Last night Bristow Media Group (BGM) unveiled plans for a “social media innovators incubator” at the first-ever #AcademySocial event during Canadian Screen Week.

The event was co-hosted by the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television and Toronto-based Bristow Global Media (BGM), the social-media-themed awards and event were held in downtown Toronto at The Hoxton. With activations – including a Google Glass activation from the CFC – and plenty of prompts to tweet/Instagram party pics and comments, the night also handed out five awards for social media innovation and served as the launchpad for the announcement of a new social media innovators incubator from BGM.

“In this universe, good ideas come from everywhere,” she said. “We want to be connected with people who have ideas that can be developed for any screen – all screens – and say ‘let’s talk about these ideas.’ Because we’ve seen so much content out there that’s not necessarily developed in traditional ways and we want to be plugged into that.”

The new venture is set to come online this month and will likely be a web-based portal through the BGM site that allows content creators to submit ideas for review to the BGM team.

The idea is not, Bristow stresses, to set up an application-style process in the style of a funding body, but to connect the right people, ideas and partners to make an idea come to life.

“I think the future is multiple partners and I think the partnerships are going to take all kinds of shapes and sizes,” she said, citing as recent examples deals BGM has done with iTunes and US-based The Daily Beast.

And as such, she wants BGM and the people it works with to keep an open mind.

“I really want [BGM] to be interacting and engaging with people that are thinking in new ways about content creation. I’m not interested in saying ‘give me your social media idea and we’ll make it into a TV show’ – that’s outdated thinking.”

From Playback Daily