January 29, 2025 • 29 mins
When Warner Bros. Discovery research chief Natasha Hritzuk first began studying short-form video, the conventional wisdom was that platforms like TikTok and YouTube were having a cannibalizing effect on TV and film consumption. But as she shares in her latest study, the deeper she explored audience behavor, the more she saw that social video served as a potent discovery tool for the very programming to which it seemed to pose a competitive threat.
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
Welcome to another episode of Strictly Business, the podcast in
which we speak with some of the brightest minds working
in the media business today. I'm Andrew Wallenstein, chief media
analyst at Variety Intelligence Platform. When it comes to social video,
the view here in Hollywood is that it's the competition. TikTok, YouTube,
(00:29):
Instagram reels are all algorithmically trained to addict the brains
of viewers to endlessly watch and create super brief and
super cheap videos on mobile phones, and that time could
be better spent focused on screens and living rooms for
TV or theaters for movies. But what if Hollywood has
(00:50):
got it all wrong. What if instead of thinking of
short form video as the enemy, it's actually a friend,
extending just the helping hand it needs right now to
get more attention back on long form content. The latest
research for my next guest suggests just that. We'll be
back with Natasha Haritzuk from Warner Brothers Discovery Research to explain.
(01:24):
We are back with Natasha Haritzuk, head of corporate Research
at Warner Brothers Discovery. Thanks for being here.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
It's wonderful to be here.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
So before we get into where your research is now,
let's get to where it began with regard to understanding
where short form video fits into the broader media diet
of the consumer.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
I think all of us who follow consumers within the
broad entertainment ecosystem new multiple years ago that short form
was starting to sort of creep into the viewing time
of our audiences. Now, what we decided to do at
(02:09):
Warner Brothers Discovery, within the context of my team, was
take a study that we had been doing, oh my gosh,
probably for fifteen years. So that year we decided to
call the study Entertainment Now and cast a much wider
net than we had done historically. So what the study
at the heart of it does is it looks at
the share of time people are spending across a broad
(02:31):
range of entertainment platforms. So we look at, of course,
linear viewing, we look at streaming, but for the first
time ever, we started to look at these different platforms
that we're pretty sure were encroaching. That was our view,
encroaching on linear viewing or TV viewing.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
What platforms are we talking about?
Speaker 3 (02:49):
So we looked this was kind of an interesting nuance
that I think made a big difference for us. We
broke out social video from social media platforms. So by definition,
social video is what I think we would call traditional
short form viewing, so YouTube TikTok explicitly, Instagram reels explicitly.
(03:10):
We also looked at music and gaming, which you know,
instinctively we knew well not even I mean gaming, we
know is a big thing, particularly for teenage boys, but
we knew with younger generations music was also becoming a
big chunk of the time that people were spending on entertainment.
So when the study came back, there were a whole
(03:30):
bunch of kind of fascinating things that confirmed some suspicions
we had, but we had the numbers to back up
these these hypotheses. These are these suspicions. So first of all,
we saw that okay, surprise, surprise, linear viewing was, particularly
with younger generations, just you know, marginal, so you know
that that kind of ship had sailed. We knew that,
(03:51):
you know, linear viewing was declining with younger generations, that
streamed content was starting to usurp it, and you know,
it was really you know, the primary way that younger
generations are watching.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
TV shows and movies.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
But then there was this massive proliferation of other platforms
they were tuning into. So Alpha Z millennials are highly
omnivorous entertainment consumers, and so there's a chunk of time
spent watching TV shows and movies, but the rest of
(04:24):
their time is divided pretty evenly between these short form
platforms like YouTube and TikTok social media.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
So, I mean, frankly, none of this is surprising.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
It's not surprising you've got young omnivores.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
Yes, where did you want to go from there? In
terms of your research, what questions? What did you want
to ask in a survey? Where did you want to
dig further?
