Branded content is more than just a buzzword these days in entertainment marketing – it’s the buzzword.

“Every man and his dog are opening up a branded content studio in one form or another,” said CNN’s Otto Bell.

He’s certainly not wrong. Branded content is growing in every form of the industry, with networks and agencies both wanting a piece of the pie.

CNN has been making a particularly major investment in branded content this year, first this summer with the launch of its studio Courageous, then with the recent announcement of Great Big Story, a video site for millennials relying on sponsorships in the form of branded content.

Courageous launched this June as an in-house branded content studio, with Otto Bell at the head. Bell, VP, group creative director and founder of Courageous, said his first task was formulating a solid (and credible) business model for the group to work with CNN.

“I was determined to set up something with a distinct point of view that was also backed up by a very distinct business model and production model,” Bell said.

To create that production model, the studio hired on a team that includes Emmy-winning video journalists, the head of Wall Street Journal’s video operations and a creative director of Style.com, aiming for a focus on the content part of branded content. Coming from the advertising side, Bell says he’s very glad to be “the odd man out” in that sense.

Setting up a branded studio with a full-time, in-house staff, Bell says the gray area between Courageous and CNN was eradicated immediately, not wanting any confusion about who was working where. “We are separate from the editorial and news side but very inspired by them.”

As a branded content studio for CNN, journalistic instinct and credibility are very important for Bell’s team. “All of these folks really have that editorial instinct and that journalistic pedigree” said Bell, “which is crucial to making newsworthy branded content.”

Recently, it released its project for Cinemax for season two of The Knick. Bell says that this project was “evidence of us walking that walk,” proving Courageous had the chops to create something substantive that connected the two brands.

For The Knick, Cinemax and CNN found a compelling connection between the medical world of the show and the one we live in.

“One of the interesting things we found,” said Bell, “is that despite being set in 1904, The Knick is a very modern show, both from a cinematography point of view but also in the way in which is handles big societal issues.”

The themes that came up were mass migration, global disease and medicinal relief. Under the headline of “The Past is Prologue: Different Century, Same Problems,” Courageous examined parallels between the world of The Knick and today.

Using quotes from history and the show, interactive maps, photography and infographics, CNN viewers and Cinemax fans see these issues in context. For example, the Serbian refugee crisis is compared to the immigrant experience at Ellis Island 100 years ago through a series of photographs and video portraits.

By speaking with people dealing with the crisis now to reaching out to charities and medical groups, Courageous was able to put together a solid picture of the issues in the show that are still around, largely “thanks to good old-fashioned journalism,” according to Bell.

Courageous spoke with The Knick’s technical adviser and archivist, who walked them through thousands of medical images from the early 1900s, some of which were never before published, to show that what viewers see in The Knick is very real and that some of those same issues are around still today.

Comparisons of the Bubonic Plague and the Ebola virus were especially important to this section, Bell said, because it was truly “the first time the world mobilized to fight disease. When you parallel those, its interesting to see that 110 years later, the echoes are uncanny.”

Living up to Bell’s model based on “relevance, execution, distribution,” the project lives on CNN’s sponsored content page, as well as on pages across the CNN site dealing with similar topics. It was featured on the editorial series Breaking Ground, which explains big moments in medical advancement.

Then Courageous also has the full distribution channels of CNN, which garners 16 million visitors to the home page each day and more than 340 million video views per month.

“With that much distribution,” said Bell, “the trick is tailoring and targeting the content. Dissect the audience and tailor communications to that audience, which is still a fairly mass audience for CNN.”

On the network side, Courageous offers a fairly loose licensing agreement with its clients that allow them to use the branded assets for two years so that Cinemax can repurpose for its own site and social accounts.

On its own platforms, CNN and Courageous were very careful to brand their branded content in a distinct way, using the gold color at the top of the page as a way to connect the branded projects and distinguish them from CNN news and feature stories.

“We are very clear on the church and state,” said Bell. “We set up Courageous and built it from the ground up, so there’s no cross over to news room. We still want to do work that has editorial merit, work that stands on its own two feet, just putting those instincts to work for brands.”

See the full experience below:

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