of National Advertising and Branded Content is also thinking a lot about emotional impact. While traditional metrics like clicks and views still dominate the conversation, Berke believes that emotional resonance could actually hold the most value for brands. By blending editorial expertise with storytelling that’s tailored to each individual platform, Berke’s team aims to create content that bridges the gap between art and analytics to prove the value of deeply engaging narratives.
So Kristen, if you do not mind, I thought we could start with some really big, really fun, and still fairly recent news. When we talked back in January, we discussed a lovely film called "The Last Repair Shop."
We both thoroughly enjoyed it, and you were releasing it as part of your short documentaries program. As it turns out, members of the Academy loved it as much as we did. Not only did it get a nomination, but it also won the Oscar for short documentaries. So what a huge feather in the hat of your film program. Congratulations!
Kristen Berke: Thank you, thank you. I mean, truly words I never thought I would say working at the Los Angeles Times. A newspaper that is 140 years old—you do not always equate that with the Academy Awards.
Jesse Roesler: You covered the Oscars for what, 100 years? It was time to get one.
Kristen Berke: Yes, exactly. It was our time. But no, that was a super-exciting moment for the studios division for sure. We are all really thrilled coming out of it.
Jesse Roesler: I think it speaks to new distribution channels for short films. As a short documentary maker, I am so excited to see platforms that are not only championing the types of documentaries that win awards like that, but also the exposure for that film is not small. I think you're helping amplify stories that a lot of times Ten years ago, short documentaries might have been shown together in theaters for a week, and then it was impossible to find them. Now they have a lovely home where many people can see them. That is awesome.
Kristen Berke: Yes, it is super exciting. For those who are not familiar with Short Docs, it is a program we have had for a few years now. Basically, we commission documentaries from filmmakers that don’t really have a platform or access to the same resources to distribute their films that a lot of wealthy people in Hollywood have. So in that sense, LA Times is really acting as kind of the distribution arm for those filmmakers, which has been fun and exciting to see. These films and stories might never have been seen, or these stories told, thanks to putting them on our website, putting them on social, and then tapping into some of the partnerships we have with other streaming companies in some cases.
Jesse Roesler: Can you give an example of that?
Kristen Berke: Yes. We are not doing it yet with Short Docs, but we have great relationships with companies like Hulu. So for example, one of the shows we were involved in last year was about the Randall Emmett scandal. It was an article that went viral, we turned it into a show, then we basically distributed it on Hulu.
Jesse Roesler: That is cool.
Kristen Berke: Right. So we are starting to think about ways that we can partner with these streaming companies to help amplify the branded content we’re doing as well. And piggybacking off of the success that we’ve had with some of our editorial programs, like that article and the Short Docs program. That's technically an editorial program. But to your point, I think the same strategies that we use there can be applied to branded content. Because those worlds are converging so quickly.. So that's been really exciting for us.
Jesse Roesler: Super exciting. Distribution has been a hot topic, and I do not expect that to change soon. It is evolving so rapidly. Could you set the stage? I am glad you talked about the Short Docs program. I know you have LA Times Studios, which has a branded component.
Where do those things live? How do they interact? And then how does your role fit into that? Are you overseeing multiple aspects?
Kristen Berke: I'm strictly on the business side and the branded side. So that's the world that I play in.
There is LA Times Studios, which is a larger umbrella. Then within that live a lot of our editorial programs, like the Short Docs program. We also do a lot of work in the entertainment space, just being the LA Times and having Hollywood at the epicenter of our market and a lot of the work that we do. We have something for example called the “Envelope Round Tables,” where we interview A-list celebrities nominated for the Emmys, Golden Globes, and Oscars. We actually bring them in to our studios in El Segundo to talk about their projects, what inspires them, and what they're excited about next on the docket. Things like that.
All of that is run by the editorial side of the organization.
And then somewhat separate, but apropos to what you and I were chatting about right before the recording, we are seeing those worlds converge more now between branded and editorial. Traditionally, we would go to brands and we would help them create a video, a podcast, or a piece of long-form journalism to help promote a product, whatever that might be. But that doesn't really seem to be what a lot of our brand partners are interested in anymore. A lot of them don't want that commercial in the conventional sense anymore. They want to tell stories that align with more value-driven and mission-driven marketing messages. So it reflects a lot of the work now that's being done on the editorial side, which is just so interesting and fun for us.
Jesse Roesler: That is great for storytellers.
