Katlyn Wilson is the Director of Branded Content and Sponsorships at VIZIO, where she runs the VIZIO Branded Content Studio. Watch this video to find out more about how Wilson is Limitless, helping brands stand out on the VIZIO Home Screen.
Who are you and what do you do?
My name is Katlyn Wilson, and I am VIZIO’s Director of Branded Content and Sponsorships. The name of the department that I run is called the VIZIO Branded Content Studio.
How do you help customers overcome limits?
I think of the Home Screen as a problem-solving initiative for brands. A lot of times we see that brands know they have a story to tell. They know they need to be in the content space, but they're limited by the places that they can actually deploy that content. Oftentimes, YouTube becomes one of their only options, or maybe a corporate blog. So we overcome that challenge.
One of the things we hear constantly in this industry is the problem with churn. The VIZIO Home Screen actually overcomes that industry-wide problem by bringing content directly to the glass, so we're not reliant on all the churn that's happening within individual streaming apps.
What is the VIZIO Branded Content Studio?
So the VIZIO Branded Content Studio is an opportunity for brands to become the entertainment, rather than the interruption. We bring brands directly to the Home Screen, and we do that through promoting their content, surrounding content with their messaging, or creating net-new production from scratch, infused with their brand messaging.
How does data play a role?
Data is important to the Branded Content Studio because it allows us to better target audiences on the front end and then measure that content on the back end. When we think about some of the projects we've worked on in the last year, sports-related content, we can actually target viewers of sports. And when it comes to holiday content, if we're creating a branded series for a holiday retailer, we can make sure that content finds audiences who are predisposed to viewing holiday content, so it just allows for more effective use – takes the guesswork out of the content itself.
Where is the Branded Content Studio headed in the near future?
The Branded Content Studio is growing, and it is so exciting to see the way that we can actually take the Home Screen and turn it into an experience for advertisers, as opposed to just a way that they can put their logo on a screen.
We created, in the last year, 56 custom collections for advertisers, 56 different types of custom campaigns on the Home Screen. We created the first-ever shoppable series at VIZIO in the last couple of months, and these are just the beginnings of what's possible when it comes to the Home Screen.
How can advertisers buy space on the VIZIO Home Screen?
There are three ways that you can buy the VIZIO Home Screen. The first we call the Promote: which allows you to align a brand to a custom collection. Point: we can actually take a brand's content and point viewers to it directly to the Home Screen via deep link on YouTube. And then the third way you can buy the Home Screen is what we call Produce: that's where we build something together totally net new. So these are our three P's: Point, Promote and Produce.
What’s one of your favorite examples of how VIZIO’s helped a customer be successful?
One of the things that VIZIO does really well is create custom collections of content that speak to a specific moment in the calendar year. For Hispanic Heritage Month this year, we curated a best-in-class collection of content, written and produced and starring Hispanic and Latinx actors and writers and directors, and we actually had Agua Frescas come in and help sponsor that collection on the Home Screen, aligning their brand messaging to Hispanic Heritage Month and helping them speak directly to that consumer.
How do you describe the VIZIO Home Screen experience?
Home Screen experience is, for the customer, a place where they sit down and they think about what they want to watch. And the VIZIO Home Screen is an Emmy Award-winning interface where people find it really easy to discover what they're looking for.
We've recently learned that an average customer spends 44 minutes a day looking for what they want to watch. Their guard is down. They're relaxed. They're on their living room couch, and that's a great opportunity for an advertiser to speak to them. So we see this trickling down from William Wang's vision, which is, “If it's good for the customer, it's good for the advertiser,” and the Home Screen is a perfect embodiment of that.
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