Discovery Lines Up Pair of Digital Partnerships in Asia

Discovery Networks Asia Pacific has aligned with China’s VS Media and Japan’s Tabilabo in two separate deals aimed at engaging mobile-first millennial audiences across AsiaPac.

VS Media is a top MCN that super-serves digital natives in Greater China. It has more than 120 million subscribers and some 320 million video views a month. Last August, Discovery made a minority investment in VS Media. Together, they are launching Tan Ba, a digital brand solution specifically targeting millennials. Tan Ba aims to deliver “smart entertainment” through highly customized short-form video content sourced exclusively from Discovery’s global catalog and localized by VS Media. Areas of focus will include health and wellness, science and technology, travel and lifestyle, art and fashion, history and nature.

Tabilabo is one of the leading and rapidly growing digital media businesses in Japan. The partnership between Discovery and Tabilabo includes a commercial agreement that will enable them to bring solutions to advertisers to reach their desired audience via 360-degree opportunities across linear, digital and social platforms. The collaboration is meant to leverage Tabilabo’s advertising technology and formats, and Discovery’s stable of advertisers.

Ivy Wong, founder and CEO of VS Media, remarked, “I am thrilled to officially launch the first of many exciting initiatives with Discovery. Tan Ba delivers unique, highly engaging and truly compelling content in a breakthrough format that has been developed with our local creators and designed specifically for digital savvy, millennial audiences. During beta testing, Tan Ba generated over 120 million unique views in less than a month with no marketing at all. The average views per video exceeded 2 million. This is exciting, especially as we look to create new engagement opportunities for audiences and our valued sponsor communities.”

Shotaro Kushi, CEO of Tabilabo, said, “We are thrilled to partner with Discovery Networks to launch the industry’s first premium video advertising solution across both digital and linear platforms. Through this endeavor, we will be able to drive higher engagement amongst Japanese audiences by focusing on media brands and world-class content quality that cannot be realized with digital-targeted marketing alone.”

“These exciting digital-first initiatives are the first steps in Discovery’s long-term strategy to accelerate our growth in Asia with digital at the core,” said Arthur Bastings, the president and managing director of Discovery Networks Asia Pacific. “We are deeply committed to engaging more viewers across more screens than ever before, building our presence on new platforms and attracting young passionate communities that advertisers want to reach with unique branded content opportunities through VS Media and Tabilabo’s extensive networks and strong base of millennial audiences.”