Vice Media arrived at the Cannes Lions advertising gathering in June with HBO having cancelled Vice News Tonight and Disney having written off its investment in the company.
But, speaking with Beet.TV, the outfit’s international and global chief revenue officer was full of optimism about the road ahead.
“We will announce soon the new home for that Vice News content,” Delport said. “I mean, (it is) multimedia-awarded (by) Peabody, and (is) the biggest newscast for the young audiences in the US.
“We want also Vice News to become more international because we don’t need less Vice News, but more Vice News – in the world of fakery, to have trusted sources, the highest journalistic standards, and (to) deliver, every, day 30 minutes of premium news, it’s something that we need.
“And, with elections coming all over the world, not just in the US, you need more and more that kind of immersive reporters from a great newsroom.”
Vice News Tonight’s incredible 2017 film on white nationalist protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, received a 2018 Peabody Award, after also receiving Emmy, Polk, Scripps Howard, Gracie and Sidney Hillman awards.
One thing seems sure – Vice Media is diversified enough at this point that it can react to a changing and challenging media environment.
Delport says the company produces 1,5000 pieces of content every day in 25 languages, has clocked 1,000 hours of original Viceland originals – 900 hours of which has been licensed by the UK’s Channel 4 – and productions for Sky, Amazon, Netflix and more soon.
For him, it is all about tapping the spirit of a can-do generation to fix what may be broken.
“The world is young,” Delport says. “Don’t feel that the world is broken and that disruption is the end of the end. No, no. It’s the beginning of the beginning.
“Take that optimistic lens and look at the world as an array of limitless possibilities.
“The new generation that is coming is just crying for that. They want to fix the system. They want to have that positive impact.”
You are watching Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2019. For all of our Cannes coverage, please visit this page. Thank you to the sponsors of our festival coverage, which are Amobee, Innovid, Nielsen, RTL AdConnect and Teads. Special thanks to Hearts & Science for hosting Beet.TV for the Festival.
]]>Some media agency executives told Digiday they had blocked hundreds of news sites. We have also seen publishers like BBC News, News Corp, The Economist and now Vice Media protest that there is nothing bad about being placed next to bad news.
Now one media buyer turned sell-side executive is speaking out against platforms that, in a bid to make “brand-safe” environments in which to buy ads, are actually employing policies that may be tantamount to homophobia, racism and censorship.
“A complete misunderstanding by the tech world is the fact that they will take decisions through algorithm and these keyword blacklists without literally being transparent about it,” says Vice Media international and global chief revenue officer Dominique Delport, the former global MD of Havas, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“I feel Vice has been the first to say, “Guys, enough is enough.” We’re talking about literally censorship. We took 18 months of research to look at all the blacklists that have been used for words that was supposedly brand unsafe. (They included) ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’, ‘Muslim’, ‘black’, came before ‘guns’, ‘shooting’, ‘war’ and ‘killing’. It’s insane.”
Delport made a similar disclosure back in September. Vice, of course, is an edgy publisher whose journalism often takes readers on a roller-coaster through the under-bell of culture.
After a couple of years of outcry over the accidental programmatic placement of brands’ ads against less-than-salubrious stories, ad-tech platforms introduced brand safety tools, often working by running keyword checkers on article content.
But that may be a blunt instrument, and Delport thinks things have gone too far, possibly leading to denying younger audiences, especially, the kinds of news they want to read.
“The pendulum became literally too far on that kind of fake safety,” he says. “We’re having that current discussion with other great publishers for trusted news, to really put that at the top of the agenda of the tech platform and the tech community.
“This is really serious, and we need to fix that to avoid that kind of technologic filtering behind the back of our young audience.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV series exploring the dynamic news landscape and opportunities for marketers. The series is sponsored by CNN. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>But how can a company that wants to be ad-funded keep ad-buying brands happy amid all the controversy and harshness of real life?
In this video interview with Beet.TV, VICE Media international and global chief revenue officer Dominique Delport suggests VICE gets an unfair rap from ad-tech buying platforms.
“I’m shocked, when I look at how programmatic trade news articles and news video, there is a kind of new moral norm no one is aware of where DSPs [demand-side platforms] are choosing the keywords that they’re considering as brand unsafe,” says Delport.
He’s referring to new brand safety software that runs on DSPs, categorizing publishers and their ad inventory based on the kinds of topics they cover.
That practice cropped up at this year’s NewFronts, where digital media publishers presented their upcoming content rosters to ad buyers, attempting to break down a mounting feeling that – amid 2018’s heady political climate – news was a bad place to find context.
