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g m o Millennial marketer Melissa Rosenthal is setting the course for online branded content as director of creative services at BuzzFeed, one of the most popular websites among teens and twentysomethings. The selfproclaimed ‘early adopter’ is helping brands forge deeper connections with her peers.

BY CHRISTINE BIRKNER | SENIOR STAFF WRITER

 cbirkner@ama.org PHOTOS BY ERICA GANNETT

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here’s no shortage of entertainment news, pop-culture trivia, fluffy kitten GIFs and social-mediafriendly “listicles” online these days, but one site gets more than its share of attention from millennials and Gen Xers—thanks, in large part, to its admittedly addictive multiple-choice quizzes that are ubiquitous in Facebook news feeds.

New York-based BuzzFeed Inc. specializes in “social content,” with posts such as “20 Forgotten Early ’90s One-Hit Wonders” and “What Your Favorite Dog Says About Your Love Life” that are designed to be shared, “liked” and commented on via social media.

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The site launched in 2006, and has grown from 2 million monthly unique visitors in 2009 to 154 million in June 2014. The site now attracts 10.5 million unique visitors per day, according to Quantcast. Half of BuzzFeed’s traffic comes from mobile, the company says, but the site also ranked in comScore’s top 50 websites for desktop visitors in April 2014.

BuzzFeed made its name with pop-culture content, but it recently expanded its content portfolio to include breaking political and business news from ex-Politico and Rolling Stone journalists. And branded content also has become a major presence on BuzzFeed, with sponsored content campaigns from companies such as American Express, Virgin Mobile, Pepsi and Samsung.

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Melissa Rosenthal, in red, leads BuzzFeed’s sponsored content team at the company’s office on 5th Avenue in New York.

Heading up BuzzFeed’s sponsored content efforts is Melissa Rosenthal, 25, a millennial who was not yet out of high school when the site launched, and who progressed from her post as an editorial intern in four short years to become BuzzFeed’s director of creative services. BuzzFeed is a young company and Rosenthal is a young leader, but her youth belies her understanding of how to help brands develop engaging content that connects with their audiences, according to her superiors. She’s a future-focused thinker who’s well-positioned to succeed at a young [wo]man’s game.

The Seeds of her Social Success During her childhood in Smithtown, on Long Island, N.Y., Rosenthal’s father worked at New York-based event

marketing agency Escalate, where his client roster included Coca-Cola and Sabra Hummus. “I grew up helping my dad promote new experiences, and it taught me that a brand can connect in a human way to a consumer and give them an experience that they want to talk about,” she says. “It was way before people could easily share the experience on Twitter or Facebook, so it was the ultimate word-of-mouth marketing.”

Early on, Rosenthal was more interested in promoting bands and music labels than CPG brands. In high school, she immersed herself in the New York music scene, promoting shows in the city as a social media intern and promotions department assistant for Barsuk Records, the Seattle-based label for indie band Death Cab for Cutie,

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WHICH BUZZFEED QUIZZES HAVE YOU TAKEN?

starting in 2004. “I was really passionate about finding indie bands early, watching them grow and placing my own bets on who would become big,” she says. “It drove a lot of my thinking of where I was going to go to school, what I was going to major in and what I saw myself doing in the future.”

Setting her sights on a career in music marketing, Rosenthal enrolled in Manhattan Marymount College in New York in 2006. “I chose Marymount because they had such a great liberal arts program and I wanted to explore all routes of communication,” she says.

During her freshman year, in 2007, Rosenthal organized and promoted music festivals and shows as a marketing intern for New York-based CMJ Holdings Corp., a music news website. “It was tough to juggle it with a full schedule of classes, but I was inherently social on the Web and I was out at shows anyway, so it was a natural progression of what I loved to do when I was not doing my school work and it was what I saw myself doing as a career.”

