Val Morgan Digital (VMD), the cinema and out of home company’s digital publishing arm, launched at an inauspicious time for the sector—September 2019.
Little did Brian Florido, VMD’s managing director, and the rest of the team know that everything was about to get quite a bit worse.
“It was a very interesting time to launch a digital business inside a cinema business to begin with. That was the first big hurdle because in March of 2020, the world went into lockdown,” Florido told B&T.
“But when cinemas are down, gyms are down, and all those wonderful things that you generate revenue with aren’t available, it allowed us to really experiment and create some growth points. In the first five years that we’ve been live, we’ve grown revenue by 40 per cent year-on-year, and our audience has grown by 20 per cent year-on-year. We’ve been profitable every year since we launched, and it’s been sustainable growth through acquisitions—POPSUGAR, Buzzfeed, LADbible Group… But also developing the capabilities beyond websites and into FAST (free ad-supported TV) and social.”
VMD’s expansion across those different channels has given its business a significant boost in defensibility, according to Florido.
Connecting The Group
It’s something that Val Morgan has been doubling down on. At its ValFronts series of events earlier this year, it launched Validate. This new group data platform promises to combine the power of Val Morgan Cinema, VMO (its outdoor business), and Val Morgan Digital’s existing channel audience measurement platforms with new consumer data sets across hundreds of categories and brands. All of it overlaid with location and movement data.
Harmonising the group’s offerings has been long in the plans for Val Morgan.
“When we think about the M&As and brands we’ve brought on, it’s been very purposeful. Everything we do and every publishing business we take on is there to complement or enhance the cinema or an out-of-home experience,” continued Florido.
He described Fandom and cinema, for instance, as a “match made in heaven” to continue brand and audience conversations right through the movie-going experience across different surfaces. It’s something that has been appealing to media agencies, including OMG Content.
“It’s the breadth of the brands and sites that they have,” said Sophie Walsh, the head of OMG Content in Sydney.
“Some briefs we’re working really deeply with just one brand and one community. But then we have other clients for whom we can take a campaign idea and shape it to fit the different audiences. You’ve got a core sporting audience with SPORTbible, but that’s not to say that there aren’t sports enthusiasts who are consuming POPSUGAR content. It’s having the ability to flex.”
This flexibility to meet a client and agency’s demands, Walsh believes, is unique to VMD.
“But to Brian’s point, there’s the opportunity to use the power of the Group to not just be in the digital content sphere but how we are then maximising our production dollars, creating this content and the scaling it across other parts of the business—so whether we’re pulling that digital content into digital out-of-home or using it on screens within their fitness network.
“It’s always been important, but it’s now even more so for clients, ensuring they are getting bang for buck and efficiency from the budgets that they’re investing.”
Walsh, while unable to give specific client examples, explained that multiple businesses had used VMD’s partnership with Vudoo for shoppable ad formats.
“It’s a great innovation,” she explained.
“Content can often be the first thing to come off the media plan because it’s seen only driving awareness and consideration. But when we’re able to layer it with shoppable ad units, it’s helping us do the job in the lower part of the funnel.”
Florido said the group takes a holistic approach to dealing with client briefs, too.
“We don’t lead with digital, cinema, or out of home. We’ll always tackle it from a group point of view, what’s the best outcome and solution that we could deliver for Sophie and her team,” he added.
Measuring The Secret Sauce
There has been a fair amount of conjecture in the industry of late about cross-publisher measurement. Florido said that VMD had abandoned vanity metrics such as impressions and views.
“We know content partnerships sit in the mid-funnel at the consideration and interest phase. But what we really focused on over the last 12 months is how we prove the power of those content partnerships to bottom-of-funnel activity. We’ve teamed up with Lifesight to showcase the value that content and display advertising have. What we’ve seen is content and content partnerships deliver three times the footfall index versus standard display,” he said.
Again, for Walsh, this sets VMD apart with an “extra layer” of third-party measurement.
“But it makes the conversation a lot easier with new clients… We are able to demonstrate the impact of what we’re doing. It helps us to sign another brief,” she said.
Getting The Story
At its ValFronts event, Amanda Bardas, the publisher of VMD’s editorial brands, spoke at length about the need to ensure good quality journalists and upskill them to ensure content is relevant to audiences and, ergo, beneficial for advertisers.
“As we continue to showcase the brands in different environments, we make sure that our team have the skills required to create content in new and exciting ways… Another is continuing to invest in our capabilities and expand beyond our existing offering with new studio tools and equipment… and we’re continuing to invest in freelancers and creatives… We also launched our grad program four years ago within our editorial team,” she explained to B&T.
Bardas added that VMD makes an extra effort to ensure it’s contributing to a diverse media landscape by bringing people from different communities onto its sites to write.
So what’s next? Walsh is planning to “accelerate” its work with the Val Morgan group and take full advantage of its offering. For Florido, the next steps are moving the game forward with audio, AR and VR content, for instance, to create more compelling content for its audiences. And, of course, blowing out the birthday candles come September.
