POPSUGAR Unveils New Original Programming, Creative Partnerships

"We rise. We shine.” 2017 POPSUGAR Digital NewFront

POPSUGAR Unveils New Original Programming, Creative Partnerships(03 May 2017)

POPSUGAR, the leading lifestyle brand for young women, held its Digital Content NewFront presentation today at New York City's Industria Studios. The company showcased a variety of new projects, from original online series to a new feature film, and highlighted its lineup of successful returning franchise series. The offerings continue to expand content around the POPSUGAR passion points in the areas of style, food, healthy living, entertainment, and global issues that affect women.  POPSUGAR’s content, aligned under the theme “We Rise. We Shine,” provides a trusted and positive platform for brands to engage with its large and loyal audience. 

 

"POPSUGAR has always helped women celebrate themselves and others,” said Lisa Sugar, POPSUGAR’s cofounder and president. “In a world where we need to come together, our mission is more relevant than ever. We continue to be committed to igniting optimism while driving change and building communities; in fact, making women's lives easier, more meaningful, and beautiful is our motivation for storytelling."

 

“We’re building real scale — over 3 billion content views per month — without compromising the voice and editorial mission that makes us unique in the market,” said David Grant, president of POPSUGAR Studios. “Our video business, especially our native business, has just exploded this past year, and it has energized us to expand aggressively into new video formats and markets.”  

 

Grant cited as examples POPSUGAR’s investment in Toy Rocket, a new longform video production company headed by accomplished TV executives, and its new movie unit POPSUGAR Films, whose first project will be Honored, a feature film in collaboration with Lionsgate. 

 

In addition, Grant confirmed that all existing franchise series are returning, including Eat the Trend, Get the Dish, POPSUGAR Beauty Junkie, Pretty Unfiltered, Hannahgram, and Class FitSugar. “These series are bona fide hits, each generating millions of weekly views,” said Grant, “and they are central to our success.”

 

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Details for POPSUGAR’s roster of new programming and our latest initiatives for 2017 include the following:

 

Toy Rocket

Toy Rocket is a longform video production startup and marks an innovative investment by POPSUGAR. Toy Rocket will be led by two accomplished execs from the TV industry: Tom Huffman, formerly a senior programming executive at Tribune Broadcasting, VH1, and Mark Burnett Productions; and Jane Yusim, formerly of ITV Entertainment. Toy Rocket will develop projects for the growing array of video platforms  — broadcast, cable, OTT (SVOD and AVOD) — as well as high-profile branded content projects for POPSUGAR. It will leverage both Huffman’s and Yusim’s expertise in longform development and POPSUGAR’s extensive first-party data, video optimization expertise, talent-friendly reputation, and large, loyal audience.

 

Honored (POPSUGAR Films)

Honored is a new feature film from Lionsgate, Untitled Entertainment, and Cinestar Pictures in association with POPSUGAR’S new film unit, POPSUGAR Films. Executive produced by Zoe Saldana and starring actress and digital influencer Meghan Rienks, Honored tells the emotional story of three former best friends who have drifted apart but reunite when the fourth member of their group suddenly passes away during their senior year of high school. To honor their friend’s memory, the group decides to complete their freshman year bucket list and in the process rediscover the power of friendship. Honored is the first feature to come out of POPSUGAR’s new feature film unit. 

 

Failing Forward 

The moments that don't break us, make us. In this documentary series, successful female entrepreneurs share stories of their “best failure” — what went wrong, what they learned, and how overcoming them enabled them to go on to much greater heights.  Hosted by CFDA-honored fashion designer Misha Nonoo, Failing Forward will cover the breadth of career mishaps, screwups, and pivots — and inspire us all to embrace the power of failure in living our best life.   

 

From Where We Stand

In From Where We Stand, power couples who are crushing it in their respective industries — across food, fashion, media, politics, art, tech, and more — put their relationships in the spotlight to answer bigger universal questions about love, life, and work. They’ll tackle the hard stuff: what “having it all” really means, their position on gender roles, and #relationshipgoals. From Where We Stand arises from a new partnership between POPSUGAR and Complex Networks and will be featured across the properties of both publishers.

 

Malfunction

Malfunction is a scripted anthology series that explores the relationship between millennial women and technology. It will explore many provocative, relevant questions from what happens when our technology betrays, misleads, or obsesses us to what happens when technology helps and saves us in unseen ways. It’s Black Mirror meets Pretty Little Liars as plausible scenarios are played out to unsettling, bizarre, emotional, and sometimes comedic extremes in stories that cannot be missed. Malfunction is from POPSUGAR Studios and Toy Rocket.

