Dive Brief:
- Vice partnered with WPP’s research arm, Kantar, on two research projects to prove the value of its branded content per Digiday.
- One project is called Vice Voices and taps Kantar’s Lightspeed product to conduct audience and behavioral research on a 30,000 person panel of Vice website visitors. The second is in conjunction with Kantar’s Millward Brown market research firm and is designed to measure audience engagement with branded content and campaign results.
- “We have more demand from clients to execute on brand studies,” Oliver Laubscher, chief media officer at Vice, told Digiday. “This is our first step in representing branded content in a more accurate way through the help of a third party.”
Dive Insight:
Vice’s business model has always been a combination of media company and ad agency through a strategy that emphasizes native and branded content on its properties over traditional advertising. The two initiatives from Vice echo other efforts from publishers like The New York Times and Condé Nast which also offer advertisers a peek under the hood at branded content audience and impact data.
The news also reflects an emphasis so far in 2017 on the overall need for better metrics and measurements, a push that is being driven by marketers like P&G that are taking a stronger stance with their partners about the need for concrete results in digital marketing. The CPG giant and world's largest advertiser, for example, is requiring its digital ad partners to get MRC accredited third-party measurement or lose its business.
For Vice, the news is the latest step to bolster its agency business. In January Vice Media announced the formation of Virtue Worldwide, an umbrella that encompasses its core digital publishing business, the cable network it launched last year and other businesses such as in-house creative agencies Virtue and Carrot Creative.
