“I truly believe the audience is the boss,” Refinery29’s Chief Content Officer, Amy Emmerich, says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recently completed Digital Content NewFronts 2018.
Refinery29’s audience makes itself known through “the way they talk to us every single day” through comments, shares, engagements and “direct interactions” via its Mad Chatter feedback platform plus live events, Emmerich adds. Those insights are mixed with “the love and care and attention of people who work within the building who are also women of all kinds. And then we put them together to decide where can we use all of this power and make sure that we’re covering the things that we know matter to them.”
Topics like representation, sex and money “are the categories that they’re trying to own in the future that people are still quite ignoring them on.”
Refinery29’s editorial team leads with stories and series as opposed to platforms in considering how best to engage with its audiences. “It’s not where it is, it’s what it is,” says Emmerich.
At its NewFronts presentation, Refinery29 announced the upcoming launch of “Beauty and the Beats,” which executive creative director and Refinery29 co-founder Piera Gelardi described as a “mobile, virtual reality DJ battle. It will be like a dance party that can go anywhere,” as MediaPost reports.
In all, Refinery29 announced 10 new and six returning digital video series, some in partnership with companies and brands.
Emmerich describes the new series as “a bit more investigative. Really taking our editorial team and putting them in front of the lens and trying to dive into the topics that they cover.”
A new series titled Shady investigates the business of counterfeit cosmetics, while Pride is a six-part documentary series featuring producer Christine Vachon that addresses LGBTQ issues “through a historical lens but also layering pop culture,” says Emmerich.
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.
]]>“What I’m psyched about in terms of Channel29 is that we’re going to take the best of what it means to do native advertising inside of the digital space and we are going to bring that model into the TV space.”
In the short term, plans call for a “full, native integration of content in live programming” and over the course of time “we will look at doing more consumer-friendly commercials,” Personette adds.
“That said, I don’t think we’ll ever do a 30-second spot. I think we’ll be focused more so on what we have learned about what it means to consumer video in a mobile-first world, and that means more like six seconds and more like fifteen seconds.”
Available on smart TVs and Refinery29’s digital platforms, the channel will be for young, progressive female-oriented stories, as MediaPost reports. Refinery29, which has a presence in the UK and Germany, will be expanding its brand to Canada and France.
The goal of Channel29 is to offer “powerful female stories” wherever and however users want to engage with them. It will benefit from Refinery’s reach on owned-and-operated venues in addition to its broad social media presence, something that has greatly benefited the 29Rooms experience.
“We originally launched 29Rooms as just a pop-up event and invited people to come celebrate with us and there were lines down the corner,” says Personette. “We have seen the growth of 29Rooms as an experience continue to elevate and escalate over the course of the last three to four years and we feel that same way for channel 29.”
While the hypothesis of Refinery29 has been that if brands can create a social impact it can drive business results, there’s little research to support it. So the company partnered with Spark Neuro to conduct quantitative, biometric research.
Among the findings are that when a brand attempts to have an “inclusive human and empathetic conversation and dialogue” with women, it can change their self-perceptions and “drive better ad recall for that brand. It actually drives increases in purchase intent and it drives increases in overall conversion.”
Refinery29 plans to use the findings to “take that step into a territory that maybe brands and businesses wouldn’t have been comfortable in before,” Personette says.
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.
]]>“If you define television as screen and screen hours, there’s a bigger opportunity than there’s ever been. If you narrowly define it as free to air TV, it’s a bit more difficult,” Sorrell says in this interview with Beet.TV.
So will there be a tipping point between ad-supported and subscription-based TV services? “People are discussing whether there’s a tipping point. Are they coming under more pressure? I think the answer is yes.”
This is where headlines come into play. “Is it to the degree that we’ve seen in newspapers, no. Will it be to the degree we’ve seen in newspapers, no, I don’t think it will be,” Sorrell adds. “At the end of the day, there are significant changes taking place in the way that consumers consume.”
Like other big, global holding companies, WPP has tried to keep pace with all of the change. This includes realigning long-established agencies while making investments in content creators like Vice and Refinery29.
“We’ve made some mistakes as well as had some successes. But it’s rapidly changing and I think you have to be extremely flexible in your approach and be willing to experiment,” says Sorrell. The core problem facing companies like WPP is “an infrastructure and a set of legacy companies that have been doing this for up to 150 years. We have to adapt as rapidly as we can in a rapidly changing world and that means we have to be very, very flexible and responsive and agile in what we do.”
This video was produced by Beet.TV in Las Vegas at CES 2018. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>“Doing good can be very good business,” says Beitler. “In the future, particularly with the way millennials and even the next generation feel about companies’ responsibilities, it’s very likely that you won’t be able to do good business without doing good.”
