In a series of interviews, Niall Coen, Snack Media CEO, explains the purpose and reasoning behind the rebrand and tells readers why we’re putting the fan first.
1. Explain the reasoning behind the rebrand?
Niall: As a business, we’ve grown significantly over the last five years and we felt that it was time to refresh our look.
One of the things we wanted to try and achieve via the rebrand was to inject some simplicity into the business proposition as well as reaffirm some of our core values that sit within the business.
A lot of the rebrand is built around trust and integrity which has been essential to the business from day one and we wanted to bring these values out more overtly.
2. How does the rebrand represent Snack Media better?
Niall: Across our two core areas; the content team (that powers our owned and operated websites and social channels) and our ad-network department, we’ve spent a lot of time looking at what we do really well, what we want to be known for, and most importantly, how we want to be perceived in the market.
Firstly, we’ve always been founded on truth and integrity and this rebrand is about putting that to the forefront of everything we do. As well as communicating that we’re experts in how to build and engage massive communities of loyal fans, we’re committed to putting authentic content first. This led us to our core proposition of ‘Honour the Fan’.
We wanted to make sure that we ‘Honour The Fan’ and a lot of what we will talk about going forward is about how we can do that. For example:
- Will a fan see true authenticity in our content?
- How will they engage in the content that our team produces?
- How can we make their experience better?
It’s really something for the content creators and the business to focus on and stay true to. We feel it’s something that translates right through from our team through to the fans themselves. Honour the Fan is simple and clear and media agencies and advertisers alike seem to understand and embrace what we are doing.
As a result, we’re putting the fan first in all we do, content, user experience and innovation in order to supercharge the engagement we’ve always had.
People’s hunger for sport is enduring.
Within our publisher business, we are putting significant time and effort into building on the fact that sport gathers huge audiences and that the lifeblood of people’s hunger for sport is authentic, enduring and always evolving.
So we’re always going to stay loyal to the fan as well as defend and celebrate them. That is why we believe so many people come to our sites to enjoy content.
Our Reach Is Real .
Right now in the industry, there is a lot of fraud, fake news and issues around ad-technology. Across both propositions we want to make sure that we’re transparent and that our reach is real.
This led us to ‘Make Content Count’. It’s a very flexible term, but essentially it means that everything we do must count towards honouring the fan.
For our publisher partners, we want to make sure that the brilliant content they produce on videos, written words, social media and websites, goes as far as it can, and that we can build sustainable businesses for them in partnership. For advertisers and sponsored content partners, it’s about ensuring that, as a trusted network, we make the content we produce and distribute count by delivering tangible results.
Lastly, we’ve got a fantastic track record in growing and developing new ideas and as a result we’re investing heavily into Snack Labs, which is our innovation & R&D proposition.
Again here, everything we do is tested against the message of “Will it count? Will it matter?”
New technologies are coming out every day and we have to ask ourselves:
- Will it count?
- Will it matter?
- Can we improve the user experience?
- Can we improve advertising delivery without impacting our readers?
- Can we provide the best in class platforms for our readers and fans?
All of this becomes increasingly important when combined, but most importantly everything we do has to ‘Honour the Fan’ via authentic, engaging content and experiences. We make these innovations count for our network partners and advertisers alike.
Next week, we explore why ‘scale is nothing without substance’ and explore the concept of ‘Snacktivism’.
