TRUSTED MEDIA BRANDS 5/08/17

Trusted Media Brands, the owner of properties such as Reader’s Digest, Taste of Home and The Family Handyman, wants very much to be known as a digital-first media company. At its NewFront presentation, the company announced that it’s planning several new digital series, including My Morning Ritual, which explores the healthy morning habits of well known people, and Your Way to Better Health, which highlights ways to stay healthy beyond just physical fitness. Both series will come from Reader’s Digest. Other new digital shows will hail from Taste of Home (‘Everyday Gorgeous’), The Family Handyman (‘The Design+Build Challenge’), and Haven Home Media (‘Bragging Rights’). The company also took time to highlight a new partnership with Arcade Creative Group, a creative and marketing agency born from Sony Music. In addition, the company says that it plans to add 25 new roles to its digital team, with the goal of supporting digital programming and creative custom video content for advertisers.

The company repeatedly assured advertisers that its properties are brand-safe environments. Given the brand safety travails that companies like Google and Faecbook have faced this year, it’s certainly not a bad theme to hammer home. “All of our brands are squeaky clean,” CRO Rich Sutton, who delivered the bulk of TMB’s presentation, told Cynopsis Digital in an on-site interview. “Because our user generated content is scrubbed by human beings, we’re never going to have a problem.” “I think that it’s a mistake to put user-generated content online with no guardrails in place,” he added. “Technology can’t do it alone. You can tell tech to go out and search the landscape – for instance, you can say, ‘show me all the things that have problem words in them.’ But then you have to look at them. Because if you don’t, you’re going to miss stuff. Counting on technology alone to keep your platform brand safe is a mistake.”