Chase, NowThis partner on personal finance media brand

Brief:

Chase, the consumer brand of the biggest U.S. bank JPMorgan Chase, partnered with social news video company NowThis to create a personal finance channel aimed at millennials, according to a statement made available to Mobile Marketer. 'NowThis Money' is a new digital media brand featuring content created by both companies.
NowThis Money is part of a new trend in the ad business as marketers try to reach younger consumers who are more likely to look at their mobile devices. NowThis has built a social video distribution network that has more than 1.6 million Facebook followers and brands like NowThis Politics.
NowThis is helping Chase to transform its in-house content into videos that are easy to absorb on social media, such as 30-second snippets on how to be a cost-conscious wedding guest and the cheapest days to travel. NowThis Money is starting with 10 to 15 clips, and plans to create as many as 150 videos a month, Business Insider reported.

Insight:

Chase and NowThis recognize that the millennial audience is turning away from media channels like television and toward watching video in a mobile format. That means videos need to be quick and direct before they’re swiped away for something more amusing. The two brands will co-host “Shadow Weeks” to share best practices in engaging a millennial, social-first audience with business and finance video.

A growing number of brands are pursuing content partnerships with digital-first media companies like NowThis that in the past might have gone to traditional print media. For example, Adidas recently partnered with Refinery29 for a content-and-commerce auction. NowThis was launched in 2012 and in last year joined with Thrillist, The Dodo and Seeker to form Group Nine Media. NowThis claims to be the largest video news brand on the social web in the U.S. with more than 2.5 billion monthly views.

Millennials have been described as another “lost generation” because they came of age during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and the weak recovery that followed. That means they’re more likely to be living with their parents as they work low-paying jobs, try to pay down record levels of student debt and help their baby boomer parents who are financially strapped and unprepared to retire. Millennials have suffered in families with record levels of mortgage deliquencies, which may make them wary of too-big-to-fail banks like Chase. Still, the generation consists of 75 million people, making it the largest demographic group in the U.S. as baby boomers decline. To stay relevant, mass marketers need to reach millennials on their terms.

Custom publishing has been around for years as media companies repurpose stale content for the exclusive use of paying advertisers who want to engage customers. The idea is that a single sponsor will create a media property like a newsletter or magazine whose content is provided by a publisher. Now that the audience has shifted to mobile media, brand marketers like Chase need to engage that audience with video content that won’t overwhelm the attention span of smartphone users.