• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, March 3, 2015

There couldn’t be a time in the history of visual content that was so clearly made to allow content makers to link with advertisers right from the get-go.

Precise analytics and thinly sliced vertical sites make it possible. That’s the environment surrounding CBS Interactive’s announcement Monday of its Studio 61 division, which will devote itself exclusively to meshing content with brands, working with ad agencies from inception to delivery.

At CBS Interactive, with more than 20 sites, personnel will work to identify opportunities for custom branding, and an in-house team will build it.  Those sites range from CNET to GameSpot to CBSSports and CBSNews.com to Last.fm and Radio.com and ZDNet.  

Studio 61 takes its names to honor past production studios in CBS history. The original Studio 61 was on First Avenue in New York, where “The Edge of Night” soap opera was made, which makes some sense here because Procter & Gamble was the full sponsor of that soap opera when it began in 1956.  

This Studio 61 is a version of that close association between product and content, it seems to me.

“It’s like our in-house advertising agency,” said David Morris, chief revenue officer CBS Interactive, who chatted by phone while attending the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. “It’s an integration of our great video content and heritage working side by side with advertisers.” CBS has been hiring, and still is, to fill out the concept.

MEC, a unit of WPP, will be partnering with Studio 61 to develop content for clients. CBS has prepared a Power Point presentation it will be taking to other agencies seeking other link ups on projects.

Like everybody, CBS has been doing advertising-driven projects like this for forever, without a Studio 61 imprimatur, of course. Is has a fantasy football feature “Weekly Picks” on CBSSports.com and a promotion it ran with its “Hawaii Five-0” series, alongside  other features that have run hand-in-hand with advertising tie-ins.

The difference now is that Studio 61 is a business unit that is incubating those video projects with advertisers. It’s not the first into this business; Morris notes that BuzzFeed and Vox have similar units, and so does Conde Nast’s video arm.

And Morris concedes, yes, Studio 61 could be producing native advertising, depending on how you define it. But none of it, he says, would be presented like it’s trying to trick viewers. Just as likely, it will be content that hits the same sweet spot that brings the consumer and advertiser to the CBS-owned Web site to begin with, but built from the ground up with the advertiser.

CBS Interactive has some powerful verticals in the tech, sports and news space that Morris thinks makes Studio 61 special, plus a history and level of premium content that makes the concept enticing.

In fact, CBS Interactive claims to be the largest distributor of premium content on the Web, with 311 million unique visitors a month. The way that boast works depends on the word "premium" and the distinction that content is CBS’ pure play.

It’s not a search engine, social network or portal. It just does content. To an advertiser looking for premium content online on established sites like CNET and TVGuide.com that “have stood the test of time,” per Morris, it might look interesting.