Turner Embarks on Digital Shake-Up For 2008

A new website soft-launched last week, CartoonNetworkHQ, heralds the start of a new digital strategy for the Turner-owned brand, where the focus for its digital properties will shift from channel and brand promotion to making money in their own right.

“It’s quite different from the way the websites were treated in the past, being more of a promotional tool supporting the linear channel and everything else,” explains Turner International’s Asia-Pacific business development VP, YewMing Lau. “We’re now taking the websites and pulling it out from within the network and making it a separate business unit. The focus is very much how do you build the business.”

The move is the latest step on the path towards true media neutrality, after the company as a whole first started moving away from being to a TV business to branded environment business three years ago.

The current push will see the launch of new community-based websites, of which CartoonNetworkHQ is the first, to complement Cartoon Network’s existing online presence, as well as an internal reogranization at Turner as its digital executives gain more autonomy within the overall business. The new sites, which will be based on different cartoon characters such as Ben 10, will be developed and hosted by a new joint-venture operation to be set up with the company that developed CartoonNetworkHQ, web infrastructure outfit Outblaze. Cartoon Network’s inhouse digital team, meanwhile, will focus on servicing existing country-based sites and work on strategy.

A lot of the elements that will go into the new sites, including multi-player games, mash-ups, mobile and merchandising, are already present in CartoonNetworkHQ, though this site will also be upgraded with more community-based functionality as the others are developed. “The question is, how do you take that [functionality] and then develop on that,” Lau adds.

The JV, majority owned by Turner, has been christened TurnOut Ventures Limited and will sit within Turner’s Hong Kong office. “We see it more as a venture company that will pursue a bunch of other activities,” Lau says. “Having said that, very importantly, the first thing is to make sure we get a couple of things under our belt so we can experiment and prove it before we pile on a whole load of things on top of it.”

Although the initiative is starting within Cartoon Network, other media brands within the Turner family will be included as time goes on.

Another area up for review is how the company makes money from advertising, for instance looking at the role that can be played by automated ad services such as Google’s AdSense and ad networks that aggregate audiences over different sites. “This is a good opportunity to experiment,” Lau says.

The first of the character sites should start appearing around the middle of the year, also forming part of a push to develop Cartoon Network’s character business as franchises in their own right, alongside the Cartoon Network brand. Local language versions for Japan, Korea and mainland China are also in the pipeline.