How We Launched a Gen-Z Media Company during the COVID-19 Lockdown.
Pandemic Pivot: From a graduate workshop at S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University, to WATCH Media, a Virtual Media Channel run by and for Generation Z.
Key Fact:
Just before New York City went into COVID-19 Lockdown, MAP Digital’s founder and CEO, Mary Ann Pierce was collaborating with Sean Branagan, Director, Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, Newhouse School at Syracuse University to lead a graduate seminar to deepen the exploration of MAP Digital’s CSR program for the Equality Moonshot. The purpose was to build an audience worldwide and encourage investment in Women and Girls to build STEM businesses that addressed the UN’s Sustainability Development Goals 2030. The Equality Moonshot’s goal is that women capture 30% of the investments and wealth created from the trillions that will be spent to achieve the 2030 SDGs. The summer seminar was to take place at MAP Digital’s 56 Ludlow Studio in New York City that is, until mid-March, when COVID lockdowns hit America.
Business Question: Would you drop the Syracuse University Seminar and focus solely on your clients’ now exponential demand for virtual events?
MAP Digital’s Answer: Do both: ramp up to meet our clients’ virtual events needs and build a virtual-only platform for the Newhouse students to communicate.
COVID19 as a Catalyst for Change — From Cancel Culture to WATCH Media:
By mid-March, everything was in flux. COVID-19 necessitated a complete lockdown in New York. MAP Digital, already an established live and virtual event provider realized a sudden and vast uptick in business. Soon after New York’s lockdown, a global emergency meeting was called for the Equality Moonshot team to address their response to the pandemic. MAP Digital was planning to work with the Newhouse School to include them as production support. Quickly, recent graduates and current students had seen their immediate futures canceled; their hard-earned summer internships with NBC at the 2020 Olympics or SXSW canceled and that first job offer rescinded. The Equality Moonshot leadership decided to pass the torch to the Newhouse graduates and students and MAP Digital was to provide our MetaMeetings platform and technical team to them to shape their generation voice. Thus, WATCH Media was born, #WeAreTheCHange, a media channel that was run by and for Generation Z to address sustainability and equality.
Launch of WATCH Media:
On May 5th, MAP Digital live-streamed the premiere of WATCH Media’s international and intergenerational #ReBootRountable discussing Post COVID-19 Opportunities. Hosts Marielle Brunelle, a recent Newhouse graduate, and Sophie Deziel, international development graduate and mentee of the Equality Moonshot, interviewed four Equality Moonshot colleagues live from New York. The expert panel included two New York residents, Tess Mateo, Senior Advisor on Gender and Climate to the United Nations and Managing Director CXCatalysts, and Jill Faherty Lloyd, Managing Director and Financial Advisor at Evercore Wealth Management. Calling in from across the globe, Dr. Mariana Bozesan, Club of Rome member and Founder & President of AQAL Capital joined the roundtable discussion from Munich, while Peggy Liu, Chairperson of JUCCCE joined from Shanghai. During the WATCH Media #RebootRoundtable discussion, audience members entered the Zoom Video Conference Room to ask their questions directly to the panelists on the livestream.
Beyond Zoom: live casts on an interactive, content-rich MetaMeetings
With over 20 years of experience in webcasting especially in the investment banking sector, MAP Digital deploys Zoom, BlueJeans, WebEx, Teams, or any video conference platform to capture the speaker virtually. We encode their video as a webcast that is embedded as a link on the MetaMeetings website. Thus, we can have multiple video sources such as speakers, slides, and videos to be switched into the live stream, just like live television. Each Session page is content rich with speaker’s profiles, Ask a Question, polling, links to downloadable content, and quick access to social media channels. There is no limitation to the number of concurrent rooms or to the number of live or on-demand attendees.