In 2007 and 2008, Rosenthal continued to beef up her social media acumen as a marketing assistant and graphic designer for rVibe, a now-defunct online music sharing community that streamed music from indie artists. Much like her current role at BuzzFeed, where she helps brands connect and share content via Facebook and Twitter, Rosenthal’s job at rVibe was to expand its client roster by using the popular social media networks of the day: MySpace and Friendster. “It was an entrepreneurial role. It was like: ‘We have no way of marketing our service. How are we going to do it?’ I built communities and profiles on MySpace and Friendster to reach out to the artists and the record labels that would be interested in the rVibe service.

I did it through my own personal profiles that I had built up a big following with. It was interesting because it was a personal, human connection. It wasn’t like a brand is connecting with you. I wanted to make it like: ‘I’m a real person. I’m reaching out to you and I think you’d enjoy this service.’ ” In 2008, Rosenthal also juggled a three-month stint as a social media intern at Baeble Music, a music video and concert website that built up databases of stock footage from indie artists’ shows. “We connected people to the service and targeted them based on their musical interests. It was very similar to using MySpace at the time, using different databases and the Rolodex they had, and contacting people and saying, ‘We want to get your band out there, we believe in you, and this is a great way to do it.’”

Over time, however, Rosenthal became jaded about the music industry’s future in the digital era. “I realized from my internships that the industry was being destroyed. I was always interested in the new media marketing route of music, where people were discovering it and how it was being shared, and what the new model was going to be in the digital age. I decided to go back to what got me there in the first place, which was the marketing, the social experiences.

My focus shifted from music to what was killing the music industry: the Internet.”

BuzzFeed might have found success with sponsored content, but it’s best known for its playful, popculture-driven, multiple choice quizzes. “Which Friends character are you?” “Which famous person should you get drunk with?” “Which Backstreet Boy should you actually marry?”

The most popular quiz to date, “What city should you live in?” garnered more than 20 million views, and others draw just as impressive audiences. In February 2014, Rupert Murdoch’s chief of staff tweeted a photo of Murdoch taking the “Which billionaire tycoon are you?” quiz with the caption: “Dear @BuzzFeed, @rupertmurdoch took the quiz and confirmed that he is in fact Rupert Murdoch. Phew.” A week later, Lena Dunham, creator and star of the HBO show Girls, tweeted a link to the “Which Girls character are you?” quiz, saying, “Took this Girls quiz and got Marnie [rather than her character, Hannah], so I guess the apocalypse is coming?”

Brands have gotten in on the action, too. Rosenthal and her team have created branded quizzes for Barbie (“What kind of Barbie are you?”), Pepsi (“What kind of Super Bowl fan are you?”) and Spotify (“Which David Bowie are you?”). Such sponsored quizzes might be just as playful as the unsponsored ones, but they’re not entirely fluff. They’re designed to help brands raise awareness and even gather customer insights, Rosenthal says. “We have a ton of branded quizzes in the pipeline.

We’re doing one for Quaker right now—‘What type of breakfast food are you?’—and that really tells them a lot about their consumer: what milk they like, what fruit they like in their cereal, what they like to do in the morning, a lot of habits and traits.”

Quizzes engage consumers and have a higher probability of getting shared than traditional content because they’re inherently fun and social, she says. “If you don’t get what you think you’re going to, you think, What about my answer made that result? You want to share that you belong in New York, or if you didn’t get it, you’re like, ‘What’s with this?’ It starts a conversation.”

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Seventy-five percent of BuzzFeed readers seek content to share with their social networks, so BuzzFeed focuses on creating the best possible content, regardless of whether or not it’s for a brand, Rosenthal says.

From Impassioned Intern to Insightful Employee In 2009, Rosenthal graduated from Manhattan Marymount with a bachelor’s in communications and soon after signed on as an editorial intern at BuzzFeed. Like most of her peers, Rosenthal was quite familiar with BuzzFeed’s offerings before she joined its team. “I used the site multiple times a day, every day. I was sort of addicted to it,” she says. “When I saw the ad for the internship, it was like, ‘This is exactly where I want to be.’ ” Rosenthal soon sought out opportunities in the company’s marketing and advertising department. BuzzFeed has no banner ads and relies, instead, on sponsored content, or “native advertising” programs, where brands pay for articles that look similar to BuzzFeed content. Like sponsored content in other media outlets, each post is labeled as such, with the brand’s logo and “promoted by” appearing at the top.

