Digitas and Outrigger Media Announce Exclusive Partnership to Identify YouTube's Rising Stars

NEW YORK, May 2, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Digitas, a digitally led, global integrated brand agency, today announced an exclusive partnership with Outrigger Media to develop an industry-first measurement product that identifies emerging creative talent on the YouTube platform.

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The Emerging Talent Tracker will leverage data and logic from Outrigger's OpenSlate platform to identify YouTube channels with strong positive growth characteristics across measures of engagement, reach, and influence.

OpenSlate, a video content analytics platform, tracks data for more than 50,000 professionally produced channels on YouTube and measures each channel's ability to attract and influence an audience. The Emerging Talent Tracker is being made exclusively available to Digitas and its clients.

"We're thrilled to announce our partnership with Outrigger Media and the OpenSlate platform," says John McCarus, SVP, Content Practice Lead, Digitas. "The Emerging Talent Tracker is a game-changing predictive analytics product that will, for the first time, allow us to identify new talents on the YouTube platform before they break. Our brands and Hollywood partners will now have a huge leg up on the world's most important discovery platform."

The Emerging Talent Tracker monitors audience and engagement data for more than 25 million videos on YouTube, focusing on characteristics that are predictive of future success at the channel level. The product will launch in June 2013.

"Our partnership with Digitas is exciting because we're developing a product that has both immediate value and long term potential," said Mike Henry, Outrigger's CEO. "The Emerging Talent Tracker will help Digitas and their clients find and engage content producers on a very granular level, and in a more nascent stage of development."

About DigitasLBi
DigitasLBi, the leading, "most complete" global digital agency network partners with some of the foremost marketers and brands in the world. Also a top ten global agency, DigitasLBi comprises of 5,700 best-in-class digital and technology experts in 25 countries around the world.

In 2012, Digitas and LBi received a combined total of over 200 awards globally including two Cannes Lions Grand Prix's and SXSW People's Choice Award. Digitas was also recently named OMMA Agency of the Year 2012 and LBi UK Digital Agency of the Year 2012 by Marketing magazine. Digitas USA operates the brand content platform, The Third Act: producers of first and most well renowned event on digital content, The NewFront.

With sister agencies Starcom MediaVest Group, ZenithOptimedia, Denuo and Razorfish, DigitasLBi is a member of Publicis Groupe. Publicis Groupe [listed on the Euronext Paris Exchange - FR0000130577 - and part of the CAC 40 index] is the world's third largest communications group. With activities spanning 104 countries on five continents, Publicis Groupe offers local and international clients a complete range of advertising services. Web site: www.publicisgroupe.com

www.digitas.com | Twitter: @Digitas | Facebook: Digitas Fan Page | Blog: Digitas Distillery

About Outrigger Media
Outrigger Media Inc. develops products and services for the online video ecosystem. Since launching in 2009, the company has worked across a wide range of producers and with dozens of blue chip advertisers. The company's focus on developing better metrics to value content in the native digital video space led to the launch of OpenSlate, a marketplace platform connecting innovative brands and qualified producers at scale. With OpenSlate, and its proprietary SlateScore™, Outrigger has introduced the definitive measure for valuing online video content. For more information, visit www.OutriggerMedia.com. To explore more than 50,000 online video channels, visit www.openslatestudios.com.

SOURCE DigitasLBi