David Bloom:
Hi there, I'm David Bloom with Next TMT here at the Stream TV Live show. I'm joined by Jim Keller, Chief Revenue Officer for Fuse Media, which has been around for a while and now is doing some very interesting partnerships. Jim has been on stage this show talking about what Fuse is doing and how they're doing it with various folks. We wanted to talk to them a little bit about where it's going. You've got this Cultural Collective that you guys are doing.
Jim Keller:
Culture collective.
David Bloom:
Culture, it's not cultural world, Culture Collective, which I find to be a really interesting an issue. What was the basis for that and where are you going with it?
Jim Keller:
Thank you for having me. The Culture Collective was built out of Fuse Media's vision. Our vision as a diverse owned media company is to bring multicultural audiences to the forefront for marketers across all of the content that we have. We have two linear cable channels, but we also have a really robust, FAST following. We have seven owned and operated FAST channels that we have out in the market right now.
David Bloom:
The biggest two are?
Jim Keller:
Shades of Black and Latino Vibes are our two biggest. But we realized a while back that we were doing well, but we wanted to do more and we wanted to bring other publishers into our fold. We started a project that we call the Culture Collective, where we work with other like-minded publishers in the fast space to homogenize the audiences together and are on the multicultural focus. We have partnerships with trusted media brands, Tastemade, Kevin Hart's Heartbeat, and Lionsgate to amalgamate all of these audiences together and go to marketers and go to agencies and talk about the total reach that we can bring to the table.
David Bloom:
How many total channels are we talking about?
Jim Keller:
About 30 to 35 channels fully distributed across all the OEMs. We're representing everybody from a multicultural perspective, so black audiences, Hispanic, LGBTQ, Asian-Americans, female audiences, really leaning into providing an audience solution in FAST.
David Bloom:
Why is that? It feels to me like this is more important than ever because of the fragmentation out there. You've got some very big players that you're competing against in some way. Why is this more important than ever?
Jim Keller:
I think it's really important because we look at the multicultural audience as the growth engine of America. There's a lot of talk about what it means to be advertising against multicultural. How does that play in with the DEI landscape and inclusion? But we're thinking about it as multicultural audiences are really good for brands, and brands want to see growth, and they're looking for that from new audiences. By bringing all of these publishers together, we find that we can go to a marketer and talk about the total reach that we can bring and the impact that that has on their media plans and of course their businesses. We find that it's really important that we partner together because all of these small media companies need to kind of work together to drive our overall revenue, drive growth, create better user experiences, and we've seen that it's really worked really well.
David Bloom:
It seems to me that puts a real premium though, on the ways you maximize the ads that you get for your 30 to 35 networks. How do you optimize? Where are the opportunities there for you guys to really take it to the next level?
Jim Keller:
We've been spending a lot of time around audience targeting tools. We want to meet the buyers where they want to buy us. We are very big on transactional flexibility. Whether or not somebody wants to buy us through a direct IO, they want to do a programmatic guaranteed deal, or do they want to buy us in a PMP. We have all of the ad tech solutions built up with multiple SSPs and DSP relationships and a ton of targeting tools, whether or not it's audience targeting, first-party targeting or third-party targeting to allow for a better user experience.
Because what we have found is that our audience comes back day after day. They're highly engaged, they're highly receptive to ads, and they're highly influential. When you take all of those together, if we create the right ad experience with the right ad targeting, we think that it's going to have a net-net of one plus one equals three for the marketer.
David Bloom:
Sounds like you've covered just about all the ways that somebody could buy an ad and wrap it around some of your shows. Is that accurate?
Jim Keller:
Yeah, but that's just like one step. That's like within the ad experience. One of the things that we're also trying to do is to provide a lot more interactive elements. Earlier this year, we cut a deal with Brightline for interactive ads to enable interactive components like video galleries, photo galleries, QR codes on our ad experiences. We're also working with other providers to create in-content experiences like lower thirds and bugs and squeezebacks. It creates extra ad inventory for us on our partners, but it also creates a deeper level of engagement for the user and the viewer when they're engaging with our ad experiences. For us, it's about all of these things. It's about building the reach, it's about building the audience targeting, building a better ad experience through these partnerships and really lending itself to an attribution solution that really proves out for their marketer.
David Bloom:
Great. Well, I think that's probably a pretty good place to stop. Thank you so much, Jim Keller, the Chief Revenue Officer for Fuse Media, talking a little bit about how they're banding together and exploiting the opportunities in advanced advertising and beyond for their multicultural audiences. I'm David Bloom with Next DMT here at the Stream TV Show. Thank you so much.