Hello dear subscribers! Due to the editorial team (me) being on a family vacation in Chicago, this week’s edition will be a little different — you’re going to hear from the former Editorial Director of Subaru Drive magazine, AKA moi.

Don’t worry, I will not be “interviewing myself” in any kind of insufferable way. Without further ado!

Megan Bungeroth’s 5 Tips for Making Stellar Branded Content

I spent over 5 years as the Editorial Director of Subaru Drive, in its 3-4 times a year print form as well as our website and newsletters.

Not to brag, but please allow me to brag: our independent reader surveys showed that 78% of people found the magazine valuable to their Subaru ownership experience. And 36% of people said it made them more likely to purchase a Subaru as their next vehicle.

Our goal was to keep Subaru owners engaged with and loyal to the brand during the very long between-purchases window. Especially for an automaker known for its cars’ longevity, we’re talking near-decades.

We did this by embracing Subaru owners as a community and covering stories that fueled their sense of adventure, love of traveling and the outdoors, and a desire for safety above all else.

Based on that experience, here are my best tips for how to make stellar branded content.

1 . It’s OK if you’re not in the intended audience/ICP for your content. In fact, it can be an advantage.

When I landed the job as Editorial Director for Drive, I did not have an active driver’s license (which is a whole other story about the broke glamor of living in New York in your 20s, broken legs, pregnancy, a cross-country move, and simple inertia).

Regardless, I spoke in my interviews about the road trips of my past, the road trips I liked to take with my husband driving, and how even though I didn’t “own a car” per se, let alone a Subaru, it didn’t stop me from empathizing with Subaru owners and figure out what they care about.

That was all true, and when I got the gig, I doubled down on audience research — read past issues, trolled Subie message boards and social media spaces, talked to people at Subaru of America HQ, peppered my generous automotive editor with a million questions. When I met Subaru owners, either for work or out in the wild, I talked to them about why they loved their car, what they liked to do, what they were interested in.

The advantage this gave me is that I never presumed to know what the audience wanted. Instead I dug deep to ask those questions, again and again, and make sure that I delivered an editorial product that spoke to those people.

2. Find high-leverage ways to feature the voices of your brand’s customers and enthusiasts.

People love to see themselves reflected in what they read. When I started at Drive, there were 2 pages in the magazine for letters from readers, and a 1-page section dedicated to an Owner Spotlight.

By the time I left 5 years later, we had introduced a back-of-book page called “Drive Picks” that showed themed product recommendations from readers in every issue, expanded Owner Spotlights to be 2 pages, created an annual feature called “Community Champions” to highlight 6-8 Subaru owners giving back in unique ways, and regularly added reader-contribution sidebars to reported features. And we encouraged freelance writers to find sources who were Subaru owners for their stories, if they could.

I call all of these “high-leverage” because they lived in a print magazine, as opposed to a social post or something else more fleeting. There are plenty of ways to highlight your audience members digitally, too, but think outside the box to make it feel special to them. The goal is to give then something they’d hang on their fridge to email to all of their friends. That person becomes a reader for life.

3. Create editorial guidelines and stick to them (most of the time).

We all know that traditional media has ethical standards. So does branded content. It’s not just a free-for-all of promotional schlock.

At Drive, I would describe it this way: We’re never going to print anything negative about Subaru. But we’ll never lie or obfuscate the truth, either. We are not unbiased when it comes to cars. We are unbiased when it comes to everything else.

A few things we made explicit and stuck to our guns about:

• Quotes could never be changed to suit corporate standards. We only edited quotes within the normal AP-style guidelines. The exception: if a Subaru of America source, like a product manager talking about a new feature in the Outback, wanted to change their quote after the fact to be more accurate, that was allowed. If we ever got pushback from Subaru on a particular quote, we’d cut it and write around it, but never change what someone said.

• Every issue was fact-checked, first by our editorial team and then at the final stages by a freelancer. This included any information from or about Subaru. Often, if our fact-checker caught something erroneous, Subaru was grateful for the chance to correct it.

• The magazine wasn’t a brochure. Any time it started to veer that way, we’d work with our Subaru partners to recalibrate and ensure that our first objective was to entertain and inform, not to sell. The exception: We sometimes ran printed inserts with the magazine that featured more straightforward, brochure-like content about upcoming Subaru models. It allowed us to put the info in front of readers with a clear separation from the rest of the magazine.

4. Your brand’s content doesn’t need to be about the brand, or even the product category.

At Drive, I thought of our coverage in 3 categories and strove to keep a healthy mix:

• Vehicle-focused content: a how-to about prepping your car for winter, a preview of an upcoming model, a first-person driving impression of a new car from one of our auto journalists. 25%

• Vehicle-related content: a story about a father and son bonding over Subaru racing, an owner spotlight about someone adapting their Outback to accomodate a disability, a feature on female rally drivers, our road trip stories. 50%

• Non-vehicle content: a story about the rise of citizen scientists, or adopting dogs with disabilities, or senior citizen athletes setting new sporting records. 25%

If you’re working in branded content, you’ll probably be incorporating news or products from your brand — but that doesn’t mean you can’t cover other topics that appeal to your audience.

We were lucky to have Subaru’s brand pillars to anchor everything we published for Drive (the Earth, Helping, Caring [and no I’m still not 100% sure of the difference between those two], Pets, Learning). Anything not vehicle focused or related would align to one of those pillars, and would reliably fall into areas of interest for Subaru owners.

5. Don’t sleep on print.

Yeah, it's expensive. But so is digital media done well enough to truly engage your audience. Meaning, you need wayyyyy more content to break through than what you would include in one print edition.

Yeah, it has a carbon footprint. So does digital media.

According to the Mozilla Foundation, "one person watching four hours of Netflix is like driving a gas-powered car one mile. Netflix can produce around 1.1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually — the equivalent of 240,000 passenger cars." 🤯

Print commands attention and has staying power that digital media simply doesn’t.

It can’t, and shouldn’t, replace digital efforts. But it can be an amazing complement to them. In a time when everyone is cutting print to save money, how baller will your brand look to be investing in it?

Print media delivered to dedicated, opted-in subscribers should be a no-brainer. Instead of getting lost in an inbox, you can stand out in the mailbox.

Plus, Gen Z is into it.

Do you need a branded content pro to join your team, kickstart your strategy, or produce kickass, loyalty-generating stories for your brand? Let’s talk!

What I’m reading/visiting/eating, vacation edition

Because a marketer is only as good as their ability to rest.

LAKES 🌊 Lake Michigan, where I’ll be taking my son to play on the beach in the city of his birth.

FICTION 📖 Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan. Only 26 pages into it, but I’m already hooked on the 1930s NYC family at the center of it. I also loved A Visit from the Good Squad and haven’t read anything else by Egan since, so I’m excited for this one.

PIZZA 🍕 Lou Mal’s deep dish with butter crust. iykyk

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