Female-oriented publisher SheKnows hired as its first CTO Carl Hixson, who’s built digital platforms for Getty Images, HBO, Pearson and McGraw-Hill.
He’ll turn his experience toward Momentum, SheKnows’ data-driven content management system designed to help advertisers “create content [and] manage ad units around content in a single, seamless ecosystem,” Hixson said.
Momentum is expected to be officially released at the BlogHer conference in July. The platform will expand its reach, serving not only BlogHer users but all SheKnows properties and contributors on those platforms.
Hixson’s long game is to ensure SheKnows can scale in the future, which means he must first ensure “the underlying foundational model in place.”
Momentum is a unified platform that combines a content management system with a native advertising solution, serving as a matchmaker between advertisers and content creators.
Here’s how it works: Advertisers can use Momentum to select the right bloggers and creators for a native advertising campaign, who in turn use the platform to monitor performance for the programs they participate in. One of the benefits of Momentum, the tech assets for which came from SheKnows’ acquisition of female-oriented community BlogHer last November, is that it can both anticipate and track the performance of advertising units.
SheKnows guarantees engagement for native advertising campaigns using predictive analytics. Clients can monitor how a campaign performs against those initial projections, noting, for instance, what social channel or blogger drives the most engagement on a given day.
“The No. 1 obstacle on the client side is the uncertainty in data, tracking of [native] performance,” said SheKnows CEO Philippe Guelton.
Creators benefit because they better understand how to make their content more effective. Dashboards show reach, shares and views for each article, letting creators gauge performance across all distribution channels, including social media.
And, like advertisers, creators can also assess how advertising campaigns perform against initial projections, letting them adjust their content to maximize results.
“We are harnessing the authenticity of the voices of these content creators, “ Guelton said, “giving them control of where and when to do the native content and which brands they’ll participate with.”
