by Jacqueline Koch | Jun 4, 2016 |
By Janinne Brunyee
Four-year-old AwesomenessTV is on a mission to create a global media brand targeted at Millennial women between 16 and 24. What started out as a single YouTube channel founded by television producer Brian Robbins, with US$5m in funding supplied by YouTube, has grown into a multi-channel video network with 90,000 YouTube channels and over 3.3 million subscribers, a talent management service, a record label, movie studio and much more. The company was acquired by DreamWorks in 2013.
According to chief digital officer Kelly Day, the key to their growth has been developing close relationships with the biggest talent in the digital space – often found on YouTube – to create high quality video content that is distributed across a wide range of platforms.
According to Day, in the early days of YouTube, the key to success was creating a massive amount of content that could be discovered when users searched for key topics. This allowed the company to quickly grow from a single YouTube channel into a multi-channel network that allows fans to create their own content.
But content creation is deeply embedded in AwesomenessTV’s DNA, so moving from YouTube to creating a feature film (which went to top of the iTunes chart) at the end of 2014, was a natural fit.
Today, AwesomenessTV is making episodic television-type content as well as feature films for a wide ranges of platforms. Two movies, currently in production, should enjoy a wide theatrical release.
Meeting the millennial audience where they are
The focus has been on developing other platforms rather than awesomenesstv.com including YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Day pointed out that the youth audience already spends all their time on social channels so building the brand there made sense. “We built the brand in the places we knew they were spending time,” she said.
At launch, there was almost no focus on Facebook because, at the time, teens were abandoning Facebook for Twitter and Instagram. Today, this trend has reversed and now Facebook has become a much bigger focus.
Content strategy
“We believe in content as marketing,” said Day. “We invest in creating original shows or at least cuts of original shows that are unique to each platform.” Most episodes are between 5 to 11 minutes long and can be packaged into 22-minute segments. Most videos for Facebook are less than a minute and for Instagram, they are under 15 seconds. Day said the company has dedicated teams who work on each platform. “We invest in people and content, not buying media,” she said.
About 40 per cent of traffic comes from new content and the rest comes from archived content. Day explained that because YouTube is so search driven, you get traffic forever.
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by Jacqueline Koch | May 12, 2016 |
By Janinne Brunyee
Participants on the Digital Innovators’ Tour got to experience the brand new LinkedIn building in SOMA which is the startup mecca in downtown San Francisco. In spite of having moved in only four weeks ago, our LinkedIn host, Jessica Chan, who is responsible for business and strategy, seemed right at home in the bright and creative space.
In addition to a mini tour of the building, participants also got a tour of LinkedIn’s evolving content strategy. According to Chan, the key goal is to provide content on LinkedIn that helps make them more effective at the job they are in today.
“Early on, we started working with a wide range of publishers spanning a range of topics and tried to get their content into our ecosystem. The challenge was how to surface this content to our members,” she said.
The team then started looking at how they could segment the content into categories that they could encourage members to follow. For example, TechChrunch content was channeled into a technology channel.
According to Chan, this was not a scalable way of surfacing content which led to the birth of LinkedIn’s “relevance teams’ – groups of engineers who parse through the content and surface it to members.
“For this to be effective, we need members to tell us what industry they are in, what content they are interested in etc.,” she said. “That ties into the broader aspect of identity on LinkedIn and why we encourage members to fill out their profile in its entirety.”
But this was still not the complete solution to the problem of effectively surfacing content to users. “The major disconnect historically was that the content team worked separately from LinkedIn’s flagship team who was distributing content. This also created challenges for publishing partners,” she said.
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by Jacqueline Koch | May 11, 2016 |
By Janinne Brunyee
HelloGiggles.com seems to have cracked the code on creating content for millennial women. After a flight from San Francisco, participants on the 2016 Digital Innovators’ Tour assembled in the beautiful conference room at HelloGiggles’ designer offices in downtown Los Angeles to meet general manager, Penelope Linge. She told the group that the site was started by actress Zooey Deschanel as a blog because she felt there was a lack of positive content and a safe place for young women to gather online. Today, the site whose audience’s median age is 26, reaches more than 30 million millennial women a month. HelloGiggles.com was acquired by Time Inc in October last year.
According to Linge, content is sourced from a contributor network of 1,000 millennial women from whom 50 to 60 pieces of content are sourced each day. The common differentiating thread across all of this content is a positive narrative. Traffic to the site comes from mobile and social channels. ‘Our audience is so young, we had to design for mobile and social first, because this is the engagement pattern for young people. They live their lives on the phone and on their social platforms,” said Linge. Fully embracing social channels, It may be surprising to know that Linge anticipates that in 24 to 36 months, most content will not live on hellogiggles.com. “We are embracing a distributed content model with most of our articles being hosted as Facebook Instant Articles via an RSS feed as well as the other channels our audience engages with. We will still be able to monetize this content,” she said.
