There’s never been a better time than now to be a platform with content targeted to women.
That’s the opportunity for AOL Inc.’s Makers site, a collection of videos and interviews aimed at female leaders with a roster of Makers that include Oprah Winfrey, Lena Dunham and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The brand held its Makers conference, which caps off today, in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., bringing together speakers such as Diane von Furstenberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Zosia Mamet and Rosie Perez.
“Historically, we’ve targeted a leadership community of women. More and more you’ll start to see us broaden it out,” said AOL chief marketing officer Allie Kline.
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This year, specifically, the media company will focus on how it can broaden its reach to young girls. It helps that its platform is built around video, which is seen as the future of content across industries.
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“We’ve got more videos on women’s leadership than any other brand in the world,” Kline said. “So you’ll see us look and make pretty aggressive moves on how we make sure we get those videos in front of a much more diverse population of women.”
A confluence of factors, one of those being the recent presidential election and the various conversations it sparked, is seen as an opportunity to leverage the Makers brand for AOL.
“When you look at the data around the [women’s] march and you see everything people were there for, it could span everything from immigration to women’s rights to equal pay [and] all the way up and down to defense spending and education,” Kline said. “So, to me, regardless of what issues, what it has done is engaged a population — half the population — in a way that they were previously not as engaged….Everything just converged. You had women’s organizations starting to gain traction. Michelle Obama was really influential in getting United State of Women off the ground and Let Girls Learn.”
As AOL looks to ways to get its content in front of an even larger audience, branding and working with content creators who have strong voices and brands will be key. That’s where the company thinks it has an advantage over others because of its roots in content marketing.
“Content marketing is the advertising industry’s jargon for saying brands really matter,” Kline said. “At the end of the day, content — whether that’s a publishing brand like yours or whether that’s an advertising brand like Pampers or Miller Lite — the message and storytelling around that brand really matters. We’re fortunate that’s a tailwind to our strategy because when you look at someone like a Google whose been very focused on search or someone like Facebook who is extremely successful in the social arena, we’ve always invested deeply in brands and I think that’s going to continue. We believe that that’s something that’s going to pay big dividends for us over time.”