New mobile project has legs for future ad partners
With the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF Festival) just around the corner, free weekly magazine The Grid has launched an online hub to bring news and information related to the festival to the movie-loving masses.
Specially built for mobile, “The Grid Does TIFF” program—which is also accessible from desktops at the microsite TheGridDoes.com/tiff—is a collaboration between The Grid, beer company Grolsch and digital experience agency Blackdigital.
Divided into distinct sections, the app covers everything from the films themselves to celebrity news. In addition to original editorial material from Grid staff and contributors that’s funneled into a mobile stream on the app, users will find a broader content offering that includes curated blogger and social media streams.
The blogger stream will come from as many as 90 bloggers that The Grid team has identified as a good fit for the program, said Grid publisher and editor-in-chief Laas Turnbull, adding that “a human being is going to be curating everything 24 hours a day so we make sure only relevant, compelling content makes it into any of the feeds.”
The app will also add the official TIFF Festival film schedule on Aug. 23.
The combination of the original content with the mass of curated content is unique, he said. “We’ve basically mashed up several different apps, different technologies into this one mega app…[those technologies] have been integrated seamlessly. There’s a lot of silent technology that goes into this.”
Grolsch also has its own clearly identified presence on the site in the form of a stream called “Choose Interesting, By Grolsch.” A wide-ranging assortment of collected tweets cover everything from speculation on whether Jay Z is coming to the famed festival—which starts on Sept. 6—to comments on lineups of different TIFF Festival programs. As Turnbull said, “Their stream is very content driven. The idea is for it not to be sales-y; it’s to actually engage and have a conversation with film buffs.”
The site also contains a large vertical banner for a contest that visitors can enter for chance to win daily prizes (swag bags from the beer company and magazine) or a grand prize (closing gala passes).
In the future, the premise and design of the app can be carried over to other programs, which Turnbull said could attract a wide array of sponsors. His team is currently working on an idea for a burger app since The Grid’s Burger Week—a recent celebration of restaurants that serve great patties—was a hit. “We think there’s an opportunity to create a mobile play that would be really interesting to all kinds of sponsors, from banks to beer companies,” he said.
His team will be taking this and a few other mobile-related ideas out to market soon with Toronto-based Blackdigital, which Turnbull described as “a true partner” on the program. Not only did Blackdigital build the microsite and app, they also developed the idea with The Grid, attended the client meetings and will be sharing in the profit and loss, said Turnbull.
“This [TIFF Festival program] is the first really major win we’ve had with them and… I’m hoping that if the Grolsch app is successful for us that people will be very open to joining us and doing other interesting similar things,” he said.
In the meantime, the current app is getting a big marketing push, including ads beyond The Grid itself in the print and online versions of the Toronto Star, free daily paper Metro and Toronto.com. PHD handled media duties.
The idea for a TIFF Festival-focused offering had been kicking around since last year’s festival, but Turnbull said when Grolsch—already an advertiser with the publication—was announced as the new beer sponsor of the event, his team approached PHD with the idea for the app. The media agency quickly took it to Grolsch.
