What do you get when you combine the “beauty of TV with the brains of digital?” Endless amounts of great content and the data with which to measure consumer engagement with it.
Along with the continued explosion of live content streamed online, these are noteworthy trends to Emma Witkowski, Managing Director of global media and marketing services giant Mindshare, as she takes in the 2017 Digital Content NewFronts.
“We heard lot from publishers about producing longer-form content, TV and movie style content for online, as well as live TV online,” Witkowski says in this interview with Beet.TV.
This translates to “the concept of the beauty of TV with the brains of digital,” her reference to grey matter referring to better measurement of outcomes.
Like other attendees of the NewFronts, she hopes people come away from the multitude of presentations “inspired and educated” by experiencing lots of new content that’s being produced by “people they might not have originally thought was producing this great content.”
She thinks the NewFronts events do a great job of packaging content into a short time frame so that marketers can gain visibility into what’s happening in the marketplace. Among the topics she’s heard talked about are conversations that have made things like gender, race and sexual orientation top of mind.
These represent a double-edged sword for brands seeking to align themselves with such topics.
“I think brands need to be very, very careful with it because these conversations are very emotional conversations. The audience really has an emotional connection to them,” says Witkowski.
Brands that wish to align themselves with these subjects need to do so for the right reasons. “Not just jumping on the bandwagon to do it for the sake of doing it, but doing it in a really authentic way. Otherwise, it’s not going to be successful.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB’s Digital Content NewFronts 2017. The series is sponsored by the IAB. For more videos from the #NewFronts, please visit this page.
