HOW BRANDVERGE AND IAB MADE A VIRTUAL EVENT MARKETPLACE ACTIONABLE, INCREASING RELEVANCE AND EXTENDING MOMENTUM FOR SPONSORS
Challenge
COVID-19 forced lAB to make the difficult decision to take the weeklong, high-touch, in-person NewFronts and bring the event online.
NewFronts was formed in 2012 as an annual marketplace for brands and digitally native content, connecting “content creators to brands and their media and marketing agencies.” This year’s virtual event, live streamed on Vimeo, was created following the cancellation of the annual in-person event that was set to take place in April. As part of reimagining NewFronts for the virtual environment, lAB was looking for a solution that made up for the lack of networking that comes naturally at in-person events to compliment the digital presentations.
“One of our priorities is to create solutions that keep the digital advertising economy thriving in an increasingly complicated and omnichannel world and tools like Brand Verge chip away at that to make things easier. To create the connective tissue [between buyers and sellers] for NewFronts, We asked agencies firsthand and discovered that BrandVerge was already top-of-mind. The partnership was a natural and obvious choice.”
Solution
BrandVerge built out a custom marketplace for NewFronts, exclusively for attendees and presenters. IAB NewFronts partners were able to promote the programs unveiled at NewFronts on BrandVerge’s custom lAB NewFronts Marketplace for advertisers to discover, explore and connect with post-event. The digital marketplace took NewFronts showcase and made it immediately actionable and discoverable to thousands of advertisers, expanding reach and increasing publishers’ ability to find sponsors for their new programs at scale. This gave partners the opportunity to virtually network and connect with brands long after presentations were complete. It also offered partners analytics on who was engaging with their profile and offerings and how they were engaging with them. While face-to-face connections were missing from the event, the marketplace offered a place for NewFronts attendees to directly contact partners
and their sales team about presentations and offerings.
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Result
13 event presenters joined the marketplace, launching profiles during or after presentations, drawing in buyers from across the country to a range of verticals, including news and media, arts and entertainment, gaming, social and business. This resulted in hundreds of unique buyer sessions. Of these unique users, 19% were existing BrandVerge users. Partners received meaningful outreach and numerous RFPs while the platform was live. Presentations and capabilities were re-watched and reviewed an average of 5 times each within 30 days of the event. Within the first 30 days, buyers spent over 58 hours in the marketplace viewing content.”
Here’s what customers say about us
Senior Media Manager at Assembly
“BrandVerge makes it possible to see all the vendors and know who to reach out to and how to negotiate, when I’d typically have no idea where to start. They put everything right there in front of me, and the partnership saves a ton of time from having to research on my own.”
Ryan Montañez, Marketing Director at Skip Hop
"What I really loved about working with BrandVerge was how they were so responsive to our feedback and so transparent during the process. They made it easy to work with several influencers at a time and future campaigns. Really great to find a team that creates successful campaigns while being great to work with."
Diana Van Eeuwen, Senior Negotiator at Assembly
“BrandVerge helps me work more efficiently. Without it, I would have spent over a week reaching out to a ton of vendors that might not have even made sense for my campaign. Being able to search from a known pool of options put me in control to work much more quickly.”
Danielle Kushner, Team Manager, New Business & Sales Strategy at Her Campus Media.
“Using BrandVerge analytics, we're able to quickly & easily pinpoint new opportunities, for example, our recent Earth Day program. Once engaged with Earthbound on our Earth Day program, we were able to finalize details in under three months compared to spending up to a year establishing a new relationship,”
Kamelle Wilson-Cornell, Brand Partnerships at Brit + Co
“Typically, it takes us several meetings to really understand what’s important for the client. We’ll go through our entire capabilities deck before able to identify specific opportunities that make sense for that brand. With BrandVerge, we were able to get straight to the point. BrandVerge helps you cut to the chase.”
Yuting Zhang, Senior Strategist, The Media Kitchen
“What’s unique about BrandVerge is different partners & packages available all in one place, everything's aggregated. This wasn’t possible before using BrandVerge. What would have taken weeks to find now takes just a few minutes. We can search by keywords to find new, unique different packages available to us almost instantaneously.”
Ryane Montañez, Marketing Director at Earthbound
“It can take two months to run through the standard RFP process to find the right media partner. With BrandVerge, it takes only three weeks for discovery and evaluation, including reaching out & getting a plan back. Now it takes just a couple of days to sort through the details. We’ve cut down 60% of the time needed for the entire process.”
Lorraine Schwartz, Media Director at Digitas
“Finding new, niche partnerships is difficult. BrandVerge helps facilitate the research process. We look for partners with ample reach against our campaign target audience and BrandVerge saves time.”
“With BrandVerge, you’re able to browse and inform yourself, find all the different media options that are available and what you can get for it, transparently. I think that’s amazing.”
Howard Rosenstein; Meredith
“At Meredith, we really loved the training, accessibility to help, the templates, the simplicity/intuitiveness of the marketplace overall.”
Tess Neudeck; Acast
“We loved the analytics section of the platform, it was amazing to be able to see who was leaned into our content!”
