Long-form creators eye taking over TVs – and chasing bigger brand budgets

Long-form creator shows are landing on TVs, and Spotter, a creator growth platform that provides services and capital to facilitate growth and YouTube revenue share, wants brands to follow — but ad budgets are still lagging.

Audiences spent 52 billion minutes last year watching long-form, episodic creator shows across platforms, according to data Spotter released at its showcase event in NYC on March 4. At the event, which was a bid for ad dollars, Spotter pitched episodic creator shows as a growing premium inventory for brands, highlighting how audiences are increasingly watching them on the living room screen.

Spotter is trying to reposition long-form, episodic creator content as “TV-like” inventory but widespread big-budget adoption is still limited. Most brands still buy creator content like social ads or influencer campaigns, often via smaller influencer budgets.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

,Read More

‘Brand safety is moving from fear to curiosity’: Zefr’s Raddon on content-level accreditation – and what it exposes about the industry

For years, brand safety was a fear business. The pitch was simple: something terrible could appear next to your ad, and without the right protection, your brand would pay the price. It worked, because the threats were legible — a controversial news story, an offensive YouTube video, a brand caught in the wrong conversation.

AI breaks that model. The threat is no longer a discrete piece of bad content that a keyword list or a domain block can catch. Its volume – hundreds of millions of posts a day, a growing share of them generated or manipulated by tools that didn’t exist two years ago, uploaded across every major platform faster than any human review process can follow. The old fear-based playbook assumed a world where bad content was the exception. In an AI-generated content environment, the exception is becoming the norm.

That’s the context for Zefr’s announcement this month that it has become the first third-party vendor to receive MRC accreditation for content-level brand safety – and for why the technical distinction embedded in that credential matters more than it might appear. Most brand safety vendors have long held MRC accreditation, but at the property or domain level: they can tell you a website is generally safe, not whether any given piece of content on it is. Content-level accreditation requires actually understanding what’s in a video or post. In a world drowning in AI output, that difference is everything.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

,Read More