Conversant Media launches creative services division and two new video channels
Zavos
Digital media company Conversant Media have launched a new creative services division called Conversant Create, Mumbrella can reveal.
The publisher, which publishes sports opinion website The Roar, culture website Lost At E Minor and consumer-tech and lifestyle website Techly, said the new division would be led by commercial integrations manager Sorrel Kesby, with support from digital producer Elise Boyd, and would handle the creative for the publisher’s ad format The Slate along with helping clients with native content.
Speaking to Mumbrella, Zac Zavos, managing director of Conversant Media explained that The Slate is a “magazine” style format which allows advertisers to create a static image that is revealed to audiences as they scroll up a page.
“We built this unit called The Slate which, basically, as as you’re looking at a page and you scroll the page lifts up to reveal a beautiful fixed image. It’s got to be an emotive image, it can’t be an ad as such, it has to be a emotive image that strikes you. As you keep scrolling the page comes back. The image is locked, it effectively reveals a window. It’s not a pop up that interrupts you,” explained Zavos.
How The Slate appears
“It’s almost like a magazine format. It performs so well, our audience emails in and tells us it’s pretty cool. Engagement rate, click through rate and time on site afterwards is really high.”
Conversant Create has been formed to help clients better utilise The Slate, while adhering to Conversant’s rules around creative and formatting.
“We’ve always done this, we’ve just never packaged it up as an actual offering,” said Zavos.
“Almost every time we show The Slate to clients it’s a similar response, we like that but then they say how do we produce the creative, so we can say we can do it for you. We’ve always done this, we’ve always done a lot of creative for clients, now we’ve launched this division to tackle it.”
Zavos said while the “dominate monetisation technique” amongst publishers is standard display ads, which he says are “an important part of the media fabric”, there are “better ways to advertise”.
“If all you’re doing is standard display, you’re missing this huge opportunity. We’re quite open about it saying yes we run those units on the site but there’s more impactful ways to send a message to an audience,” Zavos said.
Packaging up the company’s creative offering comes as it launches two new video channels, TheRoar.TV and eMinor.TV with the channels optimised for mobile and offering advertisers pre-roll opportunities.
“We’ve grown really well as a business because we want to do things differently, media is changing so quickly and we don’t want to be playing catchup,” Zavos said on the company’s first proper foray into video.
“For us it’s all about trying to do things in the way it will be done in a few years times rather than the way it was done in the past.”
Zavos explained the company has set up its video business to be a “business of the future” which sees the company looking at more innovative ways to produce high quality video content.
“We’re not buying cameras. If we buy a camera it is more of a device, if you like,” he said.
The company has kicked off its video team with two full-time staff members working on sports opinion site The Roar.
“They’re producing between five and 10 videos a day,” Zavos said.
Video content is also rolling out across creative website Lost At E Minor.
“The idea we have with sports is you wake up in the morning and see the highlights of a game, when you’re going to bed you’ve got some time to watch a few sporting clips or watch some videos from the games that night,” Zavos said on the video content.
“The videos we’re producing are a combination of match reviews and interesting moments in sport – they’re shorter form, they’re not longer form.”
“The opportunity for us as a business is just enormous. We’ve gone from zero to 600,000 video views a month,” he added.
Miranda Ward
Zac Zavos is speaking at next week’s Sport Marketing Summit on what you can do to make sure you get enough engagement with sports fans through the good times and the bad. Click the below banner for ticket and program information.
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