NDM Story 22: The&Partnership launches talent agency for YouTube stars

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/dec/02/thepartnership-social-talent-agency-youtube-stars-maddie-bruce

Media Group, The&Partnership, have decided to launch an agency that supports future You Tube and social media stars. Already representing massive You Tubers such as Zoella, Caspar Lee and Joe Sugg, the agency is believed to be the first in the UK to be an agency that focuses on promoting social media stars. The agency aims to sign up and coming talent with a lot of potential to become future stars. An example of a success story with the agency is video blogger, Maddie Bruce, who, after being overloaded with requests to promote products, decided to sign with The&Partnership. With the help from the agency, she can now focus on the material that she wants to show to audiences with the agency making educated decisions as to what she should be promoting in her videos.

• The&Partnership, owning an almost 50% stake, wants to muscle in on the market dominated by players such as the established giant Gleam Futures, which represents big name YouTubers such as Zoella, Caspar Lee and Joe Sugg. 
• Bruce, for example, decided to quit her studies in criminology to make a career out of video blogging and social media influencing when she hit 100,000 subscribers on YouTube. She currently has 135,000.
• Halpern Prince, who founded her PR agency in 1993 and sold a 50.1% stake to Hornby’s group in 2013, says she is keenly aware of the duty of care to young talent.
• Keith Weed, Unilever’s global marketing officer who handles an annual marketing budget of €7.2bn (about £5bn), says: “They’ve got a great line-up of up-and-coming talent who offer real engagement potential.

YouTube is a new and up coming form of digital media where anyone can voice out their opinions, ideologies and interests, with many vloggers having huge fan bases. Creating agency that helps successful You Tube artists with the commercial side of the profession would be very helpful and with the outstanding number of wannabe vloggers, this kind of company can potentially make a lot of profit and eventually become a well known entertainment agency in the future.