Speaker 3 (04:49):
So the first thing is I think the first instinct was,
oh my god, is our lunch being eaten by these
new platforms? Is this like an existential threat to the
TA and movie business? And on the surface, it definitely
looked like it could be. But I thought, this is
simplistic to assume that this is a bad thing until
(05:09):
we dig a little bit deeper. So there were three
things that I think jumped out. So the first thing
that strikes you is that when you see this two
point two hours a day, you're immediately wondering, is there
a distinct set of values or needs or is there
a set, a separate occasion that's driving the decision to
watch TV shows and movies And is this something that's
(05:32):
really discrete from the decision to watch short form. We
didn't have on the surface ready explanation for that. You know,
we had hypotheses, but we wanted to really dig in.
I think the second thing was is short form a
bad thing?
Speaker 2 (05:48):
Is it a good thing?
Speaker 3 (05:49):
We didn't really understand the inter relationship between short form
view and entertainment viewing where they mutually discrete. Was short
form viewing something that was really going to be in
the long term detrimental to long form viewing. Was it
something we genuinely needed to worry about, or was there
something more nuanced that we didn't understand Because.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
At first, blush, it's a zero sum game exactly, you're
watching short form, you're not watching long form.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
And that's almost the way I think we'd historically thought
about anything else that was tearing the eyeballs away from
TV shows and movies that by definition it had to
be bad because if they were spending time on something else,
it was bad for TV shows and movies. So it
was this kind of sense of mutual exclusivity, and that
turned out to not be a very nuanced view, and
(06:38):
we needed to kind of prove out that these guys
are our enemy and it's going to get worse, or
is there something else beneath the surface that we're just
not really tapping into. So that was I think the
second That was the second piece that we needed to
dig into. And I think the third piece was that
these younger generations are spending upwards of six hours too
(07:01):
in some instances seven hours a day, so somewhere, you know,
in the ballpark of six to seven hours a day
engaged with entertainment content. So these guys are spending a
lot of time on entertainment and so that immediately made
me think, well, there's a malleability here, like, are these
you know, is the time spent on each of these
platforms immovable or could there be with the right inputs
(07:24):
from us, with the right content or with the right marketing,
some malleability where we could still share Because just because
that's the snapshot of how entertainment is being consumed today
doesn't mean that it has to be that way moving forward.
So you know, if you're looking at one generation and
they're spending forty minutes on entertainment consuming entertainment content a day.
(07:46):
That's a bigger issue because there's no headspace when people
are spending six to seven hours. Well why can't that
two point two hours of TV viewing be three hours
or four hours?
Speaker 1 (07:57):
You know?
Speaker 3 (07:58):
So I wanted to understand whether there were level or
triggers that we could engage to maybe steal some share
back from short form.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
So what were the the data collection tools you trained
at getting at the problem here?
Speaker 3 (08:10):
So we wanted to approach it from multiple angles. I mean,
first of all, when you're looking at what are the
needs the motivations that are driving the decision to view,
I mean quants a blind instrument, as we know, and
first party data will tell us what's happening, but not
tell us why. So these are you know, well established
facts in the research world. So we started off with
(08:31):
mobile diaries that dug into not just what people were
watching but why. So the final piece that we did
was with.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
Midge, which explain who they are.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
So Midge is a brand new company which is a
division of Mavericks, a company that's run by Liz who's
Eric and what is fascinating when they built this offering
that's called Midge. What sparked my int was that they
have this massive first party data set. I think they've
(09:05):
got three million users who have permissioned the use of
their entire digital footprint to the company. And so why
is that interesting? Because suddenly, you know, in the world
of entertainment where we can't knit together a lot of
different data sources, so we can't say that we know
(09:25):
that somebody viewed this show and therefore you know what
short form platforms where they are on prior viewing because
we don't have access to the short form data.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
And I'm glad that we had.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
The opportunity to work with Midge to kind of figure
out the model for tackling this first party data relationship
between short form viewing and subsequent long form viewing. It
took a little bit of wrangling, but what we finally
were able to do is identifying when somebody watched We
picked fifteen TV shows, and we picked fifteen movies. They
(09:57):
were then able to go into their data and find
people who had viewed these fifteen shows, these fifteen movies,
and then go back in time to see whether or
not they had viewed any short form content that was
connected to these fifteen shows, these fifteen movies, and we
(10:19):
were able to effectively build that journey out so we
could see that if somebody had watched short form content
related to Doune Too, what was the correlation between that
short form viewing and subsequently watching the movie? And it
was pretty the patterns were pretty consistent, and I can
go into detail.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
Yeah, what'd you find?
