VICE, the global youth media company and content creation studio held their first NewFront presentation today at Manhattan’s Sunshine Theater on the Lower East Side. The company impressively did the opposite of what most NewFront/Upfront events have and still made noise. The whole presentation was less than an hour and there were no teleprompters or long presentations. Instead VICE Founder and CEO Shane Smith and Chief Creative Officer Eddy Moretti spoke briefly in between video packages that laid out the company’s new videos and how much they’ve grown over the past year including the success of their HBO docu-series.
VICE’s award-winning HBO series is currently in its second season, airing Friday nights at 11pm ET. Smith (who hosts the show) revealed (saying that he probably wasn’t supposed to) that there will be a third season of the extremely smart and easy to digest snapshots of things going on in the world you probably don’t know about. Moretti earlier in the presentation discussed how VICE “didn’t need TV to validate what we are doing but it did,” highlighting that they have one of the most interesting and successful experiences with TV as a digital company.
Smith’s short and sweet talk was absolutely hilarious, off the cuff and direct in discussing VICE’s business and how they are the first “platform agnostic” media company. AdAge’s Michael Sebastian, put it best: “Vice Media’s NewFront presentation in New York was every bit as irreverent and odd as the video content it showed to media buyers on Friday.” Here’s a clip of Smith’s talk:
Here’s Moretti’s presentation on the HBO series:
VICE announced a new sports channel, more content on their food channel Munchies , updates on their brand new VICE News channel and the fact that they’re nearing 7 million YouTube subscribers and that they’ll be featured in YouTube’s national marketing campaign in June. Lost Remote recently covered video discovery platform 5by’s partnership with VICE which you can read about here.