Canadian pastry chef and online personality Anna Olson has partnered with Boat Rocker Media and its sister company, Insight Productions, to grow her online channel and work with brands to create custom content.
The first sponsored project is Live with Anna Olson, a series of live, long-form (45-50 minutes) baking sessions on Olson’s Oh Yum! YouTube channel. The first five episodes are sponsored by Organic Meadow and Rolling Meadow dairy products, streaming Fridays at noon ET.
Out of the gate, the Organic Meadow and Rolling Meadow dairy sponsorship took the form of product placement and verbal mentions, supported by tagged social posts on Olson’s channels, as well as on the brand’s social feeds (with creative assets provided by Insight), all pointing to the YouTube stream.
Her YouTube channel currently has more than a million subscribers (typically female with 60% between 25 and 54 years old) and nearly 100 million views, including six million views in Canada alone. In total, Olson’s online videos have received nearly two million likes, and each video receives, on average, more than 100,000 views, while her top 10 videos averaging nearly four million.
While the value of the sponsored opportunities has a wide scope (starting anywhere between $10,000 and $20,000 per episode on the low end), Insight Production’s Anthony Matkovic, director of branded content, tells MiC that the goal is to develop bespoke sponsorship opportunities on a brand-by-brand basis, such as custom recipe opportunities built around specific brands, Matkovic adds.
Brand partnerships aren’t limited to live streaming series, Matkovic notes, indicating that Olson’s current slate of bi-weekly content enjoys significant popularity, but the interactivity and overall popularity of Olson’s live product strongly suggests more live branded blocks in the near future.
The obvious concentration of opportunities out of the gate seem to be coming from CPG brands (baking and cooking-centric, especially), but all categories and verticals are fair game, Matkovic says.
To-date, Matkovic says live streams have over-performed on client expectations on viewership and engagement and viewership average is 67% above the guaranteed view count on all live stream videos that have aired.
