Dive Brief:
- After a few months of anticipation, Viceland, the new television channel from Vice Media in partnership with A+E Networks officially went live Monday.
- According to the Wall Street Journal, a number of brands including Unilever, Bank of America, Mailchimp, Smirnoff and Toyota have all signed on as advertisers.
- Viceland pledged to carry half of the usual 18 minutes of ads per hour, and is also expecting for around half of that inventory to consist of native ads designed to look like Vice Media editorial content.
Dive Insight:
“We are trying to displace the clutter by injecting some humanity and authenticity,” Eddy Moretti, co-president of Viceland and Vice’s chief creative officer, told The Wall Street Journal. “If we create a user experience that is more engaging than what else is on the dial, people won’t flip.”
Vice, along with several other new breed online media publishers such as Refinery29, Vox Media and BuzzFeed, conspicuously avoided third-party ad tech and programmatic, preferring to handle advertising technology in house and selling ads directly to marketers. The move illustrates Vice’s interest in shaking up traditional advertising models.
Andrew Creighton, Vice’s president, acknowledged the native ad units for the TV channel will be more expensive than traditional advertising but that the difference wouldn’t be “egregious.” Because Vice’s approach of much fewer ads per hour coupled with an approach focused on native ads, it requested – and was granted – exemption from Nielsen on making its ratings public for its first six months.
Vice was valued last fall at almost $4.5 billion after a funding round.
