The 10 companies shortlisted for Media Player of the Year in Marketing’s Nov. 14 issue were at the top of their game in 2011. We’ll be featuring each one online as a lead-up to our January 2012 issue, where you’ll find out which media company will reign supreme.
Vice Media
By controlling its high-quality online content and a network of 3,500 influencers in 35 countries, Vice is sitting back and letting anyone chasing youth and authenticity come to Brooklyn
In an age of transparency, when companies ponder the PR implications of every tweet and “controversy” (and its ensuing impact on brand health) is engagement kryptonite, Vice Media should, by all logic, not be tearing 2011 a new one.
The global youth media company, the one drunkenly launched in mid-’90s Montreal as a hand-delivered black-and-white rag and funded by welfare money, the one that two months ago sent out its biggest press announcement in its history about consolidating all properties under Vice.com with the title “Vice Finally Gets Its Shit Together,” could do no wrong for the better part of a decade now, but it’s been particularly bullet-proof in recent months.
“Vice.com will shortly be in the 1,000-most visited sites in the world and we have more traffic than MTV,” says co-founder Shane Smith, who adds that it’s all a result of waiting for the audience and partnerships to come to him. “We don’t go to anybody. We don’t know anybody. We’re a peripheral brand. We’re a bunch of Canadians down [in New York] who don’t know anybody.”
It’s this audacity and disregard for how things should be done that has made Vice a media company in broad strokes only. It’s HQ may be in Brooklyn (shocking), but it operates in more than 35 countries, creating and curating video content across soon-to-be launched online verticals including sports, food, politics and travel. Its vault of high-quality, proprietary video (and its legions of global audiences of impossible-to-reach young tastemakers) is why CNN first came knocking in 2009 under the guise of reaching the young’uns who shunned AC360. Today Vice has digital networks like Google and HuffPo, voracious for contract-free, made-for-online, high-quality video content, looking across the East River.
“When AOL or Yahoo does a deal with NBC it doesn’t work because I Love Lucy reruns on a computer don’t work,” says Smith. “You need content that’s created for the online audience from the start.”
Their untethered content gold mine, aspirations and loyalty of affluent, mobile audiences is why in April, the company received its largest cash injection yet: what’s believed to be an investment in the high eight-figures by MTV creator Tom Freston, WPP and a private equity firm that likes media plays called the Raine Group.
“WPP is investing in Vice to further develop our content capabilities… among the youth consumer segments,” said WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell in early April. “Vice has been extremely successful in developing and repositioning major brands in these areas.”
What’s your take on Vice’s brand of content? Can they continue growing? Post your thoughts in our comment section below.
There’s more! Check out the Nov. 14 issue of Marketing for the full profile, and subscribe to find out who will be named the Media Player of the Year for 2011.
