CNN sees a future where brand activations include everything from linear TV to custom-built mobile apps.
The Turner-owned broadcaster built an app for CNNMoney called CNNMoneyStream that allows users to follow and personalize a feed of companies, influencers, news and market data.
CNN borrowed the concept from Turner sports property Bleacher Report.
E*Trade, one of CNN MoneyStream’s inaugural advertisers, kicked off a year-long, cross-platform activation with the broadcaster that includes pre-market analysis on TV to drive users to the app, as well as desktop tie-ins.
E*Trade’s goal is to serve as a utility for money market trends and news, while also reaching active traders across TV, desktop and mobile.
Its activation includes a custom “Before the Bell” stream within the app, consisting of pre-market news and video. It will also sponsor a new daily newsletter dubbed “Before the Bell.”
Nick Johnson, SVP of digital ad sales strategy for Turner, spoke with AdExchanger about the anatomy of a cross-media activation and how CNN brings TV-to-mobile activations to life for advertisers like E-Trade.
AdExchanger: How do you begin productizing a mobile app for a digital or broadcast brand?
NICK JOHNSON: Instead of asking consumers to come to our home page and curating content more widely with Bleacher Report, the app let you personalize the experience around teams, athletes and leagues so your browsing experience was really customized to you.
We wanted to apply that [to] finance, where a brand as large as CNN, in terms of uniques and page views, could create distinct consumer environments around specific verticals of content.
CNN MoneyStream was able leverage the IP we had in a sister company and apply those consumer insights to the world of finance.
How is Turner packaging RFPs for CNN and CNNMoneyStream? Is it mainly around exclusivity of content over a set period?
One thing we’re able to do for E*Trade and others is the streams themselves act almost like channels we can use natively for content. For instance, if E*Trade had decided one of their differentiators would be finding growth stocks of the next generation, we could create streams around that concept and promote the value of the stream, all while tying the E*Trade brand to this great editorial that’s curated with some of their core marketing attributes in mind.
Looking into 2017 strategically, native will be a big part of what we do through our content studio Courageous, and MoneyStream is a great vehicle for us to play in that space.
Does CNN MoneyStream benefit from Turner audience data?
Data is critical to everything we’re doing, whether it’s the plumbing or advanced TV. We’re thinking about how we capture this data from any property within the portfolio, how we segment and create first-party data, how we partner for third-party data or pull in marketer data to the extent that they want us to.
In the financial vertical, if we know people are interested in different types of investments, obviously that will be valuable to marketers. If we can bump that up against information we have in our DMP to broaden those segments and push the marketing message up-funnel, that gets interesting.
Does CNNMoney’s finance-focused audience lend any unique insights?
One of the benefits of CNNMoney is that it’s an endemic website. If you’re in there, you’re likely a target for some kind of financial advertiser. But what’s really exciting about our ad stack is if we identify you as a great high-net-worth investor and we capture you in CNNMoney, we’re probably going to capture you again on CNN and maybe Bleacher Report. Just because I’ve left CNNMoney doesn’t mean I’m any less interested in investing in tech when I’m in Bleacher or on my TBS or TNT app watching “The Last Ship.”
