For the past week we’ve seen praise for Sony’s Media Monster Wars Facebook app from all corners of  the web. It’s a cleverly executed piece of branded entertainment, leveraging Justin Timberlake’s popularity as a popstar - and a closet geek.

The promo video is pitch perfect, with Timberlake introducing the concept of the game. He explains that your character is personalised according to whatever content appears on your Facebook profile, that you can battle your friends, and eventually try your luck at beating him. It’s a smart idea and uses a combination of celebrity endorsement, social networking, gaming and personalistion to full effect.

Sony’s efforts once again came to mind when reading Todd Defren’s latest post on PR Squared earlier today. He references Spherion Staffing’s “The Temp Life” video series and Ikea’s “Easy To Assemble” webisodes as best in class, but for me, the Sony example above - and that of Lynx’s Wingman Academy - are far more relevant.

Defren uses the concept of branded entertainment to introduce a new(ish) concept, that his ex-client Kaspersky Labs have been trialling for the past year and is being referred to as ‘branded journalism’. Straight away, this notion seems a little contradictory. Surely branded journalism is simply an advertorial? There’s nothing wrong with that, but dressing it up as something else is a little concerning.

Nevertheless, reading on, we discover that Kaspersky recruitred three of the top security journalists covering the anti-virus space (Dennis Fisher at eWeek, Paul Roberts at The451 Group, and Ryan Naraine of ZDNet) to write for the company as employees. Fisher and Roberts now head up Kaspersky’s IT security news site, Threatpost, with Naraine assisting. Together they create content for the global site, and for Spanish & Portugese editions.

Defren makes the point that with such high-profile and well-respected writers on board, Threatpost has become a legitimate threat to the ZDNet’s, CNet’s, and SC Magazine’s of the world. He goes on to say that, “competing with those esteemed publications is not part of the agenda of Kaspersky Lab’s marketing team. Surely they continue to seek coverage in those journals. However, they’re also glad to know that all of the thought leadership & always-contemporary SEO-savvy content (on Threatpost) benefits Kaspersky Lab.”

Defren goes on to say that the content isn’t “salesy,” and that there’s a church/state separation on the editorial side at Threatpost. Subscribers are not fed into a lead-generation database for instance.

This is a truly interesting move from Kaspersky. BP recently hired bloggers to write on its behalf, but when the content started to overlook negative aspects of oil spill clear-up operation and questions started to be asked about the integrity of the coverage, the project was exposed to be seriously one-sided.

Here, we seemingly have the opposite; a brand trying to present a balanced view on its industry. But still, we wonder how the three will cover Kaspersky’s competitiors over time. Surely, no company in it’s right mind would employ writers to sing the praises of other products? So doesn’t that by defualt skew the editorial value? Maybe not. Perhaps in the longer term we’ll see something reminiscent of Marmite’s move to actively court negative coverage of its own brand throughout the ‘Marmite election‘. The result of which was of huge value to the brand.

The other aspect of this story is that Fisher and Roberts are both now acting as ’evangelists’ of the brand in different markets. The PR value is multi-faceted, and it’s working  because it’s been handled appropriately. A move like this has the potential to implode horrendously, but with the right people in place and some clear boundaries – it could prove to be successful for other companies as well.

Tags: branded journalism, kaspersky lab