Says Delport: “When I looked at the [keyword] list the other day, ‘migrants’, ‘refugees’, any video talking about ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’ are de facto skipped by algorithms because [they are] considered as brand-unsafe.
“This is wrong. This is crazy. This is not the world we live in, and brands should be bold enough and just relevant enough to consider that this is not the world our audience lives in. And we know that. The Gen Z [crowd] are even more purpose-driven than the millennials.”
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. Some media agency executives told Digiday they had blocked hundreds of news sites.
This year, we have seen publishers like BBC News, News Corp and The Economist protest that there is nothing bad about being placed next to bad news.
What can be done about it?
“I will keep being vocal with my programmatic partners and platforms to say, ‘Guys, look at that. This is not good’,” Delport says.
This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.
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“The market is crying for more video. There is a huge shortage on that market,” says Dominique Delport, who is President, International & Global Chief Revenue Officer, at Vice Media.
In this interview with Beet.TV at the annual DMEXCO conference, Delport says two main features of VICE Media Everywhere are premium content in brand-safe environments and the ability to reach the 18-35 audience that isn’t being addressed by legacy media providers.
“The other issue is it’s super complex,” Delport explains. “We moved from medium is a message to medium is a mess. Today, to buy video with all the platforms, all the formats, is incredibly complicated.”
VICE Video Everywhere guarantees that brands’ advertising assets will only run on VICE owned and therefore produced content. Viewability is addressed through the offering of a vCPM pricing model for advertisers that prefer a 100% viewable approach. Measurement for buys is available through a number of market leading third parties.
To reach the 18-35 audience at the core of VICE’s offerings, “You have that ability, I would say in one click, to tap into Facebook, Twitter, Snap, Apple News, Roku, Viceland, YouTube, great video inventory vice premium content,” Delport adds.
He estimates that VICE produces some 1,500 pieces of content daily, in local languages, for audiences that include 55 million people on Snapchat. When the company started up in India a few months back, it decided to champion the cause of rights for women and LGBT people.
“After a few months of pushing the society forward, to see the Supreme Court decriminalizing LGBT behavior in India is a big achievement for the Indian society, and we’re very proud, even humbled, to have contributed to that change. We give a mic to a generation that is still very unheard by the legacy media.”
Having joined VICE four months ago from Vivendi Content and Havas, reporting to new CEO Nancy Dubuc, Delport describes himself as “still a rookie, still an intern, learning every day and impressed every day with what Vice has delivered so far.”
This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>Vice Media head of sales Dawn Williamson says those campaigns don’t just look better; they perform better, too.
“We often do brand studies associated with programs that we do and what we found is, when Vice creates the creative in conjunction with our partners, the lift of the brand usage is much greater,” she tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “The brand lift awareness is there.
“So it’s about really leveraging our ability to get the message across for an advertiser in an impactful way, and we’ve done research to make sure that that’s an attribution tied to those custom-created units.”
Vice Media sponsored content includes that from Warner Bros, promoting the movie Kong: Skull Island, and Nike, with a short documentary film on 15 Years Of SB Dunk.
Williamson says a favorite example is Smirnoff’s Equalizing Music campaign, an effort to double the number of female headliners at electronic music festivals.
“We worked in tandem with Smirnoff, with this insight, to create a whole programme to elevate awareness of that and build the headliner base of females in electronic music,” she 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.
]]>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.
]]>During VICE Media’s presentation at this year’s Digital Content NewFronts, in which it talked of having an aggregate reach of 288 million monthly people globally, the company revealed its new programming and live-streaming plans. And, as Variety reports, staged a live boxing match.
In this interview with Beet.TV, Punch says that in the process of creating 300 hours of original programming, VICE is “pushing into new creative spaces.”
VICE is well known for its immersive documentary storytelling style, which will be complemented by a new therapy based show and a “mockumentary” titled What Would Diplo Do? starring James Van Der Beek as American music icon Thomas Wesley Pentz.
On the advertising side, VICE has been experimenting with shorter commercial breaks along with different sizes and shapes of commercials. Not all of them are 30 seconds in length or created by third parties. Like other publishers, VICE is creating bespoke messaging for brands, longer form commercials and more engaging ones so as to drive greater brand affinity.
“Our experimentation with that shorter commercial load and with different formats of advertising has worked for us,” Punch says.
Rather than offering up its audiences “the same sort of mainstream stories,” VICE still tries to look at the stories surrounding the mainstream stories that it thinks will interest younger viewers.
“We know our audience better than anyone,” says Punch.
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.
]]>“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.
]]>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.
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