META Meta Platforms Inc

By Mike Shields 

STREAM OF DOLLARS: How serious is Facebook about its recently launched live-streaming initiative? The Wall Street Journal got a hold of a document laying out a list of nearly 140 celebrities and publishers being paid to create videos for Facebook Live under contracts totaling more than $50 million. BuzzFeed was the top recipient on the document, pulling in $3.05 million for a one-year commitment to make live videos, with the New York Times and CNN close behind. Even celebrities like Kevin Hart and Gordon Ramsay are getting a piece of the live action. Facebook is clearly trying to ensure a steady stream of high-quality content while it works out the kinks in its live product. The question is when does Facebook start squeezing in some live ads to make some of this investment back?

VICE CRUSADE: Currently the darling of the media world for its edgy content and young audience, Vice Media is taking its brand on the road. The company took advantage of Cannes to announce a variety of deals that will bring its four-month-old Viceland cable network to viewers in dozens of new markets, reports CMO Today. Vice will partner with local media groups and set up editorial operations in places like Mumbai and the Middle East. In other cases, Viceland is being distributed through regional cable systems in Africa, Southeast Asia and Australia. Either way, the Vice empire marches on, despite traditional TV headwinds. Meanwhile, Vice is one of many media companies building out teams of creators tasked with making content on behalf of paying advertisers -- territory that was typically the domain of creative ad agencies, CMO Today reports in its special section on "The Ad Revolution." Media companies like Vice argue they are better than anyone at weaving marketers' messages into shows their viewers want to watch.

A LOT OF TACOS: Would you recommend spending up to $750,000 on an ad that lasts for one day, even if you weren't sure you'd get enough data back to verify that it worked? What about for a promotion that lets people turn their faces into tacos or Beast from X-Men? That's what Taco Bell and the Twentieth Century Fox studio have tried of late -- sponsoring Snapchat Lenses that let people incorporate branded images into their personal Snapchat videos and photos. Is it worth it? Taco Bell says it generated 224 million views of its Cinco de Mayo taco-head lens, which people watched for an average of 24 minutes. And when Fox let people create snaps that transformed them into different X-Men characters last month, the company generated nearly 300 million views and even started trending on Twitter, reports CMO Today. Numbers like those, particularly given Snapchat's young audience, may encourage more brands to take a gamble on the red hot social app.

TWIDEO: Twitter is known for its concise 140-character messages. Now here come 140-second video tweets. The company is rolling out a new mobile app designed to make it easier and more profitable for creators to make videos, reports CMO Today. The new Twitter Engage app will let digital creators post 140-second videos -- up from a previous limit of 30 seconds -- and track how they are performing. Like other social networks, Twitter has become a haven for video, with video tweets up 50% since the beginning of this year. But most of those come from pre-produced clips. Getting individual digital creators to produce original video content just for Twitter may be a tall order, considering that most are already extending their resources to produce and distribute videos for an array of proven platforms. But, the ability to let Twitter run ads alongside their videos and get a cut of the ad revenue could prove enticing.

Elsewhere

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong said the two most prevalent topics of conversation at the Cannes festival have been concerns about ad blocking and the dominance of Facebook and Google. [ CMO Today]

Meanwhile, a sobering new ad-blocking forecast is out, with eMarketer estimating that 86.6 million Americans, more than a quarter of U.S. internet users, will block ads this year. [ CMO Today]

The mobile ad company Verve is acquiring Roximity, a Denver-based startup that places tracking beacons in stores across the U.S. [ CMO Today]

Vogue editor Anna Wintour offered tips at Cannes on how to maintain creativity in a rapidly changing digital world. [ MediaPost]

Instagram says it now reaches more than 500 million users. [ BBC]

Heineken New Zealand's "Brewtoleum" work for DB Export, which highlighted environmentally friendly efforts to turn leftover brewing yeast into biofuel, won the Grand Prix for Outdoor at Cannes. [ Ad Age]

Altice completed its acquisition of Cablevision, ending the Dolan family's run in the New York pay-TV business. [ NY Post]

Lawyers for Hulk Hogan are challenging a potential sale of Gawker Media to Ziff Davis or the highest bidder to emerge in a bankruptcy auction. [ WSJ]

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(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 22, 2016 07:54 ET (11:54 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.