Melanie Witkower’s achievements in television are myriad.

She has served as a consultant and digital strategist for reality and scripted productions including Food Network’s “Best Thing I Ever Made” and TLC’s “Raising Fame.”

She is the founder and CEO of Screen-Bridge, a startup that aims to “bridge” the gap between a TV show’s social content production and its episodic production.

She speaks, in conversation with the press, as eloquently on media marketing as she does on the nitty-gritty details of making on-air television, articulating a comprehensive vision of where network social television needs to go, and how it can get there.

And she will, in two months, graduate from Syracuse University.

Still a college student studying Television, Radio and Film at Syracuse’s Newhouse school, and Marketing in its business school, Witkower has already demonstrated an almost preternatural ability to leverage her passion for social TV with business savvy.

“There’s so much room for television to expand and take initiative and learn about their viewers, and engage them in a new way,” she told Brief. “I want to be helping create those ideas. And the best way to do that was launching my own business.”

Witkower first understood the power of social engagement while interning at a New York City events company, the Business Development Institute. There, she was charged with helping beef up the social media presence, creating a digital content timeline and strategizing engagement opportunities that would be natural and not pushy. Her efforts resulted in increased registration, bringing in new customers and even various thought leaders and authors hoping to speak at the Institute’s events.

Seeing firsthand how her social efforts directly impacted the company’s business was revelatory for Witkower and when she came to the West Coast for her program’s “Los Angeles Semester” (in which students work 9 to 5 at an internship in between taking night classes), she begin seeking out ways to play a similar role in television. Interning in the development department of reality masterminds Authentic Entertainment (“Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,” “Toddlers & Tiaras,” and many others) she “had this idea that they could begin selling their shows with social media strategies in their pitches because it would help the networks see the vision for what the social experience could be online, and it would also be allocated for.”

As her internship drew to a close, Witkower worked up the nerve to bring the idea to her supervisor, who promptly arranged a follow-up meeting with the head of development and one of the company’s owners. By the end of the meeting, they had begun the process of hiring Witkower as a digital content producer for two of their shows, “Raising Fame” and “The Best Thing I Ever Made.” Her internship had ended two days earlier.

Continuing to leverage her opportunities during her time in LA, Witkower also sat down with a longtime mentor who was an executive producer for scripted shows ranging from “Workaholics” to Amazon’s “Betas.” He, too, was intrigued by her vision of developing social content in sync with developing show content, and hired her to do so for a new scripted program that is still in production. When Witkower returned to Syracuse, three TV industry consulting gigs now under her belt, the time had come to turn her freelance efforts into a full-on business.

Her team of fellow social TV visionaries now in place (including a supervising producer, director of communications, art director, and an advisory board with digital veterans such as Chad Bender, director of digital revenue planning at The Walt Disney Company), Witkower’s Screen-Bridge is focused on “connecting fans to their content in a new way and rewarding them with exclusives, with behind-the-scenes content, with teasers that are beyond what they would see on TV,” she said. “And doing it in a way that’s affordable to both the network and the production.”

Screen-Bridge offers its services in three areas: development, production and post-premiere. In development, its carefully crafted pitches for integrated social content production can help with selling the show. And in post-premiere, it can give “reports to the production company,” Witkower said, “making suggestions about how well characters perform, how the plotlines are doing, and what people really care about.”

But the company’s most valuable service, currently, may be in the middle ground: Production.

“With production, we do see unique content on [social] platforms,” Witkower said, “however, it’s normally an additional production process. It’s not a part of the episodic production. We work with the actual series producers and figure out what opportunities we have to get on set and start collecting our own content without messing up the flow of production. We cut down the time, we make sure that everything that’s on-set in that moment is being accounted for, and [we use] the resources that are already paid for instead of going back after the fact and rehiring everyone and asking to shoot more. Right now, it’s so costly to get that unique content and it shouldn’t have to be.”

With a keen awareness that “campaigns shouldn’t come from the production end, but the content definitely should,” Witkower and Screen-Bridge seem primed to help usher in a new era of communication between marketing and production.

Just as soon as she finishes college.

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