Lane Bryant was one of many brand marketers showcasing their purpose-driven positioning and communications strategies at the 2017 Masters of Marketing conference of the Association of National Advertisers. In this interview with Beet.TV, Beitler explains Lane Bryant’s efforts to change the way women see themselves and how the world perceives them.
“We want a world where all women are seen as beautiful, all women love fashion, all women have access to amazing fashion. If she’s more confident, if she feels more comfortable, the truth is she’s going to spend more on apparel.”
Along the way, Lane Bryant has broken new ground in sponsorships with the likes of Sports Illustrated and Glamour, to name just two. Just over a year ago, the retailer founded in 1904 took the title sponsorship of the first SI Swimsuit Issue to feature plus-size models in a campaign titled “This Body.”
Lane Bryant inked the Glamour magazine’s first-ever apparel licensing deal and teamed with Refinery29 to help surface the “invisible majority”: the 67% of American women who wear plus-size garments. “Our goal is to reshape the way that we see women,” Beitler says.
Asked how the company measures campaign success, he cites brand growth and consumer perception. Last month, the YouGov BrandIndex listed Lane Bryant #1 in most improved brand sentiment among millennials, ahead of brands like GE, Royal Carribbean Cruises, Tesla, Forever 21, Payless and Nintendo Wii.
As Beitler notes, that ranking was among “not just women but millennials in general.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.
]]>In the aftermath of the television UpFront season, Sorrell thinks traditional networks have done pretty well price-wise. ““I think they’re quite bullish about the UpFronts in the U.S. They’re seeing reasonably significant prices increases in the mid single-digit area at a time when we’re seeing deflation elsewhere,” says Sorrell, who is Founder & CEO of WPP. “So I think owners of the inventory feel pretty good about it.”
He then cites “obviously broader and much more significant opportunities” for advertisers in the programmatic space. It’s an area where WPP has made significant investments in its Xaxis unit and [m]PLATFORM technology.
“We’re offering something a little bit more than programmatic as it overlays brings in data and technology inputs, which make it far more sophisticated in terms of targeting,” Sorrell says.
Clients that had been concerned about some aspects of programmatic buying are thinking differently, he adds.
“We are seeing I think the start of a groundswell of change in attitude toward programmatic,” Sorrell says, citing marketers’ in-house operations “perhaps becoming less attractive” for reasons that include the need to keep updating the technology.
Turning his attention to newer content providers like Amazon he notes, “The amount of money that these companies are willing to invest in content is quite considerable.”
He says it’s not uncommon for Amazon to spend $10 million on one, hour-long episode, “Netflix maybe $7 million and the more traditional producers spending about three.”
As for whether Netflix, which according to Sorrell loses money on a cash flow basis, can ever turn that around, the answer will lie in its subscription and advertising policies. “In a way Netflix is already advertising, it has product placement warnings in front of some of its series already. So we are starting to see advertising in one form or other start to invade the Netflix platform.”
Companies like WPP, which traditionally had concentrated their investments outside of the content creation sector, have changed their thinking and are ramping up on the sell-side. Sorrell points to investments in Vice Media, Refinery29, 88rising and Mic as examples of his company’s need to experiment “to see how we can learn more and how are clients can be involved in it.”
This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“They’re the boss of me,” Chief Content Officer Amy Emmerich says of the company’s audience, which Refinery29 says represents a global footprint of over 500 million across all platforms.
About 12 years ago, Refinery29 flipped the traditional publisher-reader business model to give the latter a far bigger role.
“I think there’s something about the way that old business works is that you need to own everything for yourself,” Emmerich says in this interview with Bee.TV. “I think we have done is shown the audience that they already have the power. We are here to serve it.”
Refinery29 does that by creating lifestyle stories, original video programming and social, shareable content across all platforms. “There’s about 13 channels that we create content for,” she says. “I think we’re at about 3,500 pieces a month.”
Emmerich joined the company about 18 months ago, with stints at Scripps Networks Interactive, VICE Media and Travel Channel under her belt. By that time, “The bond was already built” between the publisher and its audiences. “This isn’t something that happened overnight,” she adds.
Asked for her thoughts on conversations at the ongoing Digital Content NewFronts, Emmerich touches on brand partners and trust at a time when one is fervently seeking the other. For advertisers, it’s about how you message and what you’re messaging.
“What I was hoping that would come out today is that some of those messages have to change,” Emmerich says. “Audiences trust us and we want our brand partners to trust us that we can help. Because it only serves all of us.”
Doubling back on the word “trust,” she says “I think right now that’s a pretty important word that people are looking for.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB’s Digital Content NewFronts 2017. The series is sponsored by the IAB. For more videos from the #NewFronts, please visit this page.
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