Commentary

WaPo Brand Studio Promotes Syfy's 'Hunters'

The Washington Post’s in-house creative agency, WP Brand Studio, is promoting Syfy’s upcoming premiere of “Hunters,” a sci-fi surveillance thriller series set to debut April 11, with a novel custom content campaign consisting of original features on the subject of covert operations and intelligence.

The campaign was created in collaboration with Syfy’s media agency Maxus.

The new promotional feature, “Shadow Misson: Covert Ops’ Unseen World,” takes readers inside the U.S. government’s intelligence missions and covert operations around the world, showing how technology and techniques have advanced over the years since 9/11.

Interactive, immersive content includes video of former covert operatives as well as a look back at some of the most damaging scandals in the history of U.S. intelligence.

One of the first pieces of content is a lengthy article detailing the upheaval in the American intelligence community following 9/11, while another examines the cost of security operations since 9/11. Display ads for the show, including video, appear in column between the pieces of content.

In addition to producing the content, WP BrandStudio will use its proprietary technology to optimize and promote the campaign. That includes WaPo’s Clavis personalization system, which identifies audience segments among WaPo readers based on their interests.

BrandStudio also draws on a number of variety of proprietary ad formats. One, “InContext,” matches native ads with relevant editorial content in the form of highlighted quotes, which link to branded content from WaPo’s BrandStudio platform.

Back in December, WaPo’s tech innovation lab, called RED, unveiled a new native advertising format, PostPulse, that incorporates editorial content from the newspaper, allowing advertisers to recommend relevant content elsewhere on the WaPo Web site, based on the context of the article the reader is currently viewing. PostPulse also uses Clavis.

WaPo also introduced a new proprietary video advertising technology, “FlexPlay,” that allows faster delivery of interactive ads across devices.

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