Liz Coughlin talks advertising, Golden Globes and why Yahoo! is #1 in entertainment news
The team behind omg! from Yahoo! takes celebrity news seriously. During last week's Golden Globes, they were in the office from early Sunday into the wee hours of Monday morning, cranking out fashion and news coverage with a unique editorial voice, in real time. All their hard work didn't go unnoticed by Yahoo! users who love their celebs.
Yahoo!'s Golden Globes 2012 microsite saw record-breaking numbers. During the day of the Globes telecast and the day after, more than 10 million unique visitors visited the site, logging more than 284 million page views. That's a 60% annual increase in users consuming Golden Globe content on Yahoo! users .
As her team prepared to cover the celebrity happenings at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, Liz Coughlin, Senior Director of omg!, sat down with us to discuss why her team's editorial approach and unique partnerships make Yahoo! the #1 destination for entertainment news on the Web.
Yahoo! Advertising Solutions: Tell us about your background and what brought you to Yahoo!.
Liz Coughlin: I've been at Yahoo! for nearly a decade, and in the digital space pretty much since the Web began. I started my career at Digitas working on projects like American Express and Dell. We built Dell.com and helped them optimize a lot of their e-commerce.
Originally, I was brought in at Yahoo! for product marketing. I was an e-commerce geek and was a specialist at that here. Eventually, I was moved down to Santa Monica---kind of against my will, funny enough. That's how I got into the media side of things.
For me, I grew up reading People magazine. From the age of 10 on, I have always been a celebrity nut and entertainment freak. So when Yahoo! moved me down to Los Angeles, it was actually such a blessing in disguise, because I'm so personally passionate about this type of content.
YAS: What is Yahoo!'s editorial approach with omg!?
LC: From the beginning, Yahoo! did something really wise with omg!'s editorial approach. When we launched, there were only two main players in the digital side of celebrity news, and their take was mean and nasty. It was Perez Hilton and TMZ. Both positioned themselves as either breaking news or having a tone and an edge that consumers might be interested in, but advertisers weren't.
So Sybil [Goldman, Yahoo!'s VP of Entertainment], very wisely positioned omg! as fun and friendly. We skewed ourselves more toward People magazine. So if you think of People as being on the far, far right side of being celebrity-friendly, omg! is a little bit to the left of that. We want to be honest and credible to our readers. So we are really celeb-, advertiser- and consumer-friendly---meeting the needs of all three.
I think omg! is #1 on the web because we have such huge potential to cover events in ways in which consumers might not otherwise see them. For example, people might see stories about Sundance---photo galleries of celebs at gifting suites, and news of a big winner that got picked up from the festival.
But our content isn't the obvious story. The team is good at finding quirky angles. It's not the main headline everyone else has. Plus, by having omg! Now here, a lot more people will see and engage in the event than they ever would.
YAS: How does omg! approach partnerships with advertisers?
LC: omg! is very open to partnering with advertisers to create experiences that are contextual and relevant to their messages. That's one of the benefits of my background on the agency side of things: I know how to partner with sales to create packages that really work for clients and users.
Oftentimes we get asks and ideas from clients that we recognize as a great opportunity and we're not doing already. For example, we have Jeep as an advertiser, and its target audience is active, outdoorsy people. Sales asked us what we could do for the brand.
So Rebecca, our managing editor on omg!, and I got together and said there's a lot of interest in celebrity fitness. We mapped out how we could create a section on omg! called Balance, which is targeted editorially at celebrity health and fitness. It was perfect for the client's message.
Our team then created original content. For instance, we went out and interviewed celebrity trainers. We worked with partners like Self magazine to pull in relevant content, as well. We also worked with the video team to create an original program. So they went out and interviewed some famous trainers, and we had Alison Sweeney from "The Biggest Loser" to host a segment showing how she lost the baby weight. It was a really successful partnership all around.
YAS: Tell us about the success Yahoo! has around awards shows like the Golden Globes last week.
LC: Photos are the biggest driver. The average number pageviews on the site the day after a show is absurdly high. The thing that differentiates omg! is that we are creating photo galleries on the fly. Our team is sitting here in the offices, watching these looks stream live, and we're producing the galleries as consumers are watching the show.
We jam out editorial before anyone else gets theirs up and running. So I believe our team does a phenomenal job on the trends and the stories. It's sometimes around jewelry or the one-shoulder dress trend, shoe shots, updos. Whatever it is, I know we are one of the first ones out there with that story, which is impressive, especially at the scale that we distribute that content out.
Can you give us a preview of what else omg! has in store for advertisers and users in 2012?
Purely on the editorial side of the house, we are looking at new sections of the site that should be very interesting to advertisers. There's been discussion at the company about certain categories that Yahoo! really hasn't touched on before. So advertisers should stay tuned.
One thing we're very excited about is this year's partnership around the Super Bowl. Bud Light, the official beer of the Super Bowl, is going into Indianapolis and taking over a hotel during the week of the Super Bowl. It is basically the hub for all the big parties, the Playboy party, and all the other ones you see on the news take place at that hotel.
What happened this year is Bud Light feels like they have been doing a great job of getting brand awareness in the Super Bowl city. Everyone knows to go to the Bud Light hotel when you are there. But if you're not there, you don't know anything about it. Bud Light was already going to sponsor Yahoo! Sports coverage around the Super Bowl--that's a no brainer. But then they asked what else they could do on Yahoo!, particularly on omg! because the celeb story side of the Super Bowl is really strong.
So we said great, we'll create a hub for you. We will send a team and cover the lifestyle and celeb side of things. So not just the game, but who is where, who are they with, what are they wearing, and who do they think is going to win. We'll be doing four days and nights of coverage, including interviews, going to all the parties---you name it, we're doing it. And we're live-streaming the big concert Saturday night, similar to what we did with the Clinton Concert and what Sean Phillips over at Yahoo! Movies did with Twilight.
What we pride ourselves on is that we always use an editorial lens on our coverage. I think there are a lot of sites out there that will do advertorials, but that's not really appealing to consumers---certainly not to the size of the consumer base we have, which is 25 to 30 million unique visitors. So we are very careful and protective of delivering great content to our users.
We're really happy when we find a situation like this with Bud Light around the Super Bowl, where we can create a larger advertising program around it that's contextual and relevant to users. For us, it's about context and high-quality content at scale.
--- Dianne Molina
