Content strategy is integral to the creative process. In order to maintain an active and engaged audience, understanding the data and constantly evolving the creative product is essential. My work is focused around using data analytics, editorial insights, A/B testing, and platform trends to create successful campaigns and grow brands.
Traditional news is losing audiences and hasn’t been able to capture the interest of younger generations. With waning viewership among millennials, and virtually no one from Gen Z, there is a need to redefine what news content means and how it connects to a new audience. This brand was created to address the lack of context and value. Audiences seek brands that stand by their messaging and connect to the individual.
The driving force behind LX is to “let the story be the story.” The foundation of innovative content is to not speak at your audience, but instead invite them to be apart of it by presenting information in a way that allows discovery and exploration.
NBC LX News Style Guide
Concept video during brand development.
Tasty, BuzzFeed's Largest Branded Property
When I first took over running the branded creative department, native content was limited to light product placement for food brands using recipe based content only. At the time, BuzzFeed believed that the audience would not respond unless brands were almost hidden within the editorial content. This limited our ability to work with brands outside of the CPG category. Using our own audience insights and marketing tools such as MetrixLab and POP Research, we found even at this level, consumers were not recognizing brand value. I changed the creative strategy and aesthetic to allow for better brand KPI integration and tapped into content that served food culture, product function and the audience's desire to watch videos that were simply entertaining. This led to deals with companies such as Nike, Google, Samsung, Diesel, Hulu and many entertainment partners.
Editorial Testing
Struggling to convince our entertainment partners we could truly incorporate their IP, I made a "Stranger Things" parody while in talks with Netflix. This video launched organically as a proactive pitch to collect data and audience insights. Although Netflix declined to purchase this particular video, it provided proof of concept and was used to land a multi-video deal with Activision. This marked the first time working with a gaming company and opened the door to many deals with other entertainment partners. Netflix eventually came around.
Cooking Panda Content Strategy
The page was acquired with 700k followers. The first step was to completely rebrand the property and take it to a very playful and approachable graphic style. Using our own set of metrics and data mining while doing a deep dive into competitor analysis, the page grew to over 5M in 5 months.
SEO Strategy with Tumblr
When Mullen won Acura from RPA, a full re-brand to hit a new consumer market was launched. However, when searching Acura online, users were only finding older RPA collateral. A partnership was launched with Tumblr to create a SEO strategy to get the new Acura brand images into ciriculation. GIFs, photo collages, and short form videos were developed and within months search engines started turning up all the new brand marketing material.
