A few months ago, I met Damon Berger over at Revision3. When we met, Damon was the senior director of creative and business development at the digital media studio. We hit it off right away -- and besides really enjoying Damon personally -- I quickly realized he’s a wealth of knowledge when it comes to the development, production, and distribution of digital media. He’s also a mentor at the American Film Institute’s Digital Content Lab.
Damon recently took on a new role at a company called Moderati. Here’s a link to the Hollywood Reporter’s article about Moderati’s recent launch. At Moderati, Damon will be developing new branded entertainment content. But what does ‘branded entertainment’ really mean? On Damon’s official bio for Moderati, it says he “oversees development of original multi-platform entertainment properties for major brands, agencies and programming outlets.” That makes sense to me, but I thought it would be great to really understand what ‘branded entertainment’ is all about. So Damon and I sat down at our Cisco Media Solutions Group offices -- we discussed his perspective on what advertisers are looking for when it comes to sponsoring or creating original content to tie to their brand.
We touched on a lot of topics in the video interview, so I split up the content into several episodes. We will roll out the series from the interview over the next couple of weeks here on the DigMediaRev blog. There is a lot to learn here.
In the first part of our talk, we talked about Damon’s career to date, and explored how he got involved in digital media content creation. I think anyone who is interested in how digital media programming gets developed and created will find that topic interesting. Damon was a creative executive at Disney and helped form the company’s first digital studio, known as ‘Stage 9′. Here, Damon discusses his experiences at Disney’s ‘Stage 9′. Some key takeaways from this first part of the interview -- 1) content companies should treat the internet as a unique medium (as my colleague Scott Brown blogged about earlier) and 2) internet content offers producers new ways to engage audiences.