Cynopsis: DIGITAL
04.26.13

Good morning. It’s Friday, April 26, 2013, and this is your first early morning digital briefing.

Yahoo! has announced a partnership with Broadway Entertainment Group and NBC Entertainment, making the website the exclusive home of the “Saturday Night Live” (“SNL“) archives from 1975 to 2013. The deal, which will be featured at Yahoo!’s Digital Content NewFronts presentation on April 29, makes the company the most comprehensive digital home for “SNL” content. The archive will be available September 1, which means that, come autumn, classic sketches from “The Coneheads” to “Down by the River” to Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin will be just a click away. “Yahoo! will give ‘Saturday Night Live’ a great opportunity to expand its current digital distribution,” said Jack Sullivan, CEO of Broadway Video. “And this deal will ensure that ‘SNL’ clips from past and future seasons will be even more accessible to fans across all generations.”

Moonscoop, developer, producer, distributor, and creator of kids content, concluded a deal with digital VoD platform hoopla from Midwest Tape, LLC. The new service will enable consumers to access Moonscoop content online and on mobile devices using public library cards throughout the US and Canada. Initial shows to launch on hoopla include the half-hour, international animated series, Code Lyoko, and Tara Duncan, based on the best-selling children’s fantasy books.

IFC is joining forces with Buzzfeed for a new programming block starting Saturday, May 4 at 8pm ET/PT. BuzzFeed will create a signature online list for every on-air “BuzzFeed Block.” For example, while IFC shows Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Boogie Nights”, Buzzfeed will publish “17 Incredibly Awesome Movie Prosthetics” on the “BuzzFeed Block” hub. Blake Callaway, IFC’s SVP of Marketing said, “Not since the Ten Commandments have lists been so talked about.” A high bar, indeed.

It was announced earlier this month that YouTube would look to themed content weeks as part of its pitch to advertisers. A week devoted to comedy was rumored to be first out of the gate, and now it’s official. Today Google confirmed the first-ever “YouTube Comedy Week” scheduled for May 19 through May 25. The lineup will include live-streaming standup, comedy sketches, musical performances, and dedicated programming from YouTube comedy channels. The announcement comes days before the start of Comedy Central‘s five-day festival #ComedyFest, which begins April 29 and takes place entirely on Twitter in the form of video snippets and jokes posted with the hashtag #ComedyFest.

As part of the launch of its online hub, Family Room, Fandango has produced an animated spot titled “Family Movie Night.” The series “offers a light-hearted look at what a typical family goes through when selecting a movie for their special outing” — and outlines how the ticket seller can help the process go smoothly.

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Television network Outcast Media announced the release of an Outcast-specific Nielsen IMS model. The news marks an expansion of the network’s relationship with Nielsen, as the new model will allow agencies and brands to quantify the potential reach and efficiency achieved by incorporating Outcast into their video investment strategy. Outcast will release its new simulation to agencies later this month and be available via Nielsen IMS Clear Decisions through Crosstab (within the 2012 Doublebase study) and Nielsen Digital Place Based RandF. The model brings together GfK MRI fuel behavior with Nielsen On Location metrics for Outcast Fuel.

A new survey conducted by eXelate and Digiday found that advertisers and agencies view third party web data as the most vital data type for audience targeting, in both direct response and branding campaigns. More than 650 digital stakeholders responded to the State of the Industry Survey.

Key findings include:

• More than 60% of advertisers prefer third party online data for audience targeting, followed by first- party CRM data
• Third party online data is the highest ranked data set for both direct response and branding campaigns for advertisers and agencies — ranked higher than first-party social, custom, and CRM data, as well as third-party offline data
• More than 69% of respondents report they plan to increase their audience-targeting budgets, with an average budget increase of 38%

Solve Media released its latest Bot Traffic Advisory Update today, revealing an increase in bot traffic for the first quarter of 2013. The report found that suspicious activity remained above 40% in Q4 2012 and Q1 2013, and 29% of the suspicious activity in Q1 was the result of bot traffic. According to the company’s numbers, mobile bot traffic is also on the rise, with current levels on course to cause nearly $1 billion wasted ad spend. “With the increase in mobile advertising spending this year, it has become incredibly important for advertisers and agencies to be aware of the inefficiencies associated with serving mobile ads to bots,” said Ari Jacoby, CEO of Solve Media. “It is up to publishers to implement anti-bot solutions and up to advertisers to seek out partners that take a real stance against bot traffic.”

ABC News announced the launch of Social Soundtracker, a social-video app that enables users to interact with others watching video, whether it’s a live television program or desktop stream. The app creates a frame around the content featuring emoticon buttons that, when pressed, broadcasted user feedback to their network via a corresponding sound, creating an authentic audience reaction. Social Soundtracker enables you to “hear and see your friends when they are watching a livestream with you, no matter where they are,” according to the press release. Social Soundtracker will launch on Saturday, April 27th during ABCNews.com’s live stream coverage of the White House Correspondents Dinner. The mobile version will be available in May for free in the iTunes App Store.

