NewFronts 2013: Digitas
For Digitas, the main goal of its event was to educate the audience, many of which were clients, on how to approach digital media. “Today’s conversations are going to be all about context,” said Tony Weisman, CEO of Digitas North America. “Because in the right context, your brand content will thrive, and it will be alive. Today’s presentation is to inspire and simulate. We want to help you navigate this terrain and come out better equipped to beat your competitors in this fast-moving space,” he added.
Partnerships
Native ads offering with The Huffington Post: The Huffington Post’s “Brands as a Newsroom” solution will now be exclusively available via Digitas’ BrandLive service. BrandLive is an agency model and technology suite that offers everything from social listening and real-time analytics to a dedicated “newsroom” that helps develop content strategies as well as distribute and amplify earned and paid content. With this deal, BrandLive teams will be able to publish “sponsored stories” on behalf of brands on The Huffington Post within two hours. Digitas clients will be able to choose from a variety of native ad formats, including articles and slideshows, all of which will be available to distribute to The Huffington Post’s home page as well as on verticals like HuffPo Healthy Living or HuffPo Tech. The “Brand as a Newsroom” solution will also offer Digitas new tools and products related to real-time data and social media scheduling, as well as custom RSS feeds that indentify and evaluate “pre-trending” articles — content that is “accelerating” in user engagement and social activity.
Emerging Talent Tracker with Outrigger Media: This measurement product is designed to identify emerging YouTube stars. It will plug into Outrigger Media’s OpenSlate platform, which currently tracks and evaluates more than 50,000 professionally produced YouTube channels, to find channels (and the creators behind them) that possess characteristics predictive of future success on the world’s biggest video site. In other words: channels/creators showing growth across measures like engagement, reach, and influence. Available exclusively to Digitas and its clients, the Emerging Talent Tracker is scheduled to launch in June, monitoring audiences and engagement across more than 25 million videos. The product extends beyond YouTube as well. “When a video is shared on another social media platform, whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or Reddit, we’re able to follow it and track what happens there. Brands can get a real sense of not only the topics that these creators have an authoritative voice in, but also how much engagement is actually happening online,” said Outrigger Media CEO Mike Henry.
Other Interesting Tidbits
Peter Vesterbecka, Chief Marketing Officer of Rovio (the creator of Angry Birds) said thatAngry Birds Toons, an animated web series that’s only available via Angry Birds mobile apps, hit 100 million views within the first 30 days of its launch.
Adam Bain, President/Global Revenue at Twitter, stressed how Twitter is positioning itself as something that is complementary to TV. “Twitter is a bridge” between digital video content and consumers, he said, citing among other things Twitter’s partnerships with the NCAA and Turner (for March Madness highlights) and ESPN (for college football bowl game highlights and other video content).
