Facebook has teamed with seven media partners — including Vice Media, Disney’s Oh My Disney digital division and Electus Digital’s CollegeHumor — to pitch marketers on developing sponsored video content for the world’s No. 1 social service.
The social giant and the partners presented the initiative, dubbed Anthology, to ad-agency execs at a private presentation Wednesday in New York. The other initial digital-media companies in the program are Funny or Die, Tastemade, the Onion and Vox Media.
The idea behind the Anthology Network: to match-make brands’ marketing goals with content creators who are best suited to deliver the desired message and hit target demos.
“While brands are free to work with any content producer on their Facebook advertising campaigns, Anthology publishers are Facebook marketing partners,” the company said in a blog post. “This means that in addition to offering creative and production services, each is trained on how to get the most out of the Facebook platform to drive business results.”
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“Facebook’s focus on real identity allows for rich creative development, personalization at scale, and unprecedented measurement of video ads,” said Steven Kydd, co-founder of Tastemade, a digital-media startup focused on food and travel programming for millennials.
The presentation was part of Facebook’s monthly “Openbook” series for agency partners that covers different themes of how to exploit the social service’s ad products and massive reach. Wednesday’s meeting focused on video ads on Facebook — which said it averaged 4 billion daily video views in the first quarter of 2015.
One industry exec who attended the Facebook event was not terribly impressed. “They presented their approach as if it were some amazing reveal of how they are partnering,” this person said. “But it’s just what every smart content creator has been using their data to do for a while.”
Facebook execs who led the meeting were Katherine Shappley, head of the North American agency team, and Matthew Corbin from the global agency team.
The social giant’s video-ad pitch to Madison Avenue comes ahead of the 2015 Digital Content NewFronts, a two-week series of presentations by digital-media companies to advertisers that kicks off next Monday.
