Before they hit the beach at Cannes next week, the folks at Havas Media Group have been hard at work getting this year’s Socialyse Newsroom ready.
We caught up with Stacy Fuller, who leads content at Havas Media Group North America, as well as its specialty group Cake in the US, to find out how it’s going.
What’s the thinking behind having a social newsroom at Cannes Lions?
In our day-to-day business, we produce around 1,000 pieces of content per month for our clients’ social platforms, as well as the development of feature campaigns involving events, celebrities and long-form content. We want to be able to show people how all these ideas and content come together, how they work with new and established platforms, and how they’re distributed by our partner network and media outlets. Cannes Lions is the perfect environment to do this.
How will it differ from last year?
Last year, we debuted the social newsroom at Cannes, which produced more than 400 pieces of content during the week from a purpose-built structure outside the Havas Cafe. This year, it will be bigger and better. We’re bringing partners and specialists with us to ensure our content is more efficient, more robust and covers more of what’s happening during the festival.
Who are the partners?
Our principal partner for this year is NewsCred, the content management platform with whom we’ve built a priority deal to service the Havas network. We’ve been using its planning tools to set out much of the content we’re looking to create over the course of the week and we’ll be using its cloud-based system to upload, review, retrieve briefs, achieve sign-off, publish, analyse and optimise.
Should we need additional images or articles we can also commission through the NewsCred system and licence content from other media outlets. The newsroom is powered by Socialyse, which means there will be both organic and paid social media as well. We’re also working with a user generated platform called Twenty20 in order to purchase crowd-sourced images from across the festival. Lastly we’ll also be using Wochit this year to source licensed video and edit from its cloud-based tool.
How important is it to have the right team in place?
It’s exceptionally important to have a range of skill-sets that can cover the full array of content requirements. We’re bringing designers, video production specialists, and both short-form and long-form writers. We have a social editor who will review and optimise content, a social analyst to monitor all conversations around the festival, a paid social buyer and a content creator, who will be creating everything from Vines to gifs, Instagrams to Snapchats.
What part will celebrity appearances play in the newsroom strategy?
It’s important to engage with the celebrities who come to the festival because they fuel the social conversation. However, it’s important that we don’t just join in with what everyone else is saying and that we create compelling and unique content of our own.
It’s for this reason that we have Jamie Cullum performing in the Havas Cafe and why we’re working with his people to create exclusive content. We’ll have other celebrities dropping in to see us as well.
What advice would you give to brands or agencies thinking of setting up newsrooms?
The social content landscape is moving so fast and you really need to have a finger on the pulse of new platforms, distribution tools and ways to analyse success.
Producing meaningful and shareable content at scale should look effortless. The key is to build a process, hire the right people, use predictive tools to find conversations early and develop as much of the content as possible in advance of the event. You can develop your content in advance but it’s the distribution and insertion into conversations at the right time that’s critical.
Find out more about the Socialyse Newsroom here or follow #HavasCafe
This advertisement feature is provided by Havas Media Group, sponsors of the Guardian Media Network’s Organic marketing hub.
