What Is Branded Content ? (With Examples and Tips)
Gap just dropped the hottest piece of branded content in 2025. Their Better in Denim music video featuring global girl group Katseye has 13 million views and counting on the official Gap YouTube channel. Comments have been overwhelmingly positive with some viewers claiming that this is the only piece of marketing that they actively searched for.
Gap’s music video is a prime example of Branded Content, a powerful weapon in the marketing arsenal that can garner brand loyalty in addition to brand recall when used correctly.
Branded content is a very misunderstood buzzword in non-marketing (and often marketing) circles. If I had to cut the explanation short, brand marketing is the way you let your audience know what your company believes in. This differs from paid campaigns or influencer videos, which are used to sell a specific product or service.
How’s this different, you ask? Well, think of the difference between drinking Red Bull because it keeps you awake, and drinking it because you watched Felix Baumgartner jump from outer space.
The former is a sales pitch, while the latter is a piece of content designed to connect with you on a deeper level. Felix Baumgartner’s jump is a stand-in for the sense of adventure, thrill-seeking and excitement that Red Bull wants to represent. It speaks to the child in every one of us who wanted to be a superhero growing up. So the next time you walk into a 7/11 and look at a shelf stacked with energy drinks, guess which one invites your consideration first.
Branded content gives your customers a reason to use your product or service over someone else who offers a solution to the same problem. The more high-quality branded content your business puts out, the easier it becomes to attract prospects who eventually buy your products. The more branded content your company puts out, the easier it becomes to keep your customers buying more of your product, instead of being swayed by a competitor who doesn’t put out branded content.
Branded Content Examples
At Mavic, we help small businesses, solopreneurs and in-house marketers to grow their businesses and portfolios through branding that they can put into action today without a million-dollar marketing budget or million-man marketing team. Any time we see small brands absolutely killing it with low-budget branded content, we take notice. Here are 3 branded content examples that caught and held our attention this year.
Brita Water DIspenser
“I called my mom just to silently cry.
My ex started dating 9 other guys.
But I’m hydrated.”
The opening lines of Brita’s original song At Least I’m Hydrated had us questioning both our taste in music and our Instagram algorithms this summer. But paired with low-effort videos of a depressed man in a shark mascot suit, the brand somehow turned hydration into a scroll-stopping, oddly relatable meme.
Brita has fully embraced Gen Z chaos. They even changed their Instagram profile picture to “Bwita,” leaning into the unhinged humor that drives their feed of AI edits, surreal shorts, and self-aware absurdity.
The contrast is what makes it brilliant. On Google Images, Brita looks like a boring water filter company. On Instagram, they feel like a fever dream — and their 89.5K followers are here for it.
And while the jokes feel random, they always tie back to one thing: hydration. Whether it’s through shark suits or cursed memes, Brita is still selling what it’s always sold — water filters. Just with way more chaos.
Shelby’s Legendary Shawarma
Shelby’s Legendary Shawarma is a Canadian restaurant chain known not just for its eponymous Middle Eastern wraps — chicken, mutton, and beef shawarmas — but for something far stranger.
Founded in 2015 by Yazan El-Shalabi and Yasser Ali in Ontario, Canada, Shelby’s Legendary Shawarma has grown from a humble food trailer into a 40-outlet franchise — driven almost entirely by viral Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and TikToks. The videos, often starring Yazan and other staff members, lean into exaggerated Middle Eastern accents to hilariously mispronounce words like “Pepsi” (“Bebsi”) and “The” (“Za”), creating a self-aware, meme-ready brand persona.
Collabs with food creators have supercharged their visibility, leading to millions of views and real-world footfall. Their website now proudly claims 8M+ followers across platforms — and even reflects their brand voice, with deliberate misspellings like “Bebsi” and “Za” baked into the copy.
We featured Shelby’s in our 2025 F&B Branding Playbook, where we provide tips and templates to successfully brand a restaurant.
Mista Towa
Sometimes, personal branding and business branding shake hands to create something truly spectacular. Towa, or Mista Towa as his Instagram handle specifies, is a producer with almost a million monthly listens on Spotify and almost half a million followers across YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.
