Video: Firmly in the frame
Partner content
Video is always evolving and Mail Metro Media’s offerings help audiences experience our content in an engaging way and connect them with brand partners.
Fuelled by a shared vision for success, at the beginning of last year four women went into a room for a six-week period, with one simple goal: make it easy for advertisers to access Mail Metro Media’s channel scale and frequency, building capabilities alongside our rapidly growing social platforms to drive on-site and off-site reach.
The process was an intense one, but the result was Edits, which has since become an award-nominated, bespoke-to-client video service that makes it easy and effective for brands to create and run social-style, short-form video formats across our vast scale.
Edits was an important step forward in our development of video. Since its debut, we have never looked back when it comes to making video a jewel in the crown of our commercial offering. Our portfolio has grown exponentially and is now highly diverse, spanning engaging long-form and effective short-form options.
We have launched our Global Video Studio, unlocking brand access to our global editorial and production talent, leveraging key cultural moments and conversations through our vast scale and compelling franchises. We’ve invested significantly in our video teams across our brands.
All the while, we continue to learn and develop our video potential across an omnichannel footprint that regularly achieves over 7bn views per month globally across domain, social and YouTube. As our audiences grow, our offering continues to diversify to meet and exceed their needs.
Test and learn
Throughout this journey, our learnings from video have transformed our thinking in other areas while driving improved engagement for our commercial partners. After testing and learning to build our knowledge areas and employing channel-native specialists to develop our products, we understand intrinsically what works best for our many different platforms.
We have evolved to create platform-native formats that drive audiences and engagement that is more than what would be seen as traditional news.
Brand videos need to lean in to the language of the channel and its users to be successful; videos have to be authentic, personal and native to the platform to deliver scale, rather than more traditional high-production values you might see across broadcast channels that may appear more staged, static or polished.
For engagement and shareability, it is vital that brands think user first, capturing that scroll-stopping virality — your content needs a unique hook, a viewer pay-off and a reason for the user to give their attention.
Breaking down silos
Perhaps most importantly, video has acted as the bridge to work with our teams across social channels, breaking down silos between editorial and commercial arms in a truly unified approach.
Our editorial teams are now actively involved in creating and honing video content for brands, removing long-held “church and state” separations. Brands now directly benefit from journalistic insights into emerging trends and up-to-the-minute insights from our news teams.
We have exciting new developments in our sights that stem from this powerful ability, including exploring options for brands to directly drive editorially infused and authoritative engagement through their own dedicated video channel, with all the trappings of a traditional TV stream, from producer through to presenters.
Put simply, video does not stand still. Not for us and not for users. We will keep innovating and developing new ways to enhance how our users can experience our content and how our commercial partners can connect with them to best effect.
Video’s star is still on the ascent and publishers are perfectly placed to ensure it continues to shine when engaging in new, unfolding ways.
Nicole Pottier is global advertising products director at Mail Metro Media
This is the fourth in a series of partner content with Mail Metro Media running this week