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Sweety High Targets Gen Z With Live Musical.ly App

Generation Z will remain a hot-target audience for marketers as this group of trendsetters increasingly move from watching television to live entertainment on apps that collect data and insights about those who view the content.

Since there's seemingly no better way to gain insights than from data in apps running live, Sweety High, a media company focused on reaching GenZ girls, recently announced a partnership with musical.ly to produce live content for live.ly TV, a platform on the app that targets viewers 18 years of age and younger.

"This generation anoints almost everything in culture and has the spending power of about $6 billion annually," said Sweety High CEO Frank Simonetti.

Sweety High's partnership agreement with musical.ly will provide original and premium content for the live.ly platform for tweens.

One show, "After The Bell," a variety show that streams live on the app for one hour at 3 p.m. PST,  pulls in between 300,000 and 400,000 live viewers weekly. Those live viewers, mostly GenZ girls, attract brands like Disney, Simonetti says. The platform on the mobile app collects data and can aggregate audiences around the GenZ demographics.

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The musical.ly platform is interactive, allowing viewers to ask questions and get responses as the live streaming show runs on the app. It provides opportunities for brands to use the data to more accurately target content or "get involved in the live stream" through sponsored segments or promotion through the influencers.

The interactive format lets content producers determine topics for future shows, as well as providing insights into the best way for brands to connect with this age group.

"Live streaming will never become like programmatic and always be branded, but you're already seeing the velocity of brands adopting the media, which will take time to develop," SImonetti says. "The world is just now figuring out how to pay for influencers and social media, and it's continually changing."

Sweety High is contemplating adding additional live shows, as well as looking at a different show that would run on Facebook and other platforms.

Livecasting, as Mike Vorhaus, president of Magid Media, call it, is currently a $5 billion industry in China, but growth is expected in the United States as a result of the growing popularity in e-sports and user-generated content on social platforms. A study released at VidCon says 48% of U.S. consumers ages 5 to 64 watch live streaming video at least once a week, while 23% consume it at least once a day.

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