Content innovation: how to push brand content beyond the obvious formats

Why most brand content feels the same

Scroll through the feed of any brand in retail, FMCG, or entertainment. You recognise the pattern within seconds: product shots, a how-to reel, a giveaway, a behind-the-scenes clip. The formats have become so familiar they've turned invisible.

That is the core problem with brand content right now. Not that quality is poor, but that the formats themselves are exhausted. Brands copy what worked for someone else, in a different category, at a different moment. Then they wonder why engagement disappoints.

Real content innovation is something else. It's not better execution of familiar formats. It's designing a format that hasn't been used before in your category. That distinction matters.

At Livewall, we design interactive campaigns and participative experiences for brands that want to look beyond the standard playbook. We've found that the biggest gains come from stepping back from "what should we make" and starting instead with "what do people actually want to do".

Three reasons brands stay stuck in the same format

They benchmark against the wrong category. A retail brand watches other retail brands. An FMCG brand watches competitor FMCG. But your most relevant competitors for attention are not your category peers. They are every other experience competing for the same person's attention at the same moment.

They confuse proven with good. A format is proven if it worked once. Not if it still works now. Benchmarks are rear-view mirrors. Brands that consistently outperform actively test outside their comfort zone.

They optimise instead of reinvent. A/B tests improve what exists. Content innovation questions whether what exists is worth improving. Both are valuable, but they operate on different timescales and produce different kinds of insight.

The combination of these three patterns produces category-wide uniformity that affects even the best-resourced teams.

How to think beyond the obvious

Content innovation does not begin with a brief for "something creative". It begins with a clear analysis of what already exists in your category and where the white space is.

Ask yourself: which formats does no one in our category use, but work well elsewhere? What do people actually do when they interact with our brand, and how could we turn that behaviour into a format? Which cultural moments or platforms have not yet been claimed by brands like ours?

For 9292, we developed a content approach that broke entirely from how public transport brands traditionally show up on social media. Not service information packaged as content. Instead, platform-native formats built around how young people actually use TikTok. The result was brand content that was organically shareable, precisely because it did not feel like brand content.

This is the pattern we see repeatedly: the most effective content innovation comes from deep knowledge of the platform and the audience, not from creative brainstorms in a vacuum.

Formats that work because they put participation first

One pattern we see consistently in successful content innovation is the shift from watching to doing. Passive consumption is replaced by active participation.

This can be simple, like a mechanic where someone makes a choice and receives a personalised result. Or more complex, like a branded game experience that spans multiple sessions. Both outperform static content, because they ask something of the user and reward that request with something that feels genuinely valuable.

For the Doritos Minecraft activation, we built a branded game world that plugged into a cultural moment the audience already owned. The format hadn't existed in the Doritos category before. That was precisely the point.

For the Martin Garrix Dream Team campaign, we translated fan engagement into a shared, viral format through Spotify integration. Fans created something that felt like their own and shared it. Not a broadcast, but a participative experience.

Both projects had one thing in common: they didn't start with "what content do we want to make" but with "what do fans want to do, and how can we enable that".

From one-off experiment to structural innovation

Many brands innovate content by accident: a campaign overperforms, a format lands well, and by coincidence it gets repeated. But structural content innovation requires a more deliberate process.

It starts with reserving space. Not every budget needs to go to proven formats. Part of your campaign production budget gets reserved for formats you haven't used before. Not as throwaway experiments, but as serious tests with a measurable objective.

It also requires measuring what actually matters. Reach and impressions tell you little about whether a format is working. Look at time spent in the experience, return behaviour, organic share actions. Those are the signals that tell you whether you've found something new.

At Livewall, we build content innovation into how we approach campaigns. Not as a separate discipline, but as a way of thinking that runs from briefing to post-mortem. Brands that do this structurally build a genuine differentiation advantage over time. Not through one big success, but through a consistent willingness to avoid the obvious.