Last updated on September 7th, 2015 at 05:11 pm
Innovation Studio, Content Solutions, and various Time verticals are being bundled into into one entity, B2Bnn recently learned.
The new agency will set up shop in Time’s Brooklyn satellite office and will be headed up by EVP of global advertising sales, Mark Ford. The Drive, a car-themed website, will be the first vertical serviced by The Foundry. Other verticals under consideration for the future are gear, tech, fashion, and luxury.
Time isn’t the first publishing company to combine different divisions in an offshoot company like this. Condé Nast launched 23 Stories which increased its leadership staff recently, and 1105 Media has 05 Group which it recently launched. The thing that makes The Foundry different is that it also provides marketing along with brand development services.
“High-quality, premium content is a powerful marketing tool, and The Foundry creates and delivers it at scale,” Ford said in a press release. “We offer a leading suite of content services and solutions that engage audiences across platforms and passions.”
The Foundry will produce content for print and broadcast, but its primary focus will be on digital. Having so many different divisions together will allow Time to more seamlessly create different types of content for its clients. With The Foundry, content marketing and native advertising can be done all in the same place.
It does seem to be the direction that the publishing industry is headed these days. Content marketing is becoming increasingly important with budgets going up every year. In B2B, content marketing is especially potent with 75 percent of B2B buyers using content to research products before making a purchase, according to a Demand Generation report. A report from Content Marketing Institute revealed that 55 percent of B2B marketers planned on increasing spending on content in 2014, and that is exactly the trend we’re seeing today in both B2B and B2C.
Native advertising is also on the rise. According to Business Insider, the total budget allocated on native advertising in the US is projected to double by 2018, going from $7.9 billion this year to $21 billion.
The new move by Time Inc. falls in line with current trends in the industry, and while The Foundry is a division of Time Inc it is still essentially a startup company. We will see if it can deliver on what it promises as time goes on.
