“We’re fooling ourselves if we believe we are becoming content companies” – Mondelez’s Bonin Bough says brands need to monetise content

Prior to stating this, Bough had run through the content Mondelez has been creating over the past two years for a variety of its brands, including Oreos and Honey Maid. For the latter, it recently launched a campaign tilted ‘This Is Wholesome’ featuring a number of same-sex couples.

In response to the negative reaction online, it created a short film showing artists ‘making something beautiful out of the comments’. This single piece of content received over three million views while the ad itself pulled in over five million.

Despite this, when it comes to calling itself a content company Bough said that the key lies in finding a way to monetise it: “If you look players like Red Bull, a guy jumps from space and they actually turn around and sell that to the BBC as an hour-long documentary.

“So until we actually think of media as investment dollars and reinvent the monetisation model we will not truly be content companies,” he said.

However, Mondelez is taking steps in this direction. Bough detailed the brand’s recent development of an Oreo game app – ‘Twist, Lick Dunk’. He said that when Mondelez discussed the idea with developers, one of the key requirements was that it could make money.

To date Bough claims there have been four million plus downloads and 220,000 active daily players. But, he said, most importantly the ad-supported app is actually cash positive.