What’s Up Moms Teams With Viacom For Branded Content Deal

What’s Up Moms will now be seen on your television as well as your smaller screens. The family-centric YouTube channel, co-founded by Elle Walker and Meg Resnikoff, partnered with Viacom to release a series of three branded advertising videos to air on the media company’s linear networks and digital verticals.

What’s Up Moms, which boasts over 800,000 subscribers and more than 203 million views on its channel, worked with the branded content division Viacom Velocity on the three TV and digital ads. The first spot was inspired by the Mom Hacks series from popular YouTube channel. For the spot, Viacom and What’s Up Moms teamed with Hershey’s to create a quick instructional clip on how to integrate Hershey’s chocolate into your holiday preparations. The content debuted on the linear TV Land and Nick at Nite channels on December 7, 2015. An extended version of the Hershey’s hack video will live on TVLand.com through December 9, before moving to WhatsUpMoms.com.

“That was important to us, for it to live on both places,” explained What’s Up Moms’ recently-hired president and COO Liane Mullin, as reported by AdWeek. “Part of what we’re trying to do is create something that draws our audience to their channel and their audience to ours.” Mullins also noted it was the “right time” to expand the What’s Up Moms brand outside of YouTube, considering getting on TV was one of the channel’s goals.

Viacom Velocity originally reached out to What’s Up Moms because the YouTube channel matched the kind of content and voice the brand was looking for. “Millennials are such a big audience, and now those millennials are moms as well,” said Niels Schuurmans, EVP of Creative at Viacom Velocity. “They’ve grown up with us, they’ve grown up through our brands, we have good relationships with them, so we’re always looking at new, authentic ways to connect with them across all platforms. It’s an important consumer base. We really wanted to pull them out and make sure we we’re talking to them in a unique way.”

The two final pieces of branded content from Viacom and What’s Up Moms won’t go live until 2016. That content will feature marketing partners other than Hershey’s, and could end up on other Viacom linear networks (and not just on TV Land and Nick at Nite). Both Schuurmans and Mullin believe the partnership with What’s Up moms will extend beyond just the three videos.

“We’ve invested a lot in data, which is very important for us. So really our plan is to identify where the millennial moms live, and then we’ll create content for them across all brands,” Schuurmans said. “We’re looking at Viacom as a whole, and where millennial moms are engaging with our content.”