Linge says the HelloGiggles team is seeing the same trend on Snapchat. “Facebook is our number platform and we are investing in creating original content for this channel. We are an official partner for Facebook Live and we are embracing Facebook Instance Articles because of the amazing user experience. Pages load instantly and we’ve seen a significant traffic increase. “According to Linge, the same level of engagement has not been possible on Twitter with this audience in spite a posting 40 tweets a day. “Snapchat is where we are the most bullish.” She said. This is because 14 to 20 year-olds are on Snapchat all day. Linge is hiring a Snapchat-focused team that will create content including video and invite advertisers to participate. She is quick to stress that the team is equally bullish about other social channels.
HelloGiggles Content strategy
HelloGiggle’s content strategy is not one-size-fits-all. Instead, the team creates content for each channel. With Facebook, for example, the audience doesn’t listen to sound – while they are at work or in line at the coffee shop – they want captioning. So the team focuses on creating videos every woman can relate to.
A recent example is a funny short video titled: ‘If you suck at putting on eyeliner’ which shows a young woman applying eyeliner to each eye and then returning over and over again to make corrections until she ends up putting sunglasses on over a wiped clean face.
“We are hoping we can create videos that we can take to advertisers, said Linge. The opportunity is to add a front card or tail card with the brand’s information. “We are also creating original videos for them because we are proving we know this space,” she said.
With recent Facebook Live Videos the team has created, there have been 20,000 – 30,000 people watching the live videostream and asking questions. ‘We have looked at what Buzzfeed is doing and recognized that Live Video is doing very well for them,’ she said.
Linge and her team are testing across platforms and trying to figure out what is next. ‘I think Snapchat is a greenfield opportunity for publishers and we are hoping to define what it means to be a publisher on Snapchat
Because HelloGigglees’ audience has not embraced paying for content, Linge said the team realized that heavily commercial sponsored content will not work on the site. ‘Millennials have never seen advertising and this generation does not see a quid pro quo for advertising. That is why we try to create a lot of organic video that doesn’t feel sponsored, but is brought to you by a brand’
Brands want content that will go viral and according to Linge, this audience is turned off if content feels too commercial. Instead, the team is creating premium video series and bringing in sponsors. This content is then distributed across multiple channels on the web including hellogiggles.com. This makes HelloGiggles both a content creator and a distribution channel.
Solutions for advertisers
A growing part of the business for HelloGiggles is creating premium branded content for advertisers.
“There are so many ways for young
women to find out who they are today. Kids can pick from thousands and thousands of identities. Zoe tapped into that zeitgeist. Our narrative, therefore, is find your freedom to explore who you are and embrace that. This is the messaging we are taking to advertisers,” she said.
HelloGiggles’ content creation team consists of 10 staff writers aged between 22 and 28 who edit contributor content. If something breaks and editors are looking for immediate coverage, this team also writes original content. Currently there are 4 video producers on staff, but this team will be ramping up fast.
by Jacqueline Koch | May 9, 2016 |
By Janinne Brunyee
What happens when 16 executives from traditional European publishing companies converge in California to visit companies at the forefront of media transformation? Intellectual alchemy.
This is what Boost! had the privilege to witness as co-organizers of the FIPP/VDZ 2016 Digital Innovators’ West Coast Tour. It was apparent in the animated conversations between tour participants on the bus between visits and in the deep engagement with tour hosts on a wide range of topics including the best approaches for reaching millennials, whether traditional publishing is truly dead and many more.
As Innovation Tour organizers, we worked with well-known German media innovation journalist, Ulrike Langer to set up the tour program. Over many months, we agonized over who the best organizations are in San Francisco, Silicon Valley and Los Angeles to help tour participants write the story of their digital future. And to ensure that bodies as well as minds were properly fed, we curated a set of restaurants that best represent modern California cuisine.
Innovation Tours are part of Boost!’s practice to help organizations facing disruptive change write their future storyline.
Innovation Tour program
Here is an overview of the tour:
DAY 1: SAN FRANCISCO
- RocketSpace is the ultimate technology campus for entrepreneurs, startups and corporate innovation professionals.
- LinkedIn, a professional networking site, allows its members to create business connections, search for jobs, and find potential clients.
- Bloomberg Beta is an early-stage fund, backed by Bloomberg L.P.
- Optimizely is the world’s leading experience optimization platform, providing website and mobile A/B testing and personalization.
- Tout helps publishers, content creators and advertisers generate more online video revenue.
- Contextly makes high-quality editorial tools for news sites and other publications
- Storied brings the native app experience to the mobile web.
- Jaunt’s technology provides an end-to-end solution for creating cinematic VR experiences.
- Buzzfeed’s Open Lab explores new ways of telling stories through hardware and software.
Food highlight: Dinner at the Slanted Door at the Ferry Terminal Market.
DAY 2: SAN FRANCISCO/SILICON VALLEY
- Stackla is the content marketing platform that puts user-generated content at the heart of marketing.
- Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project is improving the mobile web and enhancing the distribution ecosystem.
- The Brown Institute for Media Innovation provides grants for research and development for both the fields of journalism and technology.