Social-video platform Spreecast announced the launch of its free mobile app, available on iOs and Android devices. The app will enable users to access “Spreecasts” — interactive, face-to-face video broadcasts — via the browsers on their mobile devices. “Mobile accessibility is a critical part of our long-term strategy,” said Jeff Fluhr, Co-Founder and CEO of Spreecast. “This announcement represents a significant step forward on our path to connecting people through conversation.”

The commercial arm of the BBC, BBC Worldwide, is the newest partner to collaborate with social learning company, Grockit. BBC Worldwide has put together a BBC Earth multimedia board for Grockit’s social learning platform, Learnist. The content will appear under the new “Earth Science” category on the site. “We developed Learnist to bring personalized online social learning to millions of curious people around the world,” says Roy Gilbert, CEO of Grockit. “We’re thrilled to be working with BBC Worldwide to share their content with our thriving community of expert content curators and life-long learners.”  

In a special edition of our weekly Q&A series, I spoke with Alex Angeledes, Chief Revenue Officer at Collective Digital Studios (CDS), a division of The Collective. CDS is one of the top multi-channel networks on YouTube. CDS and The Collective are also well known in the web video world for successfully transitioning properties like The Annoying Orange into TV franchises. I spoke with Alex about all of that, as well as what it takes to succeed on that little site called YouTube.

Multichannel networks like Collective Digital Studios are among the first to find success on YouTube. Why do you think that’s the case?
At CDS, we have a real focus on leveraging premium content and hit-makers who deliver real scale and engagement against a millennial audience. And when I say a hit, I mean the FreddieWs and the Annoying Oranges of the online world, creators that have amassed massive audiences. That really resonates with brands.

What advice would you give to channel creators/operators on how to be successful on YouTube?
You have to have a core focus, and know the audience you are going after. Then it’s a matter of creating compelling content and engaging with that consumer. The millennial consumer (12-28) is kind of fickle. So if you can engage with them, you can build a successful business. FreddieW is an amazing filmmaker producing high-quality content, and some of it has fairly mature themes. But he does it in tongue-in-cheek ways, which really resonates with millennials.

How would you describe CDS’ business model?
It’s pretty simple. The branded content that we or our YouTube talent creates has an integration fee attached to it. But it also brings with it a massive online audience. We also have a media solution that offers targeted reach both on and off YouTube, as we’re building a large presence off of the video site as well. It’s a model that is easy for brands and agencies to understand.

How much of the business plan involves potentially transitioning a web series/content to television, like you’ve done with The Annoying Orange and Fred?
We’re always looking for ways to exploit our intellectual property and to create greater distribution for it. In the cases of The Annoying Orange and Fred, it made perfect sense to transition those properties to linear TV, as we found great partners in Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon. The last time I checked, Annoying Orange was the number one rated show on all of television among boys 6-11 and boys 9-14 (he’s right). It demonstrates not only the massive online audience, but how engaged that audience is to follow the content to other screens. One of the bigger distribution outlets — we’re finding — is Netflix. We’ve been very successful in licensing, for example, the Video Game High School web series to them.

Younger people are more screen agnostic, aren’t they?
Yeah. When you look at how millennials consume content, it’s on smartphones, tablets, and laptops, and sometimes desktops. Where they are consuming content happens to be on sites like YouTube, where creators like FreddieW and Annoying Orange exist.

For brands, it is a great opportunity to partner with a creator on content that entertains the consumer. I think that’s the future of the business, and we are in the very early stages of it. How do you connect with this consumer for whom everything is on demand? You do it by entertaining them. And there are ways to weave brand messages organically into the content, which really benefits the brand. It’s a unique opportunity for them at scale.

What’s next for CDS?
We will premiere the second season of Video Game High School at Comic-Con, with Dodge on board as a presenting sponsor. We also have a new show called Epic Build Time, which will feature the Epic Meal Time guys as well as West Coast Customs, the company from in Pimp My Ride. It’s about creating cool gadgets.

Lynn Bolger has been appointed Senior Vice President of Agency Relations at Medialets. She will build the team responsible for working closely with the ad agencies and agency holding companies that leverage Medialets’ third-party ad serving and rich media platform.

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With the 2013 Digital Content NewFronts fast approaching, it’s worth noting that one of the most successful series to come out of the inaugural event last year was AOL’s Vuguru-produced “Little Women Big Cars.” The first season’s 17 episodes garnered 6 million views to date; Allstate signed on as the exclusive sponsor of Season 2, which premiered April 15. The sponsor’s elaborate brand integration in the new season — including the introduction of an insurance agent character — is already generating buzz, and Larry Tanz, CEO of Vuguru, thinks he knows one of the reasons why. “Digital players need to promote their titles off their platforms, otherwise the advertisers who don’t watch the programming will feel like it’s buried,” he says. “You could be featured on AOL all day and all night, but if there’s no print or outdoors, traditional advertisers won’t think it’s being promoted.” He came to this realization when ads for “Little Women Big Cars” were being shown in NYC taxis. “Suddenly, [for traditional advertisers] it felt like a real show, and I was getting all this positive feedback, even though the show had been a huge hit online beforehand.”

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Later – Sahil
Sahil Patel, Editor for Cynopsis Digital
04.26.13

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