Welcome back, and congratulations for completing the course, Brand and Content Marketing, which is the second one in the series for this specialization on Branding, the Creative Journey. Now that you have finished the course, we are going to move into the Capstone project. But before we do, I would just like to remind you what we were doing in understanding the basis of branded content. You will remember that the course attempted to give you the tools so that you can understand the value of branded content and how to develop a content marketing strategy. Davenport and Beck analyzed how we live in the area of attention economy. The more valuable gift that an audience can give to a brand is the attention in the middle of the communication ecosystem saturated with all types of content. The amount of content we face everyday is just unmanageable. This, of course, has changed many aspects of our lives, and has transformed dramatically the fields of Marketing and Communication. So remember that what we did in this course was, in the first week of the course, we got an overview of the main differences between branded content and traditional advertising. There is a new ecosystem of permanent destruction and content production which is leading to new business models where every company must become a media company. It's a new and digital world where the audience decides what is relevant and what is valuable. Decreasing of compelling and consistent brand content across multiple channels tailored to the interests and ethos of your target audiences is probably the best way to go, persuading consumers through storytelling. Then we moved on to suggest the use of journalistic skills for a Branded Content Strategy in non-media organizations. We went through the main difference between good and bad journalism in order to understand the process to go from a declining newspaper industry to the creation of a high-quality branded content and branded journalism. We also learned how to develop quality headlines. The main element to attract the reader's attention and mainly to search for good stories aligned with the business strategy. We were also introduced to the main elements that make a good story good, and how different story formats are applied for different purposes. We addressed the elements behind storytelling and how to achieve emotional connections through relevant stories. It is important to take care of the formal aspects of our narrative content to tell good stories well, to tell stories that are meaningful to our audiences. We also learned how to grasp users' attention to get them identified with our brand. Finally, we got a deep insight in the Brand Entertainment Field through the eyes of respected professionals in the area. We expanded our knowledge on how to produce an effective call to action and how to preserve the audience, a key and complex factor in nowadays' ocean of never-ending content. We went into aspects as its trans-media and multi-platform nature, or it's use of gamification and co-creation. Having grabbed this up, what we are going to do now is to move on to the second peer-reviewed or peer-graded exercise of the specialization for Capstone 2.
