The new commercial tie-up that brings together The Independent, Buzzfeed UK and Huffpost UK has launched under the Independent Media brand.
Along with former Buzzfeed video sub-brands Tasty UK and Seasoned, the media network claims to be particularly strong in travel, food and drink and technology.
Independent chief executive Christian Broughton told an Advertising Week audience on Wednesday that the licensing deal was “the most exciting thing” to happen in his time at the organisation.
Broughton was appearing alongside Huffpost UK editor Cate Sevilla and Buzzfeed director of video Homam Ayaso to deliver their first remarks as a group since the announcement of the deal in March.
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The trio said the tie-up, which sees The Independent take over the running of the Buzzfeed Inc-owned brands in the UK, was motivated by compatibility between their editorial approaches and their audiences.
Broughton said “the values are the same” between the two business groups, but “when we had a look at who’s consuming these brands — it was at that point that I thought, ‘we’ve got to do this’”.
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“It is a multi-generational thing… you’ve got the perfect brands to reach the youngest generation”, he said, but “you’ve also got a really great brand for the kind of millennials, young parents and young adult cohort in Huffpost, and The Independent… skews slightly older”.
Independent Media says that according to Pamco and internal data it gets 1.5 billion content views across its combined platforms each month and that it reaches half of UK women and half the country’s LGBTQ population.
The licensing deal makes it possible for Independent Media’s commercial team to sell adverts across the network’s websites and social media profiles. Press Gazette determined last month that the creation of the group boosts the website audience of Indy parent company Independent Digital News and Media by 25%, and ups its social media follower count from 16 million to 52 million.
Broughton said teams from the different brands began working together about six weeks ago.
Sevilla said: “The breadth of the content, the quality of the content, is so high and we’re all so proud of it… You can’t underestimate how important it is to have a trustworthy brand.”
Ayaso agreed, adding: “There’s a lot of fake news, there’s a lot of negativity about. We are all about positivity, we are all about facts, we are all about fun. We want to be really relatable.”
The three executives also disclosed that their newsrooms had been encouraged to integrate AI tools into their workflows.
Sevilla said that “there are so many bitty bits to being a journalist now, particularly a digital journalist, that anywhere that that can help make things more efficient and lighten the load… I’m on board with”.
Broughton added AI had been “really empowering for the humans in our newsroom”, saying there had been “one production process… that no one really ever enjoyed” and which can now be done four times quicker.
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