Britney Spears: the Social Media Gift that Keeps on Giving
While The Consumer Experience in a Multi-Platform World session was not so "multi-platform," the panelists did serve up two solid case studies on how an offline medium forged its way online.
In case study number one, Karin Gilford, VP and General Manager of Yahoo! Entertainment walked the audience through the launch of omg!, an image-rich celebrity gossip destination. What struck me most was that this offering was born out of very solid data that Yahoo! gathered via search queries. For example, 50% of images searches conducted by 12-30 year olds on Yahoo! were for celebrities, and more than half of the top fifty searches were entertainment-related. And as we all know, Britney Spears has been the number one search for five years running.
Thank goodness for Britney.
In David Blair Epstein's (VP, Digital Strategy of Access Hollywood) own words, "Britney Spears is the gift that keeps on giving." Epstein's firm is one of omg!'s content partners, bringing this 12-year old brand that is wholly-owned by NBC and subject to NBC nightly news guidelines into the online space. Since the partnership was launched, new audiences have opened up to Access Hollywood, and they are hitting an increased number of people within their target demographic.
Conde Nast, on the other hand, has had multiple online experiments in the past, with varying degrees of success. While the rumor is that Flip.com is not performing as well as expected, I was most certainly impressed with the wysiwyg user interface, in what Flip.com VP and Publisher Jane Grenier calls "Photoshop Light." Alex Snell, Senior Business Analyst for Avenue A | Razorfish, discussed some of the research that drove this user strategy, including the in residence approach, complete with pictures of teenage girls hanging out in their poster-clad bedrooms. In one sense, I suppose that an online flip book is really no different than plastering one's walls with cut out magazine images as most of us did in the pre-internet days.
One of the more interesting aspects of the teen girl audience is that it does not reject the branded aspect of content; rather, it embraces the brands it loves, and plasters everything with the logo. This, of course, is a publisher's dream anecdote, and what Grenier hopes to turn into gold now that flip.com is a facebook Beacon partner. The question is, once these girls grow up into women, will they be so easily bought?
