News Corp’s social media news agency Storyful may have started out life validating user-uploaded news content for news publishers. But that doesn’t mean advertisers, too, cannot benefit from the Dublin-born company’s efforts.
Two years ago, Storyful opened up the same offering – verifying, validating and licensing user content – for re-use by brands and their agencies.
So, how does it work, and why?
“We have a layer of writers, newsroom editors that are live 24/7,” Storyful chief strategy officer Alex Cheeseman tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“Using the same techniques, from an investigative journalism perspective, allowed us to create a proposition whereby we could work with a specific brand and understand the objectives they wanted to create and dive down in to the world that is infinite content.”
SMG’s content studios have already used the offering to gain insight in to and licenses for content running through Storyful’s platform.
Material collated by Storyful has also appeared in AT&T commercials, for example.
Cheeseman explains the process. “We will sit down with a client, run through their overall strategy… how do we significantly move the needle on things that are important to you?,” he tells Beet.TV. “We then look at the ways that we execute against that strategy.
“For example, we will look around the pool of content for celebrations for a CPG (consumer packaged goods) client. We will then identify specific areas we believe where the content lives, identify assets we believe supports the brief, put them to the client. Our job is then to verify, validate and license that content.”
Clients are free to repurpose it across their channels.
“People need written content, they need video content,” Cheeseman says. “We can identify that 0.1% of content that is amazing.”
