Buzzfeed opens up ‘unique’ cross-platform native ad product swarm to advertisers
Buzzfeed is launching a new marketing initiative called Swarm allowing brands to reach its users across its different platforms, its chief marketing officer Frank Cooper announced overnight.
The move follows the digital media company’s decision last year to stop driving traffic to its website and instead serve up content built for the platforms its millions of users choose to engage with it on, from its own apps to social networks like Facebook and Snapchat.
“What came out of this distributed media ad strategy was a product called Swarm, our 360 cross-platform strategy that’s designed to light up our entire network in a co-ordinated manner,” he told the SXSW conference.
“In a condensed period of time we light up our entire platform across networks, and it’s been extraordinary.”
So, “He also admitted they were battling to find good measurements for its overall audience reach, saying the website visits shown by the Commscore metric showed just a fifth of its overall reach.”
One wonders whether he is comparing internal website analytics with independent third-party internet audience measurement.
An overstatement of five-to-one with internal analytics is far from uncommon when comparing monthly unique visitors with monthly unique audience due to factors like cookie deletion, device duplication, location duplication etc..
If so – no wonder he’s battling to get audience to match traffic.
And by the way it is comScore – and no I don’t work for them.