- Known on campus as the d.school, the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford works to develop innovative, human-centered solutions to real-world challenges.
Food highlight: Family style lunch at Tamerine in Palo Alto
DAY 3: SAN FRANCISCO/LOS ANGELES
- DistroScale is a platform + marketplace for delivering, managing, & measuring native content across websites, mobile web & apps.
- Hello Giggles publishes articles by young women under 18, and maintains a vibrant monthly youthful readership.
Food highlight: Dinner at Gracias Madre – known for delicious vegan Mexican fare.
DAY FOUR: LOS ANGELES
- Venture capital firm CrossCut Ventures which recently added $75 million to its fund, has 45 companies in its portfolio and 10 exits to date.
- Addressing the youth market, Awesomenesstv is a multi-channel network with 90,000 YouTube channels and over 3,300,000 subscribers.
- Meredith Xcelerated Marketing is the leading Content Marketing Agency for today’s hyper-connected world.
Food highlight: Delicious and fresh family style lunch at Rose Café in Venice
DAY FIVE: LOS ANGELES
- Digital native Tastemade, is a food and travel video network for the mobile generation.
Food highlight: Breakfast provided by Tastemade talent Bondi Harvest Café.
Facilitating deep and meaningful engagement
As we discovered first hand, an innovation tour offers participants an unprecedented opportunity to get up close and personal with the organizations who are driving innovation and transformation. Also the opportunity to share and learn from fellow tour participants who are facing or who have faced the same challenges is extremely valuable.
Next Innovation Tour
VDZ Akademie Digital Publishers’ Tour to New York City and Chicago – June 13 – 17, 2016. Limited seats are still available. Sign up today.
Contact us
Contact us if your organization is looking to create a powerful learning experience for key executives and managers. We will develop a program of company visits, manage all tour logistics and manage the day to day tour operations.
by Jacqueline Koch | May 2, 2016 |
By Janinne Brunyee
It was a long and winding road that brought Stackla co-founders Robb Miller, Peter Cassidy and Damien Mahoney from Sydney, Australia to an office in San Francisco which is where participants on the 2016 Digital Innovators’ Tour met Peter yesterday.
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It all began when Cassidy was working for the digital rights holder to the National Rugby league and Miller was working for the League itself. All three founders had a keen appreciation for the challenges organisations face around content and to use content to engage fans.
After winning a services contract to create content for the rugby league, the trio teamed up to start an agency. “We were creating 40 long form articles a day and many videos and we quickly realised the more effort and time we put into content creation, the less traction it got. In fact, long form pieces got less engagement that short videos,” Cassidy told Tour participants.
“We wondered what would happen if we flipped the model around and instead of competing with the content on social networks, the answer was to embrace it instead,” he said. This led to the idea to create technology that enables publishers and brands to collect existing user-generated content and use it as a powerful source of information. And that was when Stackla was born.
“We pitched the idea to an Australian broadcaster who had the rights to the Tour de France and were surprised when they said they would buy it,” he said. The new company then quickly pulled a prototype together and launched the company in time for the 2012 Tour de France in 2012 to great success for the broadcaster.
On the basis of this early validation, a new engineering team was assembled in Sydney who started to build the technology platform. The next year, the company set up an office in London and a year or so later, the founders moved to San Francisco to set up the US operations.
Stackla: The problem of fragmented content
According to Cassidy, the team saw that content marketing was becoming increasingly important to brands and after being approached by agencies to help them with brand content, Stackla expanded their focus beyond publishers to include brands.
“What we were seeing is that publishers and brands are creating content and then using social media as a distribution channel. At the same time, organic reach is diminishing which means that today, you really have to pay-to-play.” But the key question remained: Is this driving the right people to the right destination at the right ROI?
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by Jacqueline Koch | May 2, 2016 |
By Janinne Brunyee
How do medium-sized publishers take advantage of revenue opportunities offered by online video without taking on the prohibitive costs associated with building out their own video production capabilities? This is the problem that four-year old San Francisco startup, Tout, set out to solve.
Participants on the 2016 Digital Innovators’ Tour got a first-hand account of how Tout is changing online video distribution from CEO and founder, Michael Downing.
Downing pointed out that many publishers are having a hard time making the transition from a print paradigm to more of a television paradigm. That is because today, 125 websites are driving 95 per cent of the US$9bn of revenue that online video is generating. “We are trying to democratise continent distribution by providing technology, content and expertise to allow a larger group of publishers to participate in the online video revenue opportunity,” he said.
Tout: How does it work?
Tout works with large video content publishers like television stations who need to find new ways to distribute their content beyond their own web properties. “For large content creators, online advertising is the largest source of digital revenue but they have run out of space to carry more ads. Syndication is important for continued growth,’ he said.
Then Tout works with mid-tier publishers who do not have the in-house capabilities to create their own video content. These publishers make all the articles they publish available to the Tout platform where the text is scanned. The platform then identifies which videos are relevant for each targeted article and the video is seamlessly integrated into the story.
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