On Branding

Here’s my personal take on the future of monetizing content:

Branding.  

Eva Longloria’s producing brand – strong, Latina women in pro-social activism centric comedy-dramas – is more than just a flag for diversity, it’s a smart business decision: There’s nobody consuming more media today than Hispanics, and the biggest cord cutters of today are people of color.

Ben Spector supports this. “Everything about this business is about branding, it makes it much easier to sell things, because audiences can easily identify,” he says. The clearer the brand, the clearer the path to getting something made and monetized.

Take Derek Dressler’s Vimeo on demand example: A thousand people spending $15 on a TVOD film earns the creator more than a million views on YouTube. “Skim half of 5 million YouTube subscribers onto a paid platform,” Dressler states, “and you’re still doing way better with transactional revenue compared to the advertising breadshare.”

So strong branding is key: Keep it small, don’t go for the mass audience, and engage passionate viewers with niche content. High Maintenance is living proof of that: A strong brand and niche audience that translated into salability. Vimeo underwrote all production and marketing costs for season 2 based on the show’s existing audience. It’s also why Lindsey Doe can make $5000 a month now, way more than her CPM grade: Curated content by Hank Green’s Patreon all served to solidify her brand with a loyal viewership.

Loyal brand viewership also presents a bold opportunity: Filmmakers now have the advantage of selling everywhere like an independent studio like Sony would. Like Zach Van Amburg, creators can now get to say to networks, “Screw that. We’re not going to chase the 4% business anymore. We’ll pursue the promised land of Netflix or Vimeo on Demand.”  CAA’s Nick Khan agrees. “You’re seeing more direct to consumer products. You know that pay per view model that takes 40-50%? We don’t want to do that anymore. We want all that money for ourselves,” says Khan. Hence the Glen Beck proprietary OTT networks of today. It’s empowering; we’re so used to begging networks to buy our stuff. Let’s have Vimeo or Amazon audition for us – take the power back for once.

State of Content (Part 4)

Or maybe it’s everyone’s fault.

Perhaps it should be everyone’s fault, because tepid content is everyone’s problem. Well, okay… it’s a shared responsibility; but one thing’s clear: The numbers affect everybody: 

Not just the CAAs, WMEs, KOLs and creators, but the studios as well – it’s all ripples in the same pond. And it's not just about the capacity to reward talent fairly on an individual level, it’s also emblematic in the message sent out to the town about business with you. So a less milky understanding will need to be brokered, or there will be a problem. But it hasn’t happened yet. Like I said, it’s all still new frontier. And against its murky borders we will measure our success by our adaptability.

Adaptability is a very powerful thing. To go back to the apocryphal zombie killing parable, slaying the living dead became far easier once I exploited my environment. There are exploding barrels hidden all around the map. Those that use them gain an advantage. Brian Eno understood the same thing about the record industry: It couldn’t last forever. But capitalize on that bubble and you were lucky. Likewise, if you found a source of whale blubber in the 1840s, you were a rich man. But if gas comes along and you fail to adapt (“Sorry mate,” says Eno. “History’s moving along.”), it becomes clear that timing and flexibility are everything. Which is why Nirvana’s Nevermind was perfect for the nineties, defining the sociocultural affront at the vapidity of the Generation X paradigm in the Reagan era. This is probably why Gun & Roses suck now.

What’s interesting about this evolution in the television business is that its entire business model is changing.  The core of our industry is advertising-based, but people are skipping ads, companies are turning away from TV commercials, and networks are going “Oh God. We’re losing so much money. What do we do now?” And it’s true; in this fragmented, post-advertising market, monetization is the major issue to tackle. MCNs started signing tons of channels into their network, consolidating power before going to advertisers, sharing resources, and working together to amplify their audience. But relative to the number of eyeballs on content, the average Google ad share revenue payout for Youtube creators is still pitifully small. And it’s not a model that works for everyone: Lindsey Doe’s 20,000 views on her weekly “Sexplanations” videos net an especially low ad CPM since they’re flagged “non-brand safe.” Sure, there’s a whole different land of opportunity available. But the most effective way of monetizing content for creators remain clouded in esotericism.

State of Content (Part 3)

I mean filmmaking is alchemy, right? No one tries to make a shitty show. Spend a year of their life saying, “I’m going to make sure this is ultra-boring.”

Nobody knows how to distill, measure and replicate the components of a smash hit. But Samantha Morton’s replacement in Her definitely added something special to the film. Nobody can say if Scarlett Johansson made the movie better; she's not even on screen.  Why are some things great and some things bad? You don't know.  So filmmaking is kind of like a crapshoot in alchemy; but the mixture has been growing increasingly unstable.

Should I be using such metaphors? Perhaps the meth was a terrible idea. I can certainly foresee a scenario where I, after establishing myself as a marginally famous writer, find those words floating back to haunt me. Bryan Cranston will inevitably stalk onto my set at some point with, “What kind of whack ass chemist doesn’t know how to quantify his reagents?” And I will have to say, “Oh, God, no. Those were words for an entirely different era – an era all but unrecognizable now.”

But that’s the business:  TV isn’t just a reagent, it’s a live culture. And it’s evolving.

Because of that, however, there’s still no real yardstick for measuring value in this new SVOD arena. Creators still have the “Amorphous Mass” obscuring all vision, hovering over them like the sword of Damocles.  In absence of solid numbers, here's no solid way to measure fiscal success other the heat generated amongst industry circles.  Conventionally, you can track how much a studio’s sold a script for (or at least make a semi-intelligent guess), but no one really knows how much money Netflix is making; you can't quantify it because they hold that information so close. And when your re-up negotiations or re-do deals come up, that transparency becomes critical; when you don't know the real value of the shows in the back end, it kind of becomes a crapshoot. Sooner or later we need to figure out how to do that in some sort of reliable way.

Here’s an example: Imagine that you’re an actor who’s just made six one-year options for a show. It’s perhaps a little worse than pro-football contracts – they can fire your ass whenever, but you can't go anywhere for six years. In a single, proverbial sweep of the pen, they own your ass… unless you are Jeffery Tambor. Jeffery Tambor’s agent can waltz in with authority and say, “Well look, it's your most successful show, it's getting a 4/5 rating in 18-49, the other guy's getting $600,000 my guy should get the same. That’s dandy – assuming you have the numbers.

 Or say a TVOD provider like iTunes ranks Snowpiercer above the Hunger Games in their charts. But no one knows what that number means. Sure, the data’s coming from iTunes, but no one knows if that’s reliable, because iTunes will also surface heat-based products that are doing well. Which is an issue for independent creators: Everyone can have their guestimates on how Snowpiercer did on iTunes, but without concrete data, potential investors on the next project don’t know.

Or say Jill Soloway's hypothetical fortieth season of Transparent blooms into a mega hit… but she doesn't get a raise. UTA's going to go, “Why are we still in business with these fools?” Though the studio pays for the renegotiation deal, they still expect to approach Amazon, for example, with a pass-through or shared burden agreement at some point. If Matt Weiner’s helping AMC generate substantially more revenue on a per-subscription basis, it’s obviously fair to renegotiate and pay him more. But how do creators quantify that on SVOD?

Now, I personally think it’s just a question of who’s going to blink first, and here’s why: There’s just so much to gain from that data getting out there. And Amazon’s never going to reveal that. Pull back the curtain on their analytics, and they instantly lose their competitive advantage. And it's not to say the guys at Netflix are ripping off talent either – it's their job to secure the best deal on their end. It’s no one’s fault, really. It’s all new frontier stuff… so who really knows?