WPP's GroupM, Yahoo! Partner Up for Branded Content

October 21, 2009

The partnership to help marketers creatively incorporate their brands into original online programming. The programs will appear exclusively throughout Yahoo!’s network of leading media properties including News, Sports, Finance and Entertainment.

Marketers need big, ground-breaking ideas that engage and delight consumers, and this partnership with Yahoo! will enable them to create unique high value relationships,” said GroupM Entertainment Worldwide CEO Peter Tortorici, who will administer the partnership for GroupM.

GroupM Entertainment and Yahoo! will work together to identify advertisers, develop creative concepts that map media content with an advertiser’s messaging, and produce the content for each program. Yahoo! will also promote these branded programs to targeted audiences in channels across its network.

“Yahoo! has a keen understanding of what makes our audience click, and this partnership will help advertisers develop deeper connections with our users,” said Joanne Bradford, Yahoo!’s senior vice president, North American revenue and market development. “Furthermore, Yahoo! can continue to build on its successful portfolio of the Internet’s most-watched original programming by tapping into GroupM’s incredible creative development talent.”

Margaret Clerkin, GroupM’s director of digital assets, will assist Tortorici in overseeing the company’s involvement, and Erika Nardini, Yahoo!’s vice president of packaging, will be the representative from Yahoo!.

Both GroupM Entertainment and Yahoo! have extensive experience creating and distributing successful, award-winning programming that provides proven return on investment for their clients.

For example, Yahoo’s TechTicker (http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker), with Scottrade as the advertiser, is the most-viewed business and investing program online averaging more than 350,000 streams per day. Another popular Yahoo! show, Sports Minute (http://sports.yahoo.com/sportsminute), was developed for client Dunkin’ Donuts and averages 175,000 streams per day.

GroupM Entertainment unit Mindshare Entertainment, meanwhile, created In the Motherhood, a series of original webisodes for Mindshare clients Sprint and Unilever’s Suave that was later picked up by ABC Television and developed into the first ever prime time situation comedy to be spun off from an online series developed by a media services agency.