NYTVF, Advertising Week Fest to Launch Branded Content 'Nexus'

Nexus NYC to bring brands, content creators together during fifth annual Advertising Week

By Alex Weprin -- Broadcasting & Cable, 3/31/2008 5:15:00 PM

The New York Television Festival and the fifth annual Advertising Week festival are teaming up to create Nexus NYC, a forum that will pair brands with top content creators.

The initiative will give brands the opportunity to be "pitched" ideas from some of the industries' top creatives, including Michael Davies of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and the World Series of Pop Culture, Howard T. Owens of Reveille and a group of producers repped by the William Morris Agency.

"The New York Television Festival is proud to be working with Advertising Week on a forward-looking initiative like Nexus," said NYTVF founder Terence Gray in a statement.  "Brands are adopting an increasingly active role in content development, and putting them in the room with established producers will only accelerate the creative process.  Nexus fits perfectly with the NYTVF's mission of establishing new and innovative pipelines for producing cutting-edge video content."

The hope is that a few of the pitches from the meetings could be developed into pilots or even short series, making the Nexus forum an incubator for new programming.

Participating brands in Nexus NYC will be announced later this year.