Dive Brief:

• Swarm, BuzzFeed's new ad format the publisher announced during a keynote at South by Southwest (SXSW), will allow marketers to run campaigns that simultaneously reach all of its web and mobile outlets, plus six of its social media platforms, including its Snapchat Discover channel, Vine, Tumblr, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook.
• The format was described by BuzzFeed CMO Frank Cooper as a cross-platform strategy designed to "light up our entire network in a big, coordinated post."
• Adweek reported that NBCUniversal ran the first test campaign on Swarm promoting the movie "Sisters" in December.

Dive Insight:

"Instead of forcing all your traffic and spending all your resources to drive people to your owned and operated platforms, why not go to where they are," Cooper said. "We've done it, and in doing that we've built this power of an audience that crosses these different platforms."

Swarm was described as best-suited for launches and events where marketers are looking to create a wide range of awareness. One issue BuzzFeed will face with the format is difficultly in offering measurement metrics across all the different platforms. According to Cooper, BuzzFeed’s comScore of six billion monthly content views only reflects about a fifth of its overall traffic when all of its content distribution points, such as its social media platforms, are taken into account.

He told the audience at SXSW that to address the measurement issue, BuzzFeed is incorporating third-party measurements to track results on each platform.