A newly integrated digital media service in Canada wants to produce and monetize premium digital content and develop effective online advertising and marketing campaigns.
Evolve Media Corp. has launched three vertically focused divisions with specific content and context to organize audiences, and target ad products and sales efforts.
They include Gorilla Nation (entertainment, news and business, auto, gaming and video), totallyher (women's lifestyle), and CraveOnline (male lifestyle); they are the three key products being offered, described Walder Amaya, SVP of Canadian and International Operations for Evolve Media Corp.
Each division aims at Fortune 5000 companies with scalable offerings for branding and content.
SpringBoard Video, Gorilla Nation's Video division, offers video publishing technology solutions to publishers and advertisers. Double Helix, its creative and interactive marketing team, is made up of more than 40 web designers and developers.
Having helped launch Gorilla's initial foray into the Canadian market some five years ago, Amaya sees now more than ever that a consolidation of offerings make sense to his advertisers and his audiences.
"The market here has come a long way, and we are seeing a marked shift in the take-up of online opportunities here. Canada is not lagging behind; we're more than keeping pace and in some cases, setting precedents along the way," he says, mentioning mobile advertising companies and developers here.
"So we're grouping together sites and aggregating affinity titles and destinations that make sense to the interests of our audience and the needs of the marketers. Each of the three main products is an entry doorway to other portals with consistent and relevant content offerings. That way, we're able to offer focus and scale with content, context and creative for Canadian advertisers."
For example, Gorilla Nation itself collects leading sites focusing on entertainment, film, news and business, gaming and auto under the one umbrella.
Gorilla Nation, said to reach over 10 million unique Canadian visitors a month, includes destination sites for men like NFL.com, Gizmodo, The Guardian, Reuters, GameRevolution, MetaCafe, and Jalopnik.com to name a few.
Totallyher positions its content and context as a better way to connect the women's audience and the marketer base.
Its vertical compilation of publishers reaches over seven million Canadian women each month, giving marketers opportunities to interact with a much-sought after demographic, on sites such as SheKnows, Us Weekly, Momtastic and theFashionSpot.
CraveOnline is Evolve's men's lifestyle vertical, putting the Canadian male ages 18-34 into the spotlight, using sports, movies, TV, music, games, outdoor activities, humour and more, on sites like Sherdog.com, Ebaumsworld.com, ComingSoon.net, and Liveoutdoors.com.
Evolve and its branded divisions can and do produce custom, integrated media programs, incorporating multiple digital assets including rich media, video, mobile and social in ways that allow the marketing message to be an uninterrupted part of the content offering and user experience.
"We're cognizant of the 'church-and-state' need for editorial integrity," Amaya notes, "and so are the advertisers and site visitors. We want to create affinity sites, destination sites, where a visitor will return again and again. Working with Canadian writers here we are creating contextually relevant and related content, and combining that with a more localized strategy that help build these branded communities."
But in order to be experts across a different demographics, different audiences and different content and context expectations, Amaya says he needed to build "laser-focused" sales teams, dedicated to each vertical, not ones that were artificially separated by platform.
"Each group must know its product, and how that relates to the needs and goals of the advertiser," he adds. "It's an exclusive rep model, not a multi-platform model, and so it speaks meaningfully to the entire content life cycle.
"A digital brand campaign that can combine significant reach in key audiences and contextually relevant environments has been proven to increase key brand effectiveness."
He says that while comScore-type unique numbers at Evolve properties are very strong, it is the valuable repeat visitor who demonstrates an affinity or reliance on site content and context that has helped build Evolve's overall platform internationally -- with hundreds of sites attracting million of people -- and increasingly, in Canada as well.
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