LAB restructures for bigger share of content market
Published:Sunday | July 4, 2021 | 12:06 AMKarena Bennett - Business Reporter
Advertising and production company Limners and Bards Limited, which trades as The LAB, has restructured its business for fresh flows of revenue from the build-out of a new content creation department to drive revenues and has streamlined its influencer marketing business to capitalise on new opportunities in the marketplace.
The listed company has also created a new human resources post, which it has dubbed people operations manager, to which it has appointed former Supreme Ventures and JMMB Group HR professional Carolyn Bolt-Nicholas.
“Our vision is to become number one in the Caribbean, and in order to become number one, we have to ensure that we are focused. The strategy to get there may change, but the priorities remain the same,” CEO Kimala Bennett told shareholders during the company’s annual general meeting on June 30.
LAB’s content creation department marks its fourth unit, the others being media, production, and agency. The new division is intended to position the company as a content creation hub to unplug a fresh flow of cash from content licensing.
“Our strategic approach covers three main channels of content creation: content marketing for brands; digital content; unsolicited content that includes, but is not limited to, vlogs. This adds a new revenue stream and positions us as the go-to for major films, but we also want to produce our own content because that comes with the opportunity of us licensing,” Bennett said.
Vlogs are typically social media accounts with a heavy video content.
“Media accounts for more than 50 per cent of revenue, and so we are constantly looking at innovative ways to ensure that we are looking for additional revenue streams,” Bennett shared.
The advertising and production company has been experiencing year-over-year growth at the top line and in profit over the past three years, improving its bottom line from $62.3 million in 2018 to $127 million at the end of 2020 despite a massive fallout in the marketing and promotions industry in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The company’s six months’ unaudited results for the period ending April 2021 showed a 31 per cent jump in earnings to $113 million year-over-year on matching growth in revenue, which stood at $619 million at the end of the period.
Bennett is going after a larger share of the advertising and production market and hopes to do so organically before moving towards acquisition opportunities.
As part of the organic growth, LAB is relying heavily on technology to grow its service segment and expand into new markets.
Bennett has pointed out that one of the biggest opportunities for the company’s line of business is to be found in social media influencer marketing, which is a new way of advertising that has grown largely from an increased uptake in e-commerce, into a multibillion-dollar industry, particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Businesses across the Caribbean are increasingly utilising the marketing strategy that involves product endorsement by persons who are active and/or popular on social media.
“Our research shows that influencer marketing is a multibillion-dollar industry, and so we have shifted the focus of Scope from being a location and talent directory to talent and influencer marketing agency,” she said.
Scope Caribbean, which was incorporated in May this year as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Limners and Bards, is described by the company as a user-generated influencer and talent platform that allows vetted persons to be added to a database of talent that is accessible by film producers, casting directors, agencies, and global brands.
Individuals listed on the platform are hired to create advertising campaigns, films, and TV shows specifically for brand influencers.
Scope is said to have acquired the licence for an influencer-marketing platform meant to improve influencer-marketing campaigns through better performance tracking.
“Sometimes what we find is that a brand may want a particular person to be their influencer, but they may not be aware of the breakdown of how many women are following them, how many men, where the majority of their following is from etc. This data is literally at our fingertips, and this is what we will be able to package under the Scope brand to our clients,” Bennett said.