Speaker 2 (10:41):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (10:41):
So what we found was that in pretty much every instance,
for both TV shows and movies, there was a really
high correlation between short form viewing and subsequent long form viewing.
And then we picked a range of different TV shows
across our competitive set as well as within the Warner
Brothers Discovery family, and we made it We did a
(11:02):
similar sort of exercise with the fifteen movies that we picked.
We didn't want it to just be Warner Brothers Discovery.
We picked movies that ran across the competitive set, and
we also picked movies that were massive tent poles, movies
that were hits, and then we picked movies that didn't,
you know, do so well at the box office, again,
so that we had a mix of different test cases
(11:24):
to understand whether short form work better in some instances
versus others in terms of again driving the long form viewing.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
But you're saying you saw these high correlations across this
broad variety of kinds of content. Yes, the implications are.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
The implications are that there is an extremely strong relationship
between viewing short form content related to a specific TV
show or movie and they're going on to view it,
going on to buy a movie ticket, to actually buy
a digital version of a movie, and to watch a
movie or a TV show and a streaming on a
(12:02):
streaming service. So we again broke it down. So for movies,
we looked at whether or not short form viewing led
to a movie ticket purchase, which is of course a
huge deal for us because we're trying to drive people
back to the movie theaters, whether they purchased a digital
version of the movie or whether they watched it on
a streaming service. And so if we talk about movies first,
(12:24):
I think the lowest numbers we saw were in the
sixty five to seventy percent range, but in many instances
it was eighty five percent or higher. So eighty five
percent of the time when people viewed short from content
related to a movie title, they went on to view
the movie in some form.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
But I'm hearing words like relationship and correlation. I'm not
hearing the word the a word the attribution. So what
are we really saying here?
Speaker 3 (12:52):
So what we're saying is that there's an extremely strong
relationship between short form viewing long form viewing. The reason
why we can't use attribution is because we had to
start off with the title viewing and work backwards to
see if they'd seen short form related to that title.
It's not perfect, So in other words, we can't say that.
(13:16):
To really prove out attribution, you need to start off
and say, Okay, somebody watched a Barbie consumer, a Barbie
clip or a Barbie trailer on TikTok, and then four
days later they bought a movie ticket. We weren't able
to do that just because of this the way the
data was structured. We needed to start off with the
title explicitly, but by working backwards we could see that
(13:39):
they still that there was still a connection.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
But what you are saying is that you've discovered that
short form is a powerful conversion tool to long form content.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
Yeah, one hundred percent. I mean, you know, if the
numbers had been in the thirties or the forties, you'd say, well,
maybe there's some connection, But when you're seeing numbers of
a magnitude of on average seventy to ninety nine percent,
you know that there's something going on there, that there's
a synergy, that there's a strong connection point.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
And I would go so.
Speaker 3 (14:12):
Far as to say, especially based on the survey data
and what we heard in the Mobile diaries, that short
form is a vital marketing tool for studios. So short form,
when consumers see a clip, a trailer, a compilation, even
fan generated content, that becomes a powerful signal, a powerful
(14:33):
discovery tool, especially for young younger generations, that then encourages
them to go on and watch the content. And so
I would go so far as to argue that it's
a critical media platform for studios who want to promote
their content to younger generations. And I think what we
found with the Mobile diaries and with the survey research,
(14:56):
and actually a whole separate generational study that we did
into long form viewing with younger generations was that it
wasn't just about content discovery, and that alone, I think
is fascinating. You know, if you want people to watch
your TV shows or movies younger generations, and by younger,
I mean anybody from thirteen to forty three, because millennials
(15:20):
are now middle aged. If you start to seed your trailers,
seed clips and compilations on YouTube and TikTok, that's going
to increase the probability these guys are going to watch
your TV shows and movies.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
That's I think a pretty.
