Jeff Zucker: Viewers trust CNN ‘more than ever’
CANNES — CNN boss Jeff Zucker says despite Donald Trump’s war on the network and what the president says is “fake news,” he is certain that CNN maintains the trust of its viewers, as it extends into digital brands to attract a younger audience.
Speaking at Cannes Lions, he said, “CNN has been around for 37 years, our trustworthiness today is the same as it was a year ago, before people in high offices started questioning it. We know that through our own brand research. Just because somebody says you are not trustworthy, that doesn’t mean it is so … CNN’s brand equity is built over 37 years doing hard work in very dangerous places … those who rely on CNN trust CNN more than ever.”
He appeared on a panel with YouTube star Casey Neistat, who attracts nearly 6 million viewers a day and who just signed a deal to produce an original video brand and a daily news show for CNN. The network, which acquired Neistat’s mobile video sharing app Beme for a reported $25 million earlier this year, is banking on Neistat’s appeal to entice millennials to tune in.
Zucker said, “The world has changed — we can all get news 24/7 from any device, any outlet … but we want to tell different stories in different ways, and add to the news. We are not going to attract new viewers by just feeding CNN onto different platforms.
“Everybody has an iPhone, everyone can be a reporter now. Everybody can tell a story from every part of the world. Why places like CNN matter is that it is still important to bring them together, put context around it and explain it.”
He added that CNN and other media organizations need personalities like Neistat: “The way that CNN would traditionally tell a story is so different from the way Casey and Beme would tell a story, both are incredibly valuable, both will find their audiences, and that is what I think the new CNN is about, being a multi-platform company that reaches many different audience members on many different platforms.”
Talking about Neistat’s appeal to CNN, he noted, “He does great work, he has a huge following and he can reach a different market that CNN never could.
“We have hundreds and hundreds of reporters and people who can tell video stories and stand there with a microphone and a trench coat and tell a story, but we don’t have Casey.
“I think that’s what is missing, not just from CNN, but all the legacy television news broadcasters who think it’s enough to take a video report and put it on a platform where young people go. It just doesn’t work.”
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