By appointing a former Hollywood agent as its new director of media, Tumblr’s looking to get more ad business from show business.
Tumblr has appointed Yahoo’s director of mobile growth operations Sima Sistani in the newly created position of director of media. Based in San Francisco, Sistani will report to Lee Brown, Tumblr’s head of global brand partnerships.
“I’m excited to cultivate these new relationships and increase Tumblr’s presence in the broadcast, publishing and entertainment space,” Sistani said in a statement. She said Tumblr was “the land of opportunity for creators and the home of fandom culture.”
Sistani’s appointment will be yet another Hollywood hire for Tumblr. Last year, it appointed David Hayes, the head of digital marketing for Lionsgate to come on board as its entertainment evangelist, and head of CANVAS, a thinktank that helps brands create sponsored content for the platform.
In this new role, Sistani will be expected to utilize her experience as a former CAA agent to get Hollywood to partner with Tumblr for its marketing efforts. We’ve already seen a few examples of these, most recently, Paramount partnered with Tumblr to create range of marketing content for the Will Ferrell comedy Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues.
Speaking with Adweek, Paramount’s VP of interactive marketing Andrew Runyon said, “The concept of social media barely existed at the time of the first Anchorman, Facebook had just been conceived a few months prior, and YouTube and Twitter hadn’t been created. But social has allowed Anchorman to live on as a film. And it makes us believe that we have something really zeitgeisty here that we can capitalize on.”
Tumblr is already the place where many fans create communities and gather to exchange in-jokes, fan art and their favorite moments from the shows and movies they love. By bringing that valuable cache of influencers, Tumblr has a pretty good opportunity to become the de facto social advertising channel for Hollywood.