However, BuzzFeed is willing to toy with the line between advertising and editorial a bit more, using the site’s playful tone in each sponsored post. A recent post by Geico, for

instance, was “11 Ways Not to Be a Jerk on Your Phone,” and one sponsored by Walgreens and Old Spice was “The 14 Most Awkward Things Awkward Dads Do.” Seventy-five percent of BuzzFeed readers seek content to share with their social networks, so BuzzFeed focuses on creating the best possible content, regardless of whether or not it’s for a brand, with the idea that BuzzFeed’s branded content will be shared on social media just as much as its editorial content is, Rosenthal says. Sponsored articles initially run on BuzzFeed’s home page, and each brand gets its own page on the site (BuzzFeed.com/GeneralElectric, for example), which includes links to the company’s Facebook and Twitter feeds and an archive of its sponsored posts. The site’s sponsored content programs brought in $60 million in 2013, according to Bloomberg.

Rosenthal wanted to leverage her knowledge of BuzzFeed’s editorial style to help develop sponsored content opportunities that would be valuable to both BuzzFeed’s business and the brands’ advertising goals. “I learned the

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“It’s almost like being a professional athlete: If you play enough rounds of the game, you develop a seamless skill set,” Jon Steinberg, BuzzFeed’s former president and COO, says of Rosenthal’s rise at BuzzFeed.

tone of the site from the editors. Then I saw Jon Steinberg, the president and COO, grow this advertising model, and with my past passion for marketing, I thought, Wow, this is something huge. This is something that can shift the industry,” she says. “I saw how powerful it could be and I said, ‘I want to be the first.’ ” Steinberg, who stepped down as BuzzFeed’s president and COO in May but remains a consultant for the company, says: “With 15 people in a small office back then, I probably just yelled out across the room, ‘Hey, who can help me with this campaign?’ Melissa and I did it together. We would sit at a computer and work on the slides, the images, the text.

She has been one of the drivers and really one of the creators of the whole branded content team. She came here with an amazing creative sense and all of these ideas on how we can work with brands.”

Rosenthal counts Steinberg, who helped grow BuzzFeed into a global company with a staff of 500, as one of her role models. “Jon came in here, into an industry that was kind of nonexistent, and really pioneered it and drove it forward, and it was amazing to see his persistence,” she says.

“Sometimes getting very small buys was such a huge win for us back in the day and it’s amazing to see how far we’ve

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come in a few years. We’ve shifted the industry and now we’re seeing other people do it, as well, and that’s more of a drive for us to push it forward.”

One of the first brands that Rosenthal helped sign to BuzzFeed’s sponsored content programs was General Electric. “I was doing all of the mockups and helping with the pitching, and knocking on doors, essentially, to get people to take a meeting or a call with us. GE saw the benefit of being innovative and using new platforms. They were one of our first and biggest [clients],” she says. Now GE’s sponsored content on BuzzFeed includes science-related posts such as “14 Reasons Chemistry Class Ruled,” “12 Signs You Majored in Engineering” and “11 Things That Can Actually Make 1.21 Gigawatts of Power.”

As more brands signed on and the sponsored content team expanded, Rosenthal was the ideal person to lead it, Steinberg says. “It’s almost like being a professional athlete: If you play enough rounds of the game, you develop a seamless skill set. She had built the thing. She had defined it.

She had done everything at the task level.”

Rosenthal was named director of creative services in December 2011, and she now leads a team of 46 BuzzFeed staffers in New York and London to develop campaigns

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for more than 100 brands, including Pepsi, Nike and Volkswagen. In 2012, Virgin Mobile USA sponsored the “Always On Newsroom,” with posts such as “11 Things No One Wants to See on Instagram” and “18 Things You Probably Didn’t Mean to Say with That Emoji.” That campaign garnered 5 million earned and 4.7 million paid impressions, and 600,000 views on social media.

