Publicis Groupe's Starcom
MediaVest Group on Wednesday announced a deal with production company BermanBraun to spend north of $100 million in advertising across various entertainment Web sites.
Slated to begin on
January 1, the four-year deal will include multiple BermanBraun properties, including celebrity gossip site Wonderwall.com and health and beauty site Glo.com, as well as those still in their planning
stages.
Starcom clients -- including Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, and Wal-Mart -- will be able to help shape the sites that are still in development, said Laura Desmond, Global CEO of Starcom
MediaVest Group. "Our clients are rightfully demanding a more robust pipeline of digital programming options beyond existing assets. It is essential to curate and create new content to fill this gap
and deliver meaningful human experiences across all screens," said Desmond.
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Publicis Groupe veteran Brian Terkelsen, president of Starcom's branded entertainment unit, LiquidThread, has been
pegged to manage the initiative, which will likely include a political portal for MSNBC.com; a site directed at Latinos, as well as movie and television portals. Per the deal, SMG clients will get
"first look" privileges for all digital content produced by BermanBraun, which, in turn, will be strategically designed to scale across VivaKi brands.
Lloyd Braun, former president of Yahoo
Media Group and chairman of ABC Entertainment Television Group, and Gail Berman, former president of Paramount Pictures and Fox Entertainment, founded BermanBraun in March of 2007 as an independent
production venture.
Bypassing the traditional Hollywood system, the production company heralded the dawn of digital studios, which were seen as needed to fill the Web's growing demand for
original video content.
BermanBraun has scored multi-platform strategic alliances with NBC Universal Television, Pepsi, and Microsoft's MSN, to name a few.