Kristen Berke: Exactly. At the end of the day, it is all about telling good stories that resonate with people. We are having very different types of conversations with our brand partners, and piggybacking a lot off of the success that we've had with those editorial programs that you mentioned.
Jesse Roesler: That’s great that there can be that symbiotic relationship there.
Kristen Berke: Yes, and it is new. You are probably familiar with the traditional divide between editorial and business. There used to be a pretty staunch divide between editorial and business, right? And the two sides we're not really allowed to talk to each other very much.
Jesse Roesler: Never shall they mix.
Kristen Berke: And of course, we still have those guidelines in place. And proper disclaimers need to be put onto pieces of content so there’s no misunderstanding. But at the end of the day, it is about what is the purpose of this content? Who is the audience? What are we saying? And those conversations are changing pretty rapidly with our brand partners. So that's been really cool to see.
Jesse Roesler: And you bring up Hollywood who has actually been doing this forever with product integrations and how brands show up. So it's not that crazy as long as the story is still the story. It is only hard news where the line can be precarious.
Kristen Berke: Exactly.
Jesse Roesler: Misinformation is one thing, but if a brand shows up in a setting it is already in for example. I think the best stories are set in a world where the brand's just naturally already there. You're not having to shoehorn anything in or change a narrative.
Kristen Berke: That's when I get an ick factor. But when it's done properly like that, I think it's great. And, you know, I'm surprised still too, the amount of marketers we work with that think about media as just a place they go to buy space to put a traditional commercial message.
Jesse Roesler: I had a great experience with the Washington Post Creative Group. And seeing how an organization like yours can take an editorial point of view and voice that your readers know and love for so long, and apply that to a piece of content that sort of serves a specific messaging mandate of some kind on behalf of the brand. It doesn't feel like the icky commercial marketing stuff that you might equate with branded content, but feels like a story that, you would expect and enjoy.
Kristen Berke: Exactly. That old-school thinking of "how many times is our product going to be shown in one minute?" or "can you make the logo bigger?" is outdated.
Jesse Roesler: Or just putting the logo as the entire video.
Kristen Berke: Can we actually just do the logo alone? Yeah. That's just the whole video.
Jesse Roesler: Yes, exactly. We have come a long way. That is why I was excited to have you on—not only to learn more about the Short Docs program, which I think is awesome as a storyteller what you are doing to lift those up. But on the branded side, for listeners of those show, I think a lot of marketers can benefit by knowing what is possible.
Could you walk us through a typical engagement with a brand that isn’t just buying media space, but wants to create something with you?
Kristen Berke: We did a campaign for Merrill Edge. Traditionally, I’m sure a lot of the big banks – to your point – wanted to just talk about the financial white paper. How do we get people to sign up for this product? That's all we care about.
But this was a very different conversation.
They wanted to reach members of the AAPI community and they wanted to do it in the most authentic way possible. So we cast a number of people from the AAPI community in Los Angeles to tell stories about how they individually were handling their own financial literacy with their families. So, yes. I guess if you're taking a step back, it is a series about that. But really when you watch the videos, they're short documentaries about all these people and their families.
And it's really about intergenerational nuances of wealth management. Right. What does it mean to build wealth for your kids? What does it mean to support your parents as they age? What are the emotions and the feelings that get elicited when you're talking about money management? I think that's so relatable to so many people out there. And it's really great content.
We're really proud of that series. Because at the end of the day, it checked off all the boxes that Merrill was looking to check off, sure. Which was to showcase this product. But at the end of the day, we also told some really great stories in the process. Yeah. so I think it's campaigns like that that we're trying to repurpose more and more. We're doing a lot of work for Pfizer right now.
Jesse Roesler: What kind of work?
Kristen Berke: The LA Times has a huge reach among Latinos, which is not surprising since they make up half the LA market right now. We reach about 9 million Latinos across our site every month, and over half of them, I think it’s over 65%, are bilingual. And that's a big target demographic for Pfizer for a lot of reasons. But they really wanted to combat what was happening across the internet around medical misinformation. A lot of vaccine hesitancy was spreading on social media. And they wanted to do it in a way that didn't feel so – for lack of a better way of putting it – medicinal.
We don't want to be this big pharma company that's coming at this community, trying to educate them in a way that feels either pedantic or condescending. That's obviously not gonna achieve the results that we're looking for here. So what else can we do?
