Yahoo Brings Tribeca Film Fest to Web

As a signature media sponsor for the Tribeca Film Festival, Yahoo integrated properties from throughout its expansive network when creating the event’s official online portal. The relationship is part of a two-year agreement, which Yahoo hopes to extend on a more long-term basis.

A microsite acts as the portal for the festival. Though video appears as the centerpiece, the site pulls elements from across the network, including festival-related questions and discussion from Yahoo Answers, a map marking participating theaters, event scheduling through Yahoo’s social calendar property Upcoming, and headlines from Yahoo News. On the microsite Yahoo is also running short films and reports covering festival-related events.

American Express, a founding sponsor of the Tribeca Film Festival, is sponsoring the microsite. “American Express and the Tribeca Film Festival have a very special relationship,” said Scheckner, who sees the company’s presence on the Yahoo portal as a natural extension of that relationship. “American Express’s relationship with Yahoo is incremental to the relationship with the Tribeca Film Festival. Enabling Yahoo to extend the impact of the festival to a larger audience, it’s only natural that American Express would be there with us.”

While the microsite and related content spans the Yahoo network, it took just six weeks to construct. “A lot of folks crashed together to make it work uniting parts of the company,” said Matt Scheckner, consigliere at Yahoo, where he oversees trade marketing, events, sponsorships and advertising.

Throughout the two-week festival, coverage on the microsite will ebb and flow with the events, according to Scheckner. At the Tribeca Drive-in and Family Street Fair, for instance, Yahoo will film fans reciting famous lines from their favorite movies. The user-generated clips will be featured on the microsite and in Yahoo Videos.

The Tribeca Film Festival was created in 2002 by Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal, and Craig Hatkoff in response to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.

Yahoo became involved as “part of a broader strategic effort between Yahoo and Tribeca [Film Festival] to look at indie film,” said Scheckner. He said the partnership “extends beyond the two weeks of the festival. It’s something we can put our stamp on.”

A secondary goal of the company’s involvement with the festival is to “boost our profile in what’s known as Yahoo’s second hometown,” Scheckner said. “We have a large presence in New York, and want to be thought of [in the context of] the New York group.”