Buzzfeed chief marketing officer Frank Cooper has unveiled a new ad format, Swarm, which will target viewers across the website, mobile apps and six main social networks, during a keynote at South by Southwest interactive (SXSWi).
Adweek reported that Swarm, currently in beta, will run with Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Vine, Tumblr, as well as Snapchat’s discover channels, to work with the five million views Buzzfeed currently attracts from Facebook and Snapchat.”We’re going to open this up for other clients because we think this is a unique proposition for advertisers,” Cooper said during the keynote, going on to discuss the difficulty in assessing how many people actually see content across different platforms.
To combat this uncertainty, Cooper said that Buzzfeed is using third party measurement tools in an attempt to better represent cross-channel viewership.
The ad format was first trialled in December by Comcast’s Universal to promote the Tina Fey/ Amy Poehler comedy Sisters, resulting in Buzzfeed content topping the Facebook posts for the movie’s hashtag.
