At NewFronts in New York, the event at which premium publishers tout their upcoming content roster to hopeful advertisers, BBC Worldwide executives led their pitch with a music offering.
“For the first time ever, BBC Music is coming to the US with a comprehensive commercial offering around TV, digital, social and live events,” says Aaron Tabas, director of the BBC StoryWorks content studio.
Tabas calls Live Lounge the “backbone” of the offering. “It will be living on bbc.com in a unique commercial environment where advertisers can sponsor it,” he says. “We can do branded content. We can do live launch events, something that really allows them to connect with music fans and build their brand messaging.
“We’re going to be creating this section on bbc.com and it’s going to be a really in-depth journalism proposition where advertisers can own 100% share of voice around your standard IAB advertising units. We will also be looking to create some really high-end backed branded content with advertisers.”
BC Global News’ NewFronts announcements included:
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Digital Content NewFronts 2018. The series a co-presentation of Beet.TV and the IAB. Please see additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>There is a lot of bad news to go around, with troubled political climates and challenging rivalries making headlines around the world – and that has got many advertisers concluding “no news is good news”.
Some media agency executives told Digiday they had blocked hundreds of news sites. Over the last year, several news or so-called news sites have found their way on to the blacklists which some ad buyers and platforms use.
It was a sentiment Richard Pattinson of BBC News’ sponsored brand content-making studio sought to soothe at the NewFronts.
“We are protecting them from the harder edges of news, and I think that was one of the messages that was on display here today,” he told Beet.TV at the event.
“We are integrating new technologies – actually, I think we have just done it in the last month – that protects brands from being against the hardest of hard news stories
“We are very conscious that when brands are alongside news … then they are not adjacent to any of the challenging stories that would cause discomfort.”
To license fee-payers in the UK, the idea that the BBC could run ads at all – let alone sponsored content – is anathema to the service.
But that’s the UK. Beyond the border, BBC Worldwide, the corporation’s commercial arm, is charged with raising revenue from advertising. In 2015, branded content, through its new BBC StoryWorks content studio, became the latest manifestation of that. Now BBC Worldwide is helping brands write for and publish to its outlets including BBC.com and its BBC World News TV channel.
Pattinson, who is SVP of the StoryWorks unit is a former editor for a series of BBC News shows and brands, now running the brand content studio.
He adds: “The way we create our stories with brands is done in such a way that it has an editorial sensibility similar to the editorial content it sits alongside, and we find that, that’s really effective in delivering the most impact because it’s the kind of thing our audience are expecting to see. It doesn’t surprise them as something that feels a bit alien alongside the editorial content.”
The unit is using “facial coding” technology and will soon be adding eye-tracking studies to better understand consumer responses to its campaigns.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Digital Content NewFronts 2018. The series a co-presentation of Beet.TV and the IAB. Please see additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>This is easier said than done in a world marked by the proliferation of skinny programming bundles and rampant cannibalization. The capital demands of investing in infrastructure and platforms can be a dizzying maze for established broadcasters to navigate while trying to cling to their audiences and generate new ones.
Seeking to be the tour guide for this trip is Accenture, which just weighed in with its annual road map called Bringing TV To Life, which provides strategies for both traditional video content distributors such as TV networks and programmers, as well as content aggregators such as pay TV operators.
“The interesting thing about a broadcaster is that they are a B to B business generally but at the same time they have B to C capabilities,” Sef Tuma, who is MD & Global Lead at Accenture Digital Video and the author of Bringing TV To Life, says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual NAB Show.
“In their old world it was very broadcast capabilities. The fact is they don’t have any of the CRM, one-to-one or any sort of relationship-based capabilities in their operating model,” Tuma says.
The delicate balancing act is one of retaining and growing the value of each of household while investing in generating engagement and, most important, reach. “Because reach is really what their competitors care about, whether that’s Google or Facebook. They care reach that’s unbounded by infrastructure,” he adds.
Tuma cites as one example BBC, an Accenture client that “took power of all of their digital capabilities and put a personalization platform under it to be able to start creating new ways of having conversations with the audience.”
Broadcasters need to understand their audiences not solely for the traditional purposes of advertising, but to inform decisions about content investment and “be able to find their most valuable audience.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.
]]>“I saw nobody recreating the MSNBC, CNN, CNBC for people under the age of 60,” Steinberg recalls of his spring 2016 launch of a live news service focusing on business and technology. “It’s a cable network. Instead of living on a cable box it lives on Twitter at three o’clock every day and on Facebook live.”
Cheddar also has its own channel on Sling TV “in the base bundle right next to CNN” and is live on Amazon’s bundles as well, Steinberg explains in an interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. “We’ll have two more of these announced by mid year.”
Steinberg’s bet is that young people who are hooked on on-demand programming like House of Cards and Transparent “would have a need for what I call ambient, non-appointment viewing to see what’s happening. And that’s effectively what Cheddar is. It’s a live news network.”
Last fall, Cheddar went behind a pay wall with a monthly subscription price of $6.99, as The Wall Street Journal reports. It also gets a fee from pay TV bundles “and the ability to monetize the advertising on those bundles as well,” Steinberg says.
Another revenue stream is what he calls “Native 3.0,” wherein advertisers have a presence on the lower third of the screen. For HP, it’s the Keep Reinventing message that’s promoted, while Dunkin Donuts prefers an On The Go theme and Fidelity’s app is used to reference stocks being covered by the correspondents at Cheddar.
“The direct subscription model is our restaurant regulars. They’re people that just want Cheddar and don’t want a bundle,” Steinberg says. “But ideally any skinny bundle out there, I intend for us to be in those and the consumer can buy us that way.”
He counsels against every publisher thinking that live video is where it’s at. “It’s about looking where there is white space,” says Steinberg.
As for so-called fake news, he blames social media networks like Facebook and readers themselves.
“If people just read credible sources, if you went to BBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Cheddar even, there would be no fake news,” Steinberg says. “Fake news is a consequence of the fact that people got disoriented from what they were actually reading and this stuff was able to spread.”
This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
]]>Announced at Cannes Lions, BBC StoryWorks is the name of the content marketing that will have offices in Singapore, Sydney, New York and London and will be headed by Richard Pattinson, a former BBC News journalist who, at home in the UK, has edited the corporation’s This Week programme, reported for Newsnight and has been a commissioning editor for global news.
Speaking with Beet.TV, BBC Worldwide’s EVP of international advertising, Carolyn Gibson, says StoryWorks will offer:
“It delivers newsroom values and the combination of creative studio to support our advertisers’ ambitions globally,” Gibson says.
“It’s using the skills and the heritage the BBC is so well known for – producing fantastic content, one of the world’s most trusted media organisations – but leveraging that skillet for our advertisers to tell their stories and engage with consumers.”
At home, the BBC is funded by license fee and is largely forbidden from running advertising on its owned and operated properties by royal charter, which is due for renewal amid speculation of reform. But the corporation is permitted – and, indeed,, encouraged – to make money from operations overseas and from select activities at home through its BBC Worldwide arm, of which BBC Advertising is part.
So far, BBC StoryWorks has worked on campaigns for tourism body Brand USA, in which it created a series of two-minute films that used Hollywood directors to talk about the American landscape and psyche.
We spoke with Gibson for a series from Cannes, presented by Teads. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.
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TouchCast lets video producers embed interactive web elements including images, maps, web pages and other videos inside digital video, each expanding when clicked on by viewers, opening up possibilities for immersive storytelling.
The BBC has been using TouchCast on iPad since this summer on a range of stories from Ebola and the Scottish referendum to architecture and cats
“(WSJ) is about to roll out TouchCast on a regular basis,” Schonfeld tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “There’s a talented crew making WSJ interactive videos.
“It’s going to be a completely new form of video for them. They’re being super-creative. Most of their pieces are in the studio. Sarah Murray does stand-ups in the newsroom. They figured out a way to really rapidly do interactive videos about breaking news.”
As well as using its production suite, customers integrate with TouchCast’s player software. Founded a couple of years ago, TouchCast may be geared toward interactive editorial today – but it’s easy to imagine advertisers taking interest, too. “Our engagement is through the roof,” Schonfeld adds. “More than 50% of people who view these TouchCasts are actually clicking on at least one element – that’s unheard of.”
]]>For the BBC and other customers, the video encoding happens increasingly in the Amazon “cloud,” he explains. While hardware solutions had been the most advanced solution, software is now at least two years ahead, he says.
In this interview, he explains how Elemental is approaching the encoding of 4K files which present vastly computing needs.
Also at the show, Elemental announced an alliance with Adobe Primetime. Here is the company’s news with Ericsson.
Please find additional coverage of NAB 2014 right here.
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“The BBC is the first broadcaster to go online-only with one of its channels,” Ralph Rivera tells Beet.TV. “That demographic has the highest propensity for consuming video online. Changing the means of transport from regular TV, via satellite or terrestrial, to internet provision isn’t going to be that big a change for them.”
But Rivera admits he calls that “the glass-half-full version” of a plan designed to cut costs and divert money to core BBC services.
Rivera says iPlayer, the BBC’s UK catch-up TV service, has clocked 10 billion digital downloads of the linear broadcast TV shows it hosts on an on-demand basis since inception six years ago. Next, it will open up to offer more short-form, made-for-online and snackable mobile shows. Rivera also says use of data is helping the BBC become “better at matching you and your interests with content that we’ve already produced”.
Beet.TV spoke with him at the FT Digital Media Conference. To view all our coverage of the conference, visit this page.
]]>“There’s no reason why a brand … shouldn’t have a voice; anyone can tell a story,” BBC Worldwide‘s global strategy and sales operations VP Tom Bowman tells Beet.TV.
“Paramount ran a program with us around spying ahead of the new Jack Ryan theatrical release. It was really good stuff, the response from the audience was really good. BBC expertise can make sure you’re bringing stories to life Really good branded content is actually good storytelling.”
We spoke with him at the FT Digital Media Conference. To view all our coverage of the conference, visit this page.
]]>“If you’re dealing with a fixed-price IO (insertion order) business all the time, it’s very difficult to increase the rate,” Adap.tv‘s EMEA MD Brian Fitzpatrick tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“If you’ve got a very valuable commodity like the BBC does, you want to put this as much as possible in to competition, so you have many buyers coming in trying to access this premium inventory.”
The partnership concerns some of the video material published by BBC Worldwide outside of the UK, where, thanks to license fee funding by Royal Charter, the public broadcaster is mostly forbidden from making commercial domestic revenue.
But the relationship is a project-based one, including on the Top Gear car site, and does not cover all BBC Worldwide videos – illustrating how content owners are still feeling out the potential of the paradigm.
Watch the full video to hear Fitzpatrick on how there is no need for Adap.tv to merge teams with new owner AOL, which acquired the firm earlier this year for $400 million.
]]>“On BBC America, we have half the commercials as anyone else,” says BBC Worldwide digital sales EVP Mark Gall. “A lot of fans are saying ‘Wow, I really liked that Audi commercial’ – you usually don’t get that when you have a lot of clutter.”
Asked by Beet.TV Video Ad Effectiveness Summit interviewer Ashley J. Swartz whether that means half the inventory can bring twice the advertiser value, Gall answered: “Absolutely.
“You’re going to remember (the ad) if there’s not 80 commercials in an hour, or five ads on a pag If you reduce clutter, people are going to remember it – and, when they’re in the mind of buying something, they buy it. ”
Was Gall just making excuses for a lack of inventory at the Doctor Who and Sherlock broadcaster? Watch the rest of the video to decide for yourself…
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