We last checked in with Screen-Bridge last winter when they launched. Since then, CEO Melanie Witkower and her team have made some changes to their target market, launched a blog, and the Fast Lane membership program, which offers educational resources and networking opportunities.
Witkower says that after their launch, focusing on working directly with production companies, networks began reaching out. “And when networks say they want to work with you, you don’t say ‘sorry, that’s not our target,’ you take a step back and ask yourselves ‘how do we fulfill those needs?'” she says. They’re still working with production companies but through the networks. Witkower says “the main difference is who our direct sale is to…we have more advertiser integration opportunities.”
And let’s be real: networks have more money than production companies to pay for the extra services the Screen-Bridge team provides. She notes:
It makes a lot more sense to be with the people that have the budget flexibility to actually pay for the analytics and the backend of our services…We are creative storytelling meets data analysis and data analysis is so important and so expensive. Trying to use the best companies for our services, it’s hard to be working with just the production companies.
As for branching out into educational resources with the Fast Lane membership, Witkower says her team had been creating guides for clients anyway. And the more she spoke with people in all facets of the entertainment business, the “understanding gap,” as she calls it, is pretty huge.
You have people who get it and help push the conversation forward, then the people that know just enough. Then there are the older people who really believe it’s a generational thing and refuse to think about it.
But if those people are working in the entertainment business, they need to know. Even as a millennial –there are assumptions that are made that because my generation has grown up with social, that we’re going to know how to handle the larger landscape of the environment. And I personally don’t believe that’s totally true. I think that its a blend of the experiences of the people that have been out there in marketing and doing this for the part 30 years as well as the understanding of where people are talking right now. [We created the Fast Lane Membership] in order to get that cross collaboration and have an environment where people can ask those questions — no matter how basic or complicated they are.
The new blog, which features “Modern Family’s” Danny Zuker for its launch, is also geared toward creating a community around entertainment marketing and social media types. Witkower says she doesn’t want the blog to be about what it’s like to work at Screen-Bridge, and so they’re publishing content geared toward connecting:
objectives between different jobs that have suddenly have all these social media and digital deliverables pushed on them…we want to create a community of people who are all types of embracing social TV to learn from each other and learn from us and help push this ahead.
You can follow Witkower @MelWitkower and Screen-Bridge @ScreenBridge.