Bloomberg Media last week revealed its newly-expanded content studio Kinection, as part of a suite of new advertising products. M&M Global caught up with global chief revenue Paul Caine to find out more.
At Bloomberg Media’s presentation at the Digital Content NewFronts on 2 May, the major themes revolved around the publisher’s increasing video content – now at 20 million monthly video views – and how it is leveraging more data to attract advertisers.
“We’ve been very busy, that’s for sure,” says Paul Caine. “We’re really excited about what we presented, we’re excited about the feedback we’ve heard and we’ve been excited to see how not only the formal press has responded but also the social space and the informal responses from clients.”
As well as the formation of Kinection, which leverages Bloomberg Intelligence, a raft of other innovations were also announced.
“There’s three main things we were really excited about focusing on. One is really reminding the industry that we are a data and technology company at our core, which is really what we are from our heritage back in 1981, how we were founded, all the way to today,” said Caine.
“In a world where being a data and technology company is something that everyone aspires to be, that is exactly where we’ve been for 30 years.”
Second, Caine discusses the relaunch of Bloomberg’s content studio: “Based on our expertise on the market that we reach, this very elite and elusive audience, our ability to execute multi-platform at global scale”.
He refers to Kinection as a “combination of the kinetic energy of our data and technology with the connective power of a global multiplatform scale to really help develop custom content for advertising partners”.
New Products
Caine’s third point focuses on the launch of two new products on the ad tech side and five new digital video series, as well as the introduction of Bloomberg technology which will happen in early fall.
New products launched includes Rithm, in partnership with Algo, Bloomberg’s newest editorial video animation tool, which combines the information from the company’s data visualisation experience with speed to allow data to be made into animated videos within minutes.
Another new product is VidPlus: “When you’re watching a piece of digital video, you may have some other questions about it,” explains Caine.
Whatever the information you want to know while watching content, a little widget will appear over the digital video giving the ability to see incremental insights, replacing the need to open up another browser or close that browser to search for the information that you’re curious about.
“Everything that we think about, we think about on a global scale so all of our media properties are very much really trying to serve the global audience at a global level for two reasons,” he adds.
“One is that we recognise that there really are no borders when it comes to global c-suite, but also business is at a global level and Bloomberg is the underpinning of information and media to serve that customer.”
Getting Kinetic
Kinection, the jewel in the crown of this latest launch, is the latest upgrade on Bloomberg Media Studios, which has been around for a couple of years in a variety of incarnations. However, according to Caine, this latest update focuses more on data, technology and information, making it unique.
“We now have the ability to utilise the Bloomberg Intelligence information to power custom content so that it becomes even more valuable to more consumers,” adds Caine, referencing clients including Porsche and UBS who have created custom content and delivered at scale multiplatform globally, powered by the function which provides insights in every category on every public company from an analyst level.
Allan Wai, hired by Bloomberg in July 2015 as global head of creative has been integrally involved in the development of these products.
“You can see the influence he has had in the last year on what we have been able to create,” says Caine. “We also recently announced the promotion of Amy Marks to be the global head of marketing and she has been working very intimately with Wai and the team to develop Kinection and all the different video and ad products as well.”
Caine feels that the main overall message of the new launches is that Bloomberg is “a data technology company, first and foremost”.
“We are the largest creator of original digital video content and this is just a small portion of the breadth of the kind of video we’re creating for our consumers,” he adds. “We have an incredible ad tech platform that we continue to build out and build new functionality for our consumers and also for our advertisers.”