His marketing strategy is posting sped-up memes from Chinese social media with his soundtracks in the background. He now has a cult following who not only share and repost the memes, but also stream the soundtracks on Spotify and use them in their own memes.
His TikToks have turned his music into instantly recognizable audio meme templates.
Key Features of Branded Content
Published on brand-owned platforms
Brand content is usually published on the brand’s own channels and platforms, and not as a guest contribution to another website or publisher. Even when there are collaborations with other brands, influencers or other contributors, the content is targeted towards the brand’s own audience rather than the publisher or contributor’s audience.
Compare this to sponsored content or guest posts which usually appear on the publisher’s site, thereby reaching the publisher’s audience.
Values over benefits
Branded content is very different from product marketing. Product marketing makes a product the central focus of the content, addressing a specific customer need or pain point with the product features and benefits. This is valuable, but only when your customer is looking for the specific solution or researching the problem themselves. For example, a banner ad on your website announcing a limited period discount doesn’t entertain or deliver value to your customers, so it isn’t considered branded content.
On the other hand, branded content keeps the brand story as the focus of its efforts, making people feel something about the brand instead of convincing them to buy a product. For example, Vanessa De Prophetis who owns the Girl With The Dogs YouTube Channel delivers highly entertaining videos of her grooming her canine clients, but doesn’t overtly push her pet grooming products which she sells on her website.
Multiple Media Formats
Content marketing is tactical marketing that seeks to convert users by speaking solely about problem statements, solutions, features and benefits. It focuses on making the information available in the channels where users search for the product. And it focuses on educating the user, so there’s an upper bound to the level of creativity and truth-stretching you can do.
Branded doesn’t suffer nearly the same limitations because the focus is storytelling, not education. So businesses are free to explore more formats to tell that story. Social media posts, documentaries, story-led blogs, playlists, compilations and curations, and even experimental ideas like VR marketing are all valid and valuable formats for businesses to explore.
How Can Branded Content Help Businesses?
Higher Brand Awareness: A study by the Native Advertising Institute showed that brand awareness increased by 69% and purchase intent by 51% after consumers interacted with a piece of branded content.
Better Conversion: An IPG Media Labs-led study found that users are 14% more likely to seek out more information from an advertiser after being exposed to branded content.
Higher Trust: Consumers are tired of being sold to. More and more, they are turning away from brands to authentic storytellers like influencers for entertainment and information. Businesses must lean into authentic storytelling without a sales push to retain customer trust.
5 Tips for Creating and Managing Branded Content
- Start with the audience, not the brand: Ask yourself what your audience would enjoy watching or experiencing. Do they scroll through meme pages? Do they watch food influencer reviews? Your brand must be baked into the content that your audience likes to watch.
- Choose a channel you’re familiar with: Don’t waste time experimenting with a new platform’s mechanics or understanding the channel’s language. Branded content relies on naturally integrating with your channel and audience’s default aesthetics. If you mainly engage with your audience through Instagram, then an Instagram Story might be your best choice.
- Create an editorial calendar: Branded content requires careful planning to repurpose the main content into different formats across channels. A long form blog could be reshaped into the script for a YouTube video, cut into bite-sized Shorts, and published on LinkedIn as a carousel. Using tools like Trello, Mavic.ai or Google Calendar will help you manage the content creation process end-to-end and align the different people involved to a single timeline.
- Invest in content creation tools: The advent of AI has removed much of the pressure of content creation from solopreneurs and small business owners who can’t afford the time to learn filming, editing and all the other complexities of content creation. Tools like Mavic.ai, Jasper.ai and Surfer SEO can help you set up your content creation engine and publish across multiple channels from a single interface instead of logging in and logging out one platform at a time.
Branded content isn’t just about entertaining people; it’s about creating stories that make your brand worth remembering. The line between “ad” and “content” will only get blurrier from here — and the brands that thrive are the ones bold enough to blur it first.
👉 Ready to create branded content that actually lands? Try out Mavic today.
