Content Marketing in renaissance Venice
The more things change, the more they stay the same. A look at one of the earliest examples of branded content, and how it uses the same strategies as modern work.
Museum Musée du Louvre, Paris)
There has always been debate about how old branded content is. Some point to the birth of radio and TV in the US, and the likes of Colgate Comedy Hour, Hallmark Hall of Fame, and Westinghouse Studio One.
Some go back a bit further — to 1900 and the Launch of the Michelin Guides.
Or even 1895 and the launch of John Deere’s The Furrow, a magazine aimed at the farming audience who bought and used John Deere’s agricultural vehicles.
A recent article even highlighted out a Dutch project from 1672.
Jan van der Heijden and his brother, Nicolaes had an improved version of the fire hose. To promote it they put out a white paper, and a book filled with illustrations. Using influencer marketing tactics, Jan even dedicated the book to one of his most important prospects, the mayor of Amsterdam.
But I like to go back further.
Paolo Veronese, born 1528, was an Italian Renaissance painter, based in Venice. He was known for his large-format history paintings of religion and mythology.
Veronese used the stories from the Gospels as an excuse to stage sumptuous feasts in sixteenth-century dress inside grandiose and theatrical architectural perspectives, producing realistic representations of social life at the highest level.
One of his most famous works is Supper at Emmaus.
You can see clearly, slap-bang in the centre of the painting, a beautiful, fine wine glass. This is odd, because glass like that didn’t exist in Jesus’s time.
The reason for this is that Veronese was in fact, was creating a piece of branded content.
Venice at the time was one of the global centres of glassmaking, its quality and variety preeminent. How it was produced was a jealously guarded trade secret. No glassworker was allowed to leave the city without permission, or risk his family being imprisoned or even his own assassination.
Veronese’s brief, was to spread the word about this, helping to maintain a price premium for Venetian glass:
Get: people rich enough to afford fine glassware
To: believe Venetian glass to be the state-of-the-art
By: creating great art which demonstrated its quality and beauty.
The channel strategy was pretty straightforward. Art at the time was the medium with the highest status, as well as one of the most portable. These grand paintings would hang on the walls of the finest houses in Europe, letting everyone who saw them know how wonderful and fine Venetian glass was.
Additionally, dressing up the message as a bible story added gravitas, not to mention implicit endorsement by Jesus, the ultimate influencer-celebrity.
And it worked. Veronese’s work reached an audience throughout the western world, and in his later career he often took commissions from an international clientele.
The Venetian Glass Marketing Board, had it existed at the time, could not have asked for more.
All of which shows that content marketing, for all that it is seen as a new-fangled form of comms, enabled by the digital ecosystem, it is in fact a (sponsored) tale as old as time itself.
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