 

New Heights

New Heights tells the fascinating stories of a new generation of young, entrepreneurial women who use their airline seats as their office as they travel the world to build their careers. The series features notable women such as body-positivity activist Hayley Hasselhoff and Eliana Murillo, a Google marketing executive with a tequila side-passion.  We will ride alongside them and share their experiences as they jet around the world. New Heights is the first video series for the new POPSUGAR Travel channel and is being produced in collaboration with Delta Air Lines and Omnicom Media Group’s The Content Collective. Launching this June, the POPSUGAR-Delta Air Lines collaboration is the latest  partnership to emerge from the Final Front, the annual content showcase created and organized by Omnicom Media Group’s Content Collective.

 

Raising the Game

Raising the Game is a limited series about the powerful connection between peak athletes and the families who helped them achieve their goals. Through the stories of elite athletes and their most important relationships — from parent to sibling to child — we’ll examine the emotional, inspiring, and sometimes complicated relationships involved when high-level athletics enters the equation.

 

Spirited 

Spirited is a new POPSUGAR social video brand exploring the culture of cocktails. Spirited video episodes will transform female millennial newsfeeds into bar carts of inspiration, one cocktail at a time. From visually stunning cocktail recipe how-tos to thumb-stopping explainer videos and travel documentaries profiling the world’s most talked-about cocktails, content will be rooted in POPSUGAR insights and optimized for consumption across Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, and POPSUGAR.com. 

 

UNBX

UNBX is a new franchise from Executive Producer Adam Goodman (the studio head behind iconic movie franchises such as Transformers, Mission: Impossible, and World War Z), the writing team of Jason Pagan and Andrew Deutschman (Paranormal Activity), and POPSUGAR Studios. A family-friendly fantasy franchise, UNBX turns the YouTube unboxing phenomenon on its head in unexpected ways. The mystery begins when a family of five — beloved YouTube unboxing celebrities — begins receiving magical and mysterious boxes from an unknown source. Every episode will feature a brand-new adventure, springing from an item in the box that is sometimes magical, sometimes otherworldly — and always amazing.   

 

TURN

TURN, in partnership with Banana Republic, tells the inspiring, true stories of women who took a risk to reinvent themselves. Each episode will profile an influential woman who went from an unfulfilling job to a new career that better matched her life’s mission. We will learn how taking one turn can have huge ripple effects into the rest of their lives. 

 

Whine & Dine

In each episode of Whine & Dine, we bring together one foodie adult, one hungry child, and one top restaurant. In this comedy food series, hosted by comedic actress and model Arielle Vandenberg (@midnight, How I Met Your Mother, Greek), we’ll get both the honest and hilarious reactions of host and kid as each experiences culinary masterpieces from their own POV. Whine & Dine serves up entertainment for anyone interested in food and comedy and who relates to the universal experience of dining out with kids. Whine & Dine is from POPSUGAR Studios in partnership with Portal A (Song Voyage featuring the Gregory Brothers, Esquire's White Collar Brawlers, YouTube Rewind)

 

We Rise

We Rise by POPSUGAR is a new video content brand about inspirational women around the world who are breaking barriers. We Rise by POPSUGAR aims to empower POPSUGAR’S massive audience of young women to be their best selves and to stand up for what they believe in. It is an inclusive, revealing, and uplifting look at the power of women around the world.

 

Break the Dawn 

Some people are night owls. Others are hustling before sunrise. Break the Dawn profiles the adventures of real women whose life’s work takes place in the early hours of dawn to make every day epic.  In partnership with Jeep, POPSUGAR will create stories that celebrate these women who are doing just that.

 

#FailFix

Glidden, in partnership with POPSUGAR Studios and Vox Creative, will launch #FailFix, a new makeover series for the social generation. Our host will save the day for those of us who have miserably failed at trying to re-create DIYs from social media. Viewers will laugh, learn, and cheer as we experience disastrous DIY crafts, home projects gone awry, and misguided room makeovers — all saved with easy-to-follow tips on how to do it right. #FailFix launches in June

 

About POPSUGAR Inc.:

POPSUGAR Inc. is a global media and technology company that is parent to lifestyle media publisher POPSUGAR and monthly subscription box POPSUGAR Must Have. Together, the brands attract a monthly global audience of 100 million, generating 3.1 billion monthly content views. POPSUGAR is the leading lifestyle brand for young women, delivering inspiring, informative, and entertaining content in multi-platforms across entertainment, fashion, beauty, fitness, food, parenting, news, and more. POPSUGAR Studios, the video production arm of POPSUGAR Inc., is the leading producer of online video lifestyle content, with more than 325 million monthly views of its original series.

 

POPSUGAR Inc. operates internationally in Australia, France, Germany, China, the Middle East, and the UK, with offices in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and 

London. The company is privately held and funded by Sequoia Capital and IVP. For more information about POPSUGAR Inc., visit corp.popsugar.com.