VICE Media – How to Brand and Expand
Getting maximum value out of every deployment, with content for multiple platforms, experimenting, adapting, and trying new methods of news delivery—all part of the challenge facing the youth orientated VICE Media Group.
In the latest episode of season three of the Making the Media Podcast, host Craig Wilson is joined by Maral Usefi, vice president of news and editorial operations at VICE Media Group.
In the episode, she outlines how they strive to stay in tune with their audience with extensive use of analytics and a constant sense of reinvention. VICE has carved a specific place in the news market, with coordination between broadcast and digital teams key to how they deliver content.
She says, “Everyone is making sure that everything that they spent money on can be used across multiple platforms. And that's really where we've come together to make sure that deployments, for example, to Ukraine or to Lebanon are being used in every way. We have a documentary, we have a VICE News Tonight piece, we have a piece for Showtime, then we also have our TikTok content and our Instagram content from that same deployment.”
The podcast also discusses how VICE has built their brand and how they are trying to expand their audience beyond their traditional age demographic of eighteen to thirty-four year-olds. Balancing commercial realities with a desire to deliver groundbreaking and award-winning journalism is never easy, and VICE are constantly seeking ways to commercialize their content. This includes setting up FAST channels—Free to air, Advertising Funded streaming channels—as a way of generating more income.
She says ,“What we're experimenting with is what will happen when we put out new content on FAST? What will happen when we premier content on FAST? What will happen when we put out maybe live content on FAST? And I think that what we're hoping for is an ecosystem that kind of mirrors the Internet, right. Mirrors, maybe YouTube views. Because right now we have hundreds of millions of people watching VICE content on YouTube that we don't really monetize. And so FAST feels like a place where we can mirror that and hopefully make some money off of it.”
Find out more on the next episode of the podcast, available on all major podcast platforms on Monday, December 12.
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Craig Wilson
Craig Wilson is a newsroom specialist with over thirty years of experience in the broadcast industry. Craig has held various roles with Avid and is now the Global Media and Cloud Product Evangelist and host of the Making the Media podcast.