Interactive, Content-Rich and Robust Audience Usage Data:
For the WATCH Media premier event, the MAP Digital team created the participants’ profiles, a resource library full of relevant links and downloadable content, such as The Club of Rome’s Transformation is Feasible, a strategic pathway to achieving the UN SDGs by 2030 through five transformative and synergistic actions. We embedded WATCH’s social media pages on to the MetaMeetings website and built a Talk to WATCH button where the audience could ask questions and make comments during the live event, as well as post-event. We even invited audience members into our Zoom room to ask their questions in the livestream during the broadcast. All attendees’ content usage reports were displayed in real-time. They included: who watched live or on-demand, what content was downloaded and shared and by whom to whom, and a list of all questions. For the live WATCH Media premiere there were 289 live webcasts, 17 questions asked, and 97 PDFs of content downloaded in addition to the presentation slides.
Outcomes:
WATCH Media, Equality Moonshot and MAP Digital were delighted with the virtual event execution and the audience we attracted for our maiden voyage in the digital space. For the MAP Digital team, even with our intensely busy production schedule, we were honored to fulfill our CSR pledge to the Equality Moonshot and to help build new possibilities for so many talented young people of WATCH Media, who were left high and dry by the COVID pandemic. We also learned a lot. Most of our work is for financial institutions with strict compliance guidelines. Producing WATCH Media enabled us to use more of our creativity and digital tools to enhance interactivity and audience engagement with the content.
Testimonials:
“Great stuff, this first event, really. Thanks. I actually cried a tiny bit during the panel because it is great to see that successful women invite a community like this to connect and share experience and knowledge while also sending out a call for action to think and act sustainably. Great narrative, really.” — Eva F. from Zurich, Switzerland
“Congratulations on a very professionally presented and fascinating virtual event. My daughter and I were most impressed by the quality of the contributors, by the way the technology worked to bring everyone together, and by the in-vision presence of the questioners, which is so much better than having their questions read out by the “anchors”. My daughter learned a lot about the subject, as did I (it was especially interesting for me to hear about virtual internships!).” — Alun D. from Strasbourg, France
“The event was so well presented and appeals to a wide range of age groups!” — Mary D. from South Carolina, United States of America
Conclusion: Post-event Amplification and multi-channel digital content deployment
Working with such a pressure cooker as COVID-19 lockdown and such a diverse team of stakeholders made for many things to happen quickly that would never have come to pass in the old normal way of life. Once the decision was made and the date of May 5th established, everyone got remarkably busy. Deep collaboration and learning from the digital natives are what allowed this multi-national and generational project to be greater than the sum of its parts. Post-event, the WATCH Media team sent out snippets of thought leadership videos on various social media platforms to share and amplify the content. WATCH is also using digital platforms such as Instagram and TikTok to find their Gen Z audience where they engage. All content and paths lead back to the WATCH Media MetaMeetings where all content can be viewed, shared, and commented.
About WATCH Media:
WATCH was created as a purposeful media venture that is giving Generation Z and young Millennials actionable ways to contribute to the transition into a sustainable economy. Their mission is to educate to facilitate system changes by cutting through the jargon and making social and environmental issues accessible and personally relevant to any averagely engaged young person. Whether it is through employee activism, civic engagement, or conscious consumerism, for every issue they present, WATCH directs consumers to a way they can help change the system. Working as a Gen Z and Millennial team, WATCH believes that their generations will lead the movement in achieving a truly sustainable future, coining the statement #WeAreTheCHange.
About the Equality Moonshot
Our collective vision for 2050 is 9 billion people achieving the 17 SDGs within Earth’s 9 planetary boundaries, with the world’s resources owned and controlled by a balanced, diverse, and representative group of peoples, which of course includes women. To raise awareness about this pressing need, we created Equality Moonshot to foster females to capture at least 30% of the investments and wealth created from the trillions that will be spent related to achieving the SDGs between now and 2030. Follow us @EqualMoonshot, #EqualityMoonshot
About MAP Digital, Inc.
MAP Digital is a webcast conferencing company created in response to the ever-expanding digital needs of our investment banking clients. We built our MetaMeetings platform with attendees’ experience at the center and promote engagement that enhances information exchange and collaboration while capturing and measuring in real-time data to inform sales, marketing, learning, and strategic objectives. Visit us at https://mapdigital.com/
