By purchasing traditional ads across a variety of media, GEICO typically tells us how to save money on car insurance. In a new, video-first sponsorship with Time Inc., the insurer aligns itself with consumer financial advice in one of the publisher’s largest video initiatives to date.
It comes as Time Inc. continues to roll out its enterprise sales model, the collective result of its investments in content creation, video capabilities and, in the case of consumer targeting, its 2016 acquisition of ad tech firm Viant.
Considering Time Inc.’s ownership of new fewer than 22 brands, “There’s no reason why we can’t take and extend those brands and tell our stories through sight sound and motion, which is exactly what we’re doing,” Brad Elders, President, Digital Ad Sales, says in this interview with Beet.TV.
GEICO’s sponsorship of Coinage, a new, video-first brand, leverages the audiences of all 22 Time Inc. brands with 600 short-form videos throughout 2017 “talking about any kind of financial issue across multiple life stages,” Elders says.
Approximately 90 seconds in length, Coinage videos will feature original infographics, in-studio interviews with personalities and experts and other relevant news and information, according to a release announcing the initiative. Nearly every Time Inc. brand will contribute content and promotional efforts to the project, including their social media channels, which reach an audience of nearly 250 million.
Enterprise selling creates a much larger distribution channel for the various content produced by all of Time Inc.’s assets. “What the enterprise selling model lets us do is work in a much more comprehensive way,” Elders explains, developing content “that isn’t specific to any one brand but can actually live on a bunch of different places.”
He says advertisers have asked publishers to “put some skin in the game” by not just creating lots of content but by distributing it in a way that maximizes consumer engagement of the content. Time Inc. took a big step in that direction by acquiring Viant, whose Viant Advertising Cloud™ provides marketers with access to over 1.2 billion registered digital users who can be targeted with cross-device advertising.
“Everything we do is more data-infused than it’s ever been,” says Elders.
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.