Speaker 3 (15:32):
Important, you know, development, a pretty important finding. But what
we also found that I thought was really interesting is
that when younger generations make a decision to watch a
TV show or movie, it's highly intentional. And that was
the interesting distinction between short.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
Form long form.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
Short Form is more about passive viewing. You know, throughout
the day, they're kind of scrolling, they're sort of passively
absorbing this content. But it's not something they don't set
a side time to view short form, and it's not
an immersive, emotionally engaging experience. It's probably more soothing and
it's more leaned back. When they make a decision to
(16:10):
watch a TV show, they carve out the time. It's
highly intentional, and this is where the short form becomes important.
They start to build up anticipation and excitement around that
viewing session and so not only is short form flagging
that this TV show exists or this movie exists, but
they keep rewatching clips and compilations, and the algorithm keeps
(16:33):
serving up content related to that title, and that starts
to build an emotional connection to the content. So the
more clips they see, the more fan content they see,
the more compilations they see, the more excited and the
more connected and invested they become in that piece of content.
So not only is it a tool for discovery, but
it's a tool for kind of immersion, and it builds
(16:55):
up excitement and anticipation around the title that they're going
to watch. And you know, I think that's an interesting
distinction for me, because when you think about historical advertising
and promotions for TV shows and movies, like, if somebody
sees a trailer five times, is that going to increase
their excitement to see a TV show or movie?
Speaker 1 (17:15):
Might decrease it might actually decrease it.
Speaker 3 (17:18):
And you know, for decades and decades we've talked about
frequency capping, and you know, at what point, what's that
tipping point between seeing too much of the promotional materials?
You know, and I think everybody you know, historically there's
a lot of debate about like what that magical number is,
but more has never been more. But what's fascinating about
(17:38):
short form because you're not just looking at one single
creative execution. There's infinite, infinite variety in the short form universe.
So because you're not seeing that one trailer or that
one promotional piece, you're seeing maybe twenty thirty different executions.
It could be something a fan, a spoof that a
fan created, it could be clips that the studio created,
(17:59):
It could be different version of a trailer. But they
may see twenty unrelated piece of content for that TV
show or movie, and that just keeps sparking their interest
and sparking their anticipation around viewing the actual piece. And
I think that's probably what makes short form particularly powerful.
The repetition isn't driving sort of on Wii and boredom.
(18:22):
It's driving anticipation, interest, and it becomes more and more
immersive as a content format.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
We're going to take a quick break, but we will
be back with Natasha Heritzuk from Warner Brothers Discovery in
just a moment. We are back with Natasha Heritzuk from
Warner Brothers Discovery Research. She first began studying social video.
(18:51):
The view was that it was a distraction from long
form TV and movies, But the deeper she got into
her research, she realized there were a more complicated dynamic
at play. So yeah, I guess you know, as you're describing,
there's obviously lots of different kinds of video that can
(19:13):
be a discovery tool, marketing clips, user generated content that
doesn't necessarily even have any intellectual property. You know, people
could be talking about Severance, which is on the air
right now, but not necessarily showing a single second of it.
So if you're a marketer at your company or any
other company, how do you know how to harness these powers?
Speaker 3 (19:37):
So I think there's a number of different considerations, and
any way, it's sort of I think the way that
we would have you know, digital has definitely I think,
added multiple layers of complexity for marketers, and then social
video adds almost this whole new dimension of complexity. But
I think the biggest mistakes and I'm so this is
(20:00):
a researcher, you know, wagging the finger at marