Bank Of America media SVP Lou Paskalis thinks brands need to take a leaf out of the books of publishers and broadcasters they historically have advertised against.
“I need to move into a world where I’m operating more like a publisher to have the level of content that I need to join these moments,” he said, in this fireside chat with Matt Spiegel SVP of MediaLink at the Beet.TV executive retreat.
What Paskalis was channeling was a belief that only content, not ad messages, can really engage viewers.
“We’re now in the attention economy, he said. “We’re competing with every stimuli out there to try to get consumers’ attention long enough so that we can plant a message in their head.
“The issue is to do something that will resonate with people because let’s face it, they have 2.2 devices within reach while they’re watching television and they’re in control now with the swipe.
“They don’t want an ad, they want content, and they don’t want content, they want video content. So, if I can find those moments of indulgence and I can bring in something that resonates for them, I think I can win. It’s not about frequency; it’s about context and connection.”
This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen.
You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.
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But what is the real place of “content” in a marketer strategy? And are they prepared to to the next step – to create content that’s so good people would pay for it?
If brands really want their content to be consumed, should they aim for standards so high that their work demands payment? It’s an interesting notion – one OMD chief innovation officer Ben Winkler shared a Beet.TV discussion panel.
“In the end, there’s only really two kinds of content – you either pay for it or you don’t,” he said. “When clients talk to us about creating content, I say, ‘Are you willing to put the time, investment and resource in to creating content that people would pay for?’
“I say, ‘Think about the kinds of content that you pay for – HBO, Netflix, sometimes even New York Times’. Then they tend to back off a little bit – they go, ‘Okay, maybe we’re not ready for that’.”
Fellow panelists Jordan Bitterman and John Montgomery said they think data can fuel creative renaissance for advertisers.
“(Data) can be reinvested back in to some sort of creative product,” saidMindshare NA chief strategy officer Bitterman. “We have a lot of white space left in which we can create great content due to data. We’ve just hit the tip of the iceberg on this.”
GroupM Connect NA chairman Montgomery added: “We can use data to tell stories. We know who’s seen episode one of the ad – we can serve episode two or three. We can tell much longer stories.”
They were questioned by Tobi Elkin.
This video is from Media Future Conversations 2015: Unblocked – Valuing Human Attention In A Content-Driven World, an event presented by true[X] in association with Beet.TV Please find more event videos here.
]]>Online video production veteran Ze Frank leads BuzzFeed’s video content efforts in Hollywood, but they are set to get an expansion.
“Branded video will be coming to my region very soon,” Kate Burns, BuzzFeed’s general manager for Europe, reveals to Beet.TV in this video interview.
“Our video business based in LA has been a significant driver of growth, both from an audience and a revenue perspective. It was only a matter of time, once I joined, that I’d be looking at how we can scale that business outside of California to Europe and beyond. So we’re looking at the UK as being the first market.
“We’ve now hired two editorial guys on the ground, shooting in London, British content. We’re working on signing deals with brands. We’ll soon have our first UK branded content videos to play for Q4.”
After having headed Google, Bebo and AOL in various regions, it seemed like there was only one logical next step in the digital media ranks for Burns.
She was named BuzzFeed’s general manager for Europe in March, and promptly hired The Guardian’s deputy editor Janine Gibson as BuzzFeed’s UK editor-in-chief.
This video is part of a series from DMEXCO, presented by Mediaocean. Please visit this page for our other videos.
]]>At Cannes Lions, the bank announced the launch of The Business Of Life, a video series made by Vice using data provided by Pinterest, which will also promote the content, as AdWeek reports.
“Young people are growing up and need financial advice,” Smith tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Banks don’t have the best reputation. They said, ‘What would you do?’ I said, ‘It’s very simple’ – just give them factual (information); ’here’s what a mortgage is’, ‘here’s how you lease a car’, ‘here’s renting versus buying’.”
Those are the topics The Business Of Life video discussions touch on over the series.
“Pinterest is one of the biggest platforms in the world … especially that’s interactive,” Smith adds. “We didn’t really have a partnership with Pinterest, so we wanted to see how that would work, and it’s worked fantastically. Analytics doesn’t mean anything unless you can convert that in to something. Pinterest’s data actually works.”
We interviewed Smith as part of a series on video advertising at Cannes Lions, presented by true[X]. For more videos from the 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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“At the moment, we are looking to confirm one of our first global deals, which will mean Guardian Labs content created in London can be distributed across all of the media that are part and parcel of the Pangea Alliance,” she says.
That alliance is the Rubicon-powered programmatic system, announced in March, in to which The Guardian, CNN International, the Financial Times, Reuters and The Economist are putting their ad inventory. Whilst Pangea is designed for display ads, Watkins comments suggest she may try to scale branded content programmatically, too.
“It really does depend on the objectives of the campaign, whether we look to distribute that content off Guardian platforms,” Watkins adds. But, even if Guardian-produced branded content doesn’t end up published on Pangea partners like the FT, it may appear elsewhere: “One of the areas we’re going to move in to is white-label content production where we are creating content that solely sits on our clients’ owned channels.”
Having undertaken drinks brand Diageo’s first real-time content marketing campaign for Bailey’s in December, The Guardian will soon begin bringing real-time content to other Diageo brands, likely including Guinness, Watkins says.
At the upcoming Cannes Lions festival, she expects a refocus on the show’s awards track, demonstrating a fusion of technology and creativity.
We interviewed Watkins in London as part of the series the Road to Cannes, our lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival presented by Coull. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>“It’s very different because it’s not a formula,” Kilgore tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Some of these things are six-month programmes where you send people out and do videos across the country, maybe around the world.
“That involves a different kind of pricing from something that can be done with a couple of meetings. It ranges dramatically and is driven by the production side of it.”
His USA Today publication offers brands Branded content. “The only single rule is you can’t put it in a traditional ad unit slot, or it just looks like an ad unit,” Kilgore says.” It loses all of its potential and power. We are still experimenting with … different ways to make it feel organic… more in the editorial well with some markings to say ‘this is a little bit different’.”
He was interviewed by Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting.
Beet.TV coverage of the IAB meeting was sponsored by SpotXchange. Please find Beet.TV’s coverage of the event here.
]]>“Later this year, we’ll be opening an office in New York,” head of business development and partnerships Brian Cullinane tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
Marketers increasingly want to tell their story using editorially-produced content. VideoElephant’s library curates 120,000 clips and 15,000 hours of long-form video for such purposes.
“We’re giving access to a library of brand-safe premium professionally-produced content,” Cullinane says. “You can get access to 150-plus content producers in a single place.
“You tell us this is the kind of content you’re looking for, we can produce feeds of content, aggregated from multiple publishers, and refresh that continue on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.”
He was interviewed at Beet.TV’s annual executive retreat.
The Beet Retreat ’15 was sponsored by AOL and Videology. Please find additional videos from the event here.
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Programming head Oren Katzeff tells Beet.TV the company has a studio, a network and a platform. With 440 creators across its YouTube network, Tastemade has also produced its own drinks show, Local Flight, with vodka brand Grey Goose.
That was one of 18 new shows Tastemade bowed in 2014. Former Yahoo Media exec Katzeff wants to double that number through 2015 and expand the company from food to more lifestyle segments.
He was interviewed by Beet.TV at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Earlier this month, the health publisher previewed “Future of Health with Robin Roberts”, a digital mini-series fronted by the Good Morning America co-host.
It will be “just the first in what should be a significant amount of additional video programming”, CEO David Schlanger tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “We feel the need to focus on video. It’s certainly going to be an emphasis in 2015.”
Schlanger says he wants to syndicate original productions off-site to social media and broadcast TV. And, although FDA advertising rules mean medical advertisements must include lengthy balancing product statements, Schlanger says TV ads’ experience in working to those regulations means they pose no barrier to WebMD’s own video ambitions.
He was interviewed by Beet.TV at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
“A lot of our best-performing stories have had video as part of them; many of them are multi-media,” Times advertising EVP Meredith Levien tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “The ones with video are absolutely out-performing everything else.”
Levien says the Times has clocked over 40 marketer campaigns under “Paid Posts”: “It was a big big growth business for us – it’s a big contributor to our digital ad growth this year.”
The program has mostly prompted buzz around Netflix’s Paid Post for its Orange Is The New Black show, a feature article about women in prison, the series’ own plot line. Campaigns since have been notched up for Holiday Inn and Cole Haan.
“What we’ve been able to prove in a year is that, even with very clear labelling (as sponsored), if a story is high-quality, we can get terrific engagement for it,” Levien adds.
We interviewed her at the MEC session at the Consumer Electronics Show.
Beet.TV coverage of CES 2015 is sponsored by Adobe Primetime. Find all our coverage here.
]]>“It’s about using data to be strategic about how you reach people in a contextual way,” he says. Next up for branded video will be a more audience-driven approach in tandem with publishers, he says. Key to this strategy is working with publishing partners to better understand what their audiences want.
“We are partnering with publishers to understand throughout the production process how to create and distribute so we know who we are reaching, and producing the creative for the campaign to run natively,” he says. As an example, Digitas has worked closely with the social viral platform Upworthy to dig into the ideal duration, emotion and types of video to best reach consumers.
Book was interviewed earlier this month at the Beet.TV video summit about video advertising outside of the pre-roll. The event was presented by Teads.
]]>Some Maxus clients lean on branded video to change brand perception. “We have a client filming local activation and distributing it online, and distributing that emotional message coupled with an ad can work nicely to change brand perception,” Langan says. Other marketers use video for targeting because of the efficiency. “We have a tourism client that recently changed their target to a much younger one…and the branded content is more fun, irreverent, very true to the audience and targetable,” she explains. In addition, some form of interaction in the branded video can help.
When it comes to native content, marketers need to make sure the native ads deliver value in the form of entertainment or information. While native ads are on the rise, however, the programmatic opportunities in them are still small, she adds.
Langan was interviewed earlier this month at the Beet.TV video summit about video advertising outside of the pre-roll. The event was presented by Teads.
]]>“About a year ago, we hired a chief digital officer with intent to build and staff a team,” says the group’s digital brand engagement global director Sosti Ropaitis. “Right now, we are pretty much a startup in a large organization – a small group of people looking at doing marvellous and ambitious things.
“We’ve gone from just a series of Likes … to being more purposeful about the content we develop – having a more unique and tangible tonality. We see a natural connection point in the integration of convenience and fun.”
He was interviewed by Paul Kontonis, CMO of Collective Digital Studios at the Beet.TV leadership summit on the transformation of television, presented by AOL. Please find more videos from the event here.
]]>“We give the partners rights and permissions to use that video content on their own (channels) – it needs to have a life of its own,” branded content and content production VP Jennifer Catto tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
One recent example of such a Say Media branded video exercise was the campaign it produced with fashion brand Boden and its xoJane publisher Jane Pratt. On native branded video, Catto says: “It started back with soap operas.” And Say Media is pleasantly surprised to be finding viewer completion rates for in-stream branded video in the realm of 48 percent.
]]>They were interviewed by comScore co-counder and executive chairman emeritus Gian Fulgoni, at the Beet.TV leadership summit presented by the Jun Group. You can find more videos from the summit here.
]]>“You have to think about the first few seconds. We have to think about modularity of creative … whether these 30(-second videos) are small films anymore,” says BPN chief strategy officer Chris Hiland:
“The reality is … I might be paying per the second of the ad viewed… I have to be able and willing to swap out the next form of creative.
“Don’t wait for half way through the 30 to show the brand logo – hit them up front. People are becoming more impatient.”
He was interviewed by comScore co-counder and executive chairman emeritus Gian Fulgoni, at the Beet.TV leadership summit presented by the Jun Group. You can find more videos from the summit here.
]]>“Purchase and sales is a tough thing. When you’re talking about starting a conversation about a brand, that’s a much easier thing to do with content,” he says. The branded content that is shared most often tends to be more focused on ideas and stories about a brand, rather than direct pitches, he says.
Brands should implement a measurement plan with clearly defined objectives, and that process can help branded content to deliver for a marketer, says Tom Weeks, SVP and Group Brand Director at SMG’s LiquidThread. “We try to make sure branded content is being looked at as part of the last inch to retail,” he says.
Branded content can also yield worthwhile creative results. “For a tiny fraction of a traditional media budget we can create and build relevant brand experiences that is worth making content from. It’s usually more brains than cash,” says Jonathan Hoffman, President at ZeroDot/President Experience Design at Starcom MediaVest Group,
The panelists were interviewed by Cristel Turner, Director of Brand Advertising, Strategy and Business Marketing at U.S. Cellular at the Beet.TV leadership summit presented by the Jun Group. You can find more videos from the summit here.
]]>IPG’s BPN chief strategy officer Chris Hiland tells Beet.TV in this recorded panel interview how his agency helped food client Hilshire appeal to so-called “grill masters” with its Ball Park meat line-up, using webisodes and contests to tap in to competitive streaks.
“There are always trade-offs about what’s the right balance,” “There are always trade-offs about what’s the right balance. We followed the right lead of letting the passion speak for itself. Is reach as important as what we think it was, or is it about giving people something to participate in?”
He was interviewed by Gian Fulgoni, co-counder and executive chairman emeritus of comScore at the Beet.TV leadership summit presented by the Jun Group. You can find more videos from the summit here.
]]>“There is an urban myth of organic reach, of something going viral,” Mindshare digital innovation and strategy MD Jim Cridlin says in this interview with Beet.TV. “If you’re not prepared to pay to put media support behind any content you’re creating, then there’s absolutely no reason to create that content.
“Social channels have either already changed or are becoming paid models – the idea of organic reach is non-existent. For years, particularly with Facebook, we told everybody it was about engagement. We counsel our clients now, ‘Stopping doing that’ – stop trying to acquire fans, try to focus on fewer, better pieces of content, all supported with paid media.
He was interviewed by Gian Fulgoni, co-counder and executive chairman emeritus of comScore at the Beet.TV leadership summit presented by the Jun Group. You can find more videos from the summit here.
]]>“We are committed to being champions of entrepreneurship, so it was an organic intersection of our values and the show’s values,” she says. The partnership includes sponsoring casting calls and shadow days on set. These type of marketing efforts can help a brand that does business in a commodified market. “Using brand content to position and change a brand perception is really important,” she says, adding that digital marketing should ideally blend transactional and branding.
Turner was a panelist and moderator at the recent Beet.TV summit on branded video presented the Jun Group. You can more videos from the event here.
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The agency has a division, Newcast, dedicated to creating TV and online video content opportunities for its clients.
“It’s become much richer than ‘just place your TV ad in pre-roll’,” Newcast global MD Mark Waugh tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
Newcast recently used the playbook for a campaign to illustrate the switch-on of UK mobile telco O2’s 4G network.
“We accessed Caspar Lee, who’s just gone through three million subs, in a video where we talk about 4G in the UK,” Waugh says. “We handed him creative control to talk about ‘How does 4G help him reach his audience better?’ That short video has now reached 1.4 million views – and it keeps on going, so the ROI is increasing all the time. That’s what brands are waking up to.”
This video is part of a series titled The State Of Video, a series sponsored by AOL Platforms. Please visit this page for all the videos from the series. This session was recorded in London.
]]>Now Mondelēz’s global media and consumer engagement VP B. Bonin Bough reveals progress in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“We’ve been able to deliver over 100 million unique impressions via the studio at 50% of what our average online video CPM is,” Bough says.
“The challenge that brands have is, we want to create content in real-time that’s relevant to what’s being discussed right now. Guess what news organisations do on a continual basis? That’s exactly what they do. Blink Studios is really about operationalising real-time content creation from a video perspective.”
Last week, Mondelēz inked a deal with Google which will see the confectioner up its ad spend across YouTube and Google+ in return for analytics and production support on its branded video content.
Bough says YouTube is already making it possible for brands to respond to breaking news events with conversational video, but he is eyeing a future in which that transfers to bigger screens: “At some point, I’m going to be able to create a TV commercial in real time based on what’s being talked about in culture. We’re preparing for that.”
Beet.TV interviewed him Bough Manhattan during Advertising Week at the offices of digital consultancy RebelMouse.
]]>But in the midst of this expansion, there are questions and challenges: how and where does that content get published, discovered, and consumed? What is the creative process? How do brands make sure their content reaches the right audience? And how do we calculate ROI on the heavy investment in custom content?
These and related topics will be explored in a three-hour, high-level summit produced by Beet.TV The event will involve senior level agency, brand and publishing executives. The event is not being streamed live, but will be produced for publication shortly after.
The event is being sponsored by Jun Group.
Earlier this summer, we spoke with Jun Group CEO MItchell Reichtgut about the challenges and opportunities of serving branded video advertising into mobile apps. Jun Group, a content network for brands and publishers, serves a majority of its ads into mobile apps. In the interview, he explains the significance of Yahoo’s acquisition of Flurry and the complexities in mobile advertising.
Moderators:
*Gian Fulgoni, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman, comScore
*Cristel Turner, Director, Brand Advertising, Strategy & Business Marketing at U.S. Cellular
*Andy Plesser, Executive Producer and Founder, Beet.TV
Panelists:
*Spencer Bahler – Managing Director, Chicago, Maxus
*Jim Cridlin – Managing Director, Digital Innovation and Strategy, Mindshare
*Harvin Furman, SVP, Director & COE Digital Acceleration, Starcom
*Vincent Geraghty Executive Director of Production, Leo Burnett
*Chris Hiland, Chief Strategy Officer, BPN (IPG Mediabrands)
*Jonathan Hoffman – President, ZeroDot, SMG
*Len Kendall, Director of Social Marketing. Havas Worldwide
*D.J. Reali – SVP, Ad Sales and Agency Partnerships, The Weather Company
*Mitchell Reichgut, CEO, Jun Group
*Tom Weeks, SVP Group Brand Content Director, LiquidThread (SMG)
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“You need to give people the pathway to understand the brand, but in the pure storytelling the brand has to step back and be the confident that the brand and story stand for the same thing and that will come through to the audience,” he says, pointing to a campaign Johnson & Johnson implemented for Clean and Clear skin care that included lightly branded content paired with ads that included more specific brand details.
The key to successful content marketing lies in studying audience insights and their motivations, and pairing that information properly with brand objectives, Donaton adds. He’s an advocate of seeding a range of branded content in the marketplace and then layering in paid media behind that. “Once something catches fire on its own, you can dial back the paid,” he says.
We interviewed Donaton at the IAB conference during Advertising Week in New York.
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