LAS VEGAS — Branded content is hot in marketing land. Now Starcom Mediavest Group (SMG’s) is saving brands the trouble of creating their own content – by obtaining publishers’ permission to re-publish theirs.
SMG’s new Content@Scale CMS, launched this week, ingests text articles and images from Ahalogy, Demand Media, Glam Media, Forbes, Martha Stewart Omnimedia, Parade, Rodale Inc. and Time, Inc, all of whom are happy to license the materials for re-use by brands anywhere.
“Traditional display campaigns were subject to the constraints of what could be placed within that (ad) unit for consumer to engage with,” SMG’s global digital, data and analytics president Lisa Weinstein tells Beet.TV.
“Can it only live with the publisher of the content? No. The truth is, Forbes content could end up running on any other publisher. That was something to be worked through.”
Gaining publishers’ agreement to turn their pages in to ads is certainly different. But that’s the place media are at in 2014.
In principle, Content@Scale, powered by Flite, sounds a little like a smaller version of NewsCred, the content marketing startup whose platform lets brands licence articles from around the world for marketing purposes.
Weinstein says her system is “real-time” but is best at giving marketers “evergreen” content: “If they created it yesterday or last month, it could have equal relevance to something a brand wants to associate with today.” It’s not clear if that means publishers are offering only archive content to marketers.
Content@Scale plans to include video for re-use later this year before expanding out of North America toward the end of the year.