So in that case, we produced a series of animated videos where we had some fun with it. We looked back at the last 400 years of all these medical myths that existed. it was everything from if you swallow a tape worm, for example. I think back in the 1600s, they believed that if you swallowed a tapeworm, you were going to lose weight. This was a way to become skinnier, basically. So you had all these women going around swallowing, tapeworms…
Jesse Roesler: Gosh.
Kristen Berke: There was another one that was dedicated to hand washing. It was supposed to be bad for you and have the opposite effect of what it's actually good for. So here we all are still doing those things. Practicing those things. I'm just kidding.
But that was the whole point of that series; to try and have a little bit of fun. Infuse a little bit of levity and then also reach this community in a way that feels a little bit more authentic to just explaining the facts. We were really trying to tell a story with that one.
Jesse Roesler: So you are utilizing various formats things you would use editorial side, potentially for different issues. But how are you working with the brand to determine what format might best translate their message into your voice? You've done podcasts, Short Docs, and then animation. What's the process there?
Kristen Berke: That's such a good question. You hit the nail on the head. It has to be a conversation with the brand every time. We're really never coming at any concept knowing exactly what the format is going to be until we brainstorm it and workshop it a little bit.
So just using that Pfizer example, we came up with the concept first of targeting these these myths that used to exist over the past 300, 400 years. What shape that took, it made sense for us to do animation. Because we wanted that to be kind of funny and lighthearted. It wouldn't have come off I think in the same way if we'd had some guy talking.
Jesse Roesler: Yeah. And how do you do that style?
Kristen Berke: How do you visualize it on camera? Explaining that these things used to exist over the past few hundred years, that would have been so bizarre. I mean it's a way to do it. But it wasn't the right way given the emotions that we were looking to elicit from this content. So in that sense, we just organically arrived at animation.
Using the Merrill Edge example, I think that was really about relatability and seeing a lot of yourself in these people. So for that one, it made total sense for us to take more of a docu-style approach. So I think it really just depends on the goal, or the product essentially. Or in some cases it's not a product, it's a message, but that drives and dictates the format and the style that we infuse.
Jesse Roesler: Awesome. Like we started talking about, I think there are multiple benefits here. Not only are you getting a piece of content as a brand that feels more editorial style, whether that's journalistic or something fun. But then also extending the reach to your readership versus the typical channels of the brand.
How do you talk about that position? Is this content something that you talk about reaching a new audience? Is it something that the brand can also utilize on their channels?
Kristen Berke: Thanks for asking that question by the way. Because in general I would say distribution is a huge differentiator for us. I see so many content creators out there producing these beautiful pieces of work, and all of their time and all the resources are allocated to producing the work. And then nobody sees it.
Jesse Roesler: I know, it's the greatest tragedy I think in our industry.
Kristen Berke: It's such a bummer too. Because sometimes it's really great work. It's just work that five people see. And it's usually the people that worked on the project. And if you're submitting it for an award, the committee that's looking at it. Great, another ten.
But outside of that, probably not money well spent. Certainly not what the brand is looking for.
So we apply a hefty percentage of the budget to distribution whenever we're talking to our clients about branded content. What percentage that is obviously varies depending upon how much money we're going to incur on the production. But we look at everything from, what sections of the site are going to be most contextually relevant, right? We cover everything from sports to entertainment, so where is this content going to perform the best across those sections. We also have access to all of our first party data about our subscribers. So we can tap into all of that first party data and do a lot of behavioral targeting when we're promoting the content across our site.
We're starting to do a lot more socia- first distribution, which I have to be honest we are in an infancy stage with that. I would say traditionally because we have 40 million people viewing the site every month, it made sense for us to leverage our website first as the primary model.
Jesse Roesler: There's some prestige and credibility about that too.I think about the media brands that are social-first and I don't know if I'm going to give that the same credibility.
Kristen Berke: I think that's why a lot of brands like to work with us as we have been around for over a century. And we do have that trust among our readers. That's not going anywhere. And so almost every time we take kind of a two-pronged approach. We of course still tap into the website, but what I mean by social-first is creating content that's sort of endemic to different social platforms that we want to leverage per platform.
So the content that we're producing for Instagram is going to look very different from the content that we're producing for LinkedIn, and Twitter, et cetera. And the other thing that I'll just say about social is I think there wasn't really a focus placed historically on the sentiment that you get when you're tracking how this content is performing.
When you run it on your site, you get a lot of engagement metrics: How many people clicked on it, how many people viewed the video. But you're not getting commentary and you're not getting re-shares and brand affinity.
This is just my humble opinion, but I think that's the most important metric the brand should be looking at. Because, fingers crossed, hopefully this content is working, and everyone's commenting on how funny or educational or insightful or whatever it is, and that's it.
But I think you also want to know when content isn't working. For whatever reason, consumers are a lot smarter now than they used to be. And sometimes you'll see – certainly not on LA Times produced content – but on content you'll see them say: “this feels really inauthentic. And here's why.” And that is really valuable intel for a brand to know. Because then you can apply those learnings hopefully to the next campaign and not make those same mistakes.
You know, I think it would be so interesting actually, hearkening back to the point of this podcast, is there a way to measure what you're talking about?
These different things are impacting your brain and lighting things up. I think that would be such an interesting place for us to play in the branded content space.
Jesse Roesler: For sure. And that's the data I want to have to be able to back up what I'm talking about. Because you can feel it when you watch it. And then when you leave, it's had a different kind of impact on you. So there's something called the Evoke score.
Kristen Berke: It's a fairly new thing?
Jesse Roesler: I think so, yeah. They're measuring for different things, but it's essentially when you watch a piece of branded content, what parts of your mind are lighting up. So I feel like what I'm hoping to find is tangential to that. When you watch this style of content,
what's happening to you? And when you have an emotional reaction versus…what's the word…an academic, or logical, or a mind reaction is different than a…
Kristen Berke: Like an emotional…
Jesse Roesler: Emotional, heart reaction. And so that's really hard to measure. Not only is it that what we are making can be hard to measure because it's not a traditional ad, but the format it takes makes it hard to measure the Impact of it.
Kristen Berke: And it's so subjective, right? It's going to vary completely based on who's watching it and their own life experiences.
Jesse Roesler: I think the closest thing we have is the brand affinity or brand lift scores in which you can ask someone some questions after they watch something versus people who haven't seen it. It gets in the ballpark, but not quite to the level I guess the physical representation of it or the outward representation of it is.
There's a woman from Logitech here, and they've only done product and product launch media before. Very feature heavy, very product heavy. They did this first story that actually got at the meaningful end result of putting their technology in the hands of someone who it can make a big difference for. And she said: our people lost it. They couldn't believe it. They're like: “oh, this is what we're actually doing.”
And when you present someone with that and they feel their daily task now has a whole new layer of meaning to it that it didn't have before, it’s hard to measure. And I think that's part of what we're all trying to figure out to a certain degree: proving the value in a way that the analytical folks would say is one-to-one of how they're used to seeing things be measured. And t's hard to do. I think we're getting closer.
Kristen Berke: But I think so much of marketing is emotional, right? If not all of it. It's so human and it's so personal. And you're just never going to achieve the same results with a display ad. Ever. I don't care what it says or what it looks like. You have to tell some kind of a story.
Jesse Roesler: To that point. A display ad, probably the person that sees it, they might think: “okay that's cheaper. Maybe I'm going to buy this thing.” But that's where it stops. I don't think there would be a halo effect or a ripple around it. Whereas someone that sees a film that really moves them, there's going to be a ripple there that you definitely can't measure. And that's the thing that's hard to quantify. I think when people at brands are trying to make the case to their senior leadership, and say why this spend is worth it for something a little bit unorthodox. That's the thing that they can't do.
Kristen Berke: Do you think we'll get to a place soon with branded content where brands can create some kind of a film or a podcast and this idea of it being separate from traditional content creation doesn't even exist? It's just content.
Jesse Roesler: Gosh. I mean we might be there in some regard. I mean I think the brands especially that are at the forefront of an industry for example, can make a film that's just set in a world and about a value, and they know if there's more attention brought to this issue, their boat will rise because they're at the top. So there are brands that are in that privileged position that are already doing that, which is really interesting.
Kristen Berke: That's where I hope we can get to across the board. That space is super exciting to me. Oh yeah. I don't think we're quite there yet at scale.
Jesse Roesler: And that's why we're all here getting together and going, “ how do we get there faster? Well thanks for geeking out with me. Fun conversation.
Kristen Berke: Anytime. Love to geek out. Thanks for having me.
Jesse Roesler: To view The Oscar award winning The Last Repair Shop and keep up with all of the LA Times short docs, visit the LA Times YouTube channel.
As always, I hope you've been enjoying the podcast and I'd love to hear from you. If you have ideas for guests or topics for future episodes, drop me a note at jesse@credononfiction.com.
