Brands Bite Dogs: Omnicom Shop Taps CNN Exec To Run 'Newsroom' Ops

In the latest example of Madison Avenue’s push into brand journalism, Omnicom’s Sparks & Honey unit has recruited a long-time CNN executive as director of newsroom operations. The exec, Kristine-Ellis Petrik, a 24-year vet of the cable news channel, most recently was director of integrated promotion at CNN, and has mainly worked on promoting and marketing CNN’s content. Now she’ll begin using those skills to help market content associated with S&H’s consumer brand clients.
 
The appointment is part of a progression for S&H, which was founded last year by CEO Terry Young as a “next-generation agency” that would “amplify brands in real-time.” The core to its strategy is a sophisticated cultural trend-spotting platform utilizing a variety of social and other data signals and some proprietary algorithms to identify which of those will resonate for a particular brand, and how to “activate” them.
 
The most common method of activation, Young says, is “content,” so developing a newsroom is the yin to the machine-based trend-tracking system, and Petrik’s role is to provide that human element, overseeing newsroom operations that leverage S&H’s data and modeling systems.
 
“Coming from the news organization mindset,” she says, it’s not just about reacting to breaking news -- in this case, that relate to S&H’s brands -- but being prepared to have “planned content that we know how to activate in real-time.”
 
She likened it to the way traditional newsrooms anticipate the passing of notable figures and celebrities by writing their obituaries in advance and updating them at the last minute based on the actual news of their death. 
 
S&H’s ramp-up comes as other agency and client organizations are accelerating their own newsroom efforts, including Digitas’ BrandLive, 360i, Golin Harris and the Gatorade Control Center. But Young says S&H’s is different because of its focus on proprietary “cultural identification” models on the “front-end” that put it in a unique position to leverage breaking news for client brands.
 
He declined to disclose specific examples, citing client confidentiality, but he alluded to a recent opportunity the agency executed for a client’s brand that related to NASA’s discovery of a new solar system potentially capable of supporting life.
 
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