the old. Quite simply, they don’t work very impressively in a silo. They can work very impressively as part of a whole. We have become victims of our desire to show ourselves to be successful. I plead guilty of signing off case histories where the measure is “views”, as if views are all that matters. They do matter, because they show that what you do has got pull, that consumers enjoy it. But pull has to have conscience. It is easy to pull by pandering to the lowest common denominators of crowd culture: we would just put a cat in every video. “It is easy to pull by pandering to the lowest common denominators of crowd culture: we would just put a cat in every video.” The ghettoization of digital leads to claims that are easy to attack. Branded content has been subjected to such attacks simply because it does not stack up the same viewing figures as online video creators do (see tables). How could it? It still has a branding or a selling purpose that necessarily constrains. No professional marketer is interested in views as a simple objective: the digital component is part of a gestalt. It often operates at the level of agenda setting, which is exactly what it does well. And we have a mountain of evidence that suggests it works best in concert with traditional media.