NowThis Partners With TikTok for a Live Show About Covid-19

NowThis, the Group Nine-owned news brand, is working with TikTok on a weekly 45-minute livestreamed interview show about the pandemic, called Viral, which debuts Thursday at 6 p.m. ET. TikTok is co-producing the show and will pay NowThis to support the initial five-episode run. The show, which will address the global confusion about vaccines and public safety, is hosted by infectious disease researcher Laurel Bristow, an Instagram-famous science communicator. “It just feels clear to all of us that the ongoing importance of clear information at this stage of the pandemic is as critical as it ever has been,” NowThis chief content officer Tina Exarhos told Adweek. “Especially for young people who are, for the most part, the last vaccinated.” Dispelling pandemic confusion Covid-19 has taken a narrative turn. In April 2021, the unending plague feels like it could soon subside—or at least offer a temporary reprieve in time for a wild and completely unhinged summer. Despite the fact that one-fifth of the United States is fully vaccinated, infections are spiking in some parts of the country. Outside of the U.S., many countries are still in the worst throes of the pandemic. Viral plans to dispel some of that confusion. Each week, Bristow will interview public health experts and take live questions from the TikTok community about vaccines, transmission and other pandemic-related topics. A team of seven is working on Viral, including Bristow. Since it started in 2012, NowThis has focused mainly on distributed news, meaning it produces content specifically for various social platforms, though it does also have an ad-supported website. Exarhos’ team, which has amassed 4.6 million TikTok followers between its NowThis and NowThis Politics accounts, approached TikTok about the show idea earlier this year and Viral was greenlit in March. “NowThis has been a great partner for us for over a year now and they have really created an educational and entertaining presence on TikTok, so our users have come to know and love them both as a source of instructive content, but also content that is engaging,” Robbie Levin, who leads media partnerships at TikTok, told Adweek. TikTok is paying an undisclosed amount to NowThis as a co-producer of the show, the social video platform’s first public health series with a “publishing partner.” NowThis and TikTok declined to discuss the specifics of the arrangement. “My hope and expectation will be that, in success, there will be other opportunities—there might be sponsorship opportunities,” Exarhos said. “We’re definitely starting to see huge interest from [a] brand perspective in the possibilities of the platform.” In the past, NowThis has sold sponsored content on TikTok to brands like Toyota, as part of multi-platform deals. Instructive content NowThis is also one of 25 publishers taking part in TikTok’s Instructive Accelerator Program (née the Creative Learning Fund), in which TikTok pays publishers an undisclosed sum to post “instructive” content. While The Washington Post is known for its humorous TikTok videos depicting the news, other publishers like Yahoo News have grown their followings on the platform by publishing breaking news content, something that NowThis has done as well. "The early days were very much a handful of producers in the newsroom who were putting themselves forward, covering fun stories," Exarhos said. "And we very quickly pivoted to covering the news of the day." That pivot has been fruitful and NowThis is one of the most-followed news brands on the platform. (By comparison, Yahoo News has 1.2 million followers and The Post has just over 900,000.) NowThis has done some livestreaming on TikTok, but Viral is its first foray into a longform show like this. TikTok also said this is the first time it’s co-producing an episodic livestreamed show with a news brand. “Not only is it a first-of-its-kind when it comes to that programmatic series with NowThis, but it’s also first-of-its-kind when it comes to our educational and instructive Covid content,” Levin said. “We wanted to make sure the partner was right for something like this, and NowThis absolutely is." Exarhos said there's a few ways she's going to measure success. "Is it going to be a compelling 45-minutes to an hour worth of content? Is there a real audience around it? And, almost more importantly, is there real engagement around it as well?" she said. "The opportunity to disseminate really strong fact-based information in a really challenging moment in our lives can't be underestimated. I feel really passionate about the need for this type of content." On Tuesday, federal health agencies in the U.S. called for an immediate pause on the Johnson & Johnson vaccine due to concerns over blood clots. The news leaves millions with renewed questions about vaccine efficacy and vaccine side effects, as many public health experts are grappling with increased vaccine hesitancy and skepticism. NowThis Sports and the NHL Dropped the Puck on a Watch on Facebook Series

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NowThis Partners With TikTok for Viral, a New Live Show About the Pandemic

Viral debuts on Thursday

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