Customizing Content BuzzFeed’s less-than-traditional culture leaves plenty of room for creativity in brainstorming sessions for sponsored content campaigns. There are few parameters, Rosenthal says. “People are coming to us with really serious, big-time RFPs and wanting us to pitch really big, well-thought-out and -executed deals that will impact what their next move is. Nothing is too silly or not a fit. We can explore every possibility, and that drives us to create our best ideas.”

She and her team work with the brands’ marketing executives or advertising agencies to develop topics for the sponsored content campaigns. “It’s always very custom to the brand,” she says. “We’ll take their initiatives and do some research and deep dives into the type of content that we think will work well for them and the target audience.”

In August 2013, BuzzFeed housed a “cat Internet” site for St. Louis-based Nestlé Purina PetCare Co.’s Friskies brand (BuzzFeed.com/CatInternets), which presented a mockup of what BuzzFeed would look like if cats wrote the site’s content. Posts included “10 Yarns We’re Excited to Paw at This Fall” and “12 Spots to Nap Before Human Gets Needy Again.” “A lot of my group, we love animals, and more than half of us own a cat or two, and we thought it would be funny,” Rosenthal says. “The idea was that Friskies is a brand that not only feeds cats, but also understands them. Friskies loved it because they thought it really communicated who they were.”

In December 2013, Oscar Health, a New York-based health insurance company targeting millennials, ran a sponsored content campaign with posts such as “11 Millennial Diseases That Are Completely Legitimate and Real.” “We created a template of prescription bottles and paired them with a GIF that was appropriate, something like ‘selfie arm,’ ” Rosenthal says. “It was real, funny things that millennials could relate to. People loved it, and it paired perfectly with their target audience. It had to do with health, and it was a funny way of visualizing it in a shareable and social way.”

Sponsored content is a way for consumers to connect with brands beyond their offerings, sales reps and customer service teams, Rosenthal says. “Brands can be publishers, and we should think of them as such. … I think of pieces of content as touch points within a brand’s overall scope, and all of these touch points add up to increased purchase consideration and positive brand affinity. We’re trying to

13, 0 2 t s u I n Au g sed a u o h d e BuzzFe net” site for er “cat Int based Nestlé sS t . L o u i t C a r e C o .’s e Purina P rand, which b kup of Friskies c o m a ed present zFeed would z what Bu if cats wrote e look lik content. ’s the site create an authentic, shareable, social experience, where we function as many of those touch points. If those posts make people laugh, if they make them cry, if they touch them emotionally in some way, it’s going to resonate.”

To have a millennial heading up a team charged with helping brands connect with millennial audiences is just good business sense, and Steinberg says that Rosenthal is effective at both collaborating with her peers and taking charge. “What she’s really learned is that it’s important to be friends with your team, but it’s also important to have the team understand that occasionally you will make unilateral decisions, and not everything can be consensus-driven. She’s developed the confidence to make those decisions,” he says. “She brought all of the ideas and all of the creativity and the sense of how to work with brands, and she developed this amazing management and operations skill set to supplement it.”

In 2014, Rosenthal was named to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 media influencers list, Business Insider’s 30 Most Creative People in Advertising Under 30 and Ad Age’s 40 Under 40 list. After only four years in the workforce, she finds herself at the forefront of a rejuvenated advertising trend and she counts herself lucky every day. “At the beginning, [Steinberg] was tasked with solving a different problem every day in terms of brand initiatives and at first, I helped him with that. Now I’m in charge of it in the creative department. Things have changed so much, and it’s amazing where we are. Native advertising is going to become something that no one really thinks it could be now, the way that no one thought digital advertising could jump outside the banner a few years ago,” she says. “When I was in high school, I didn’t know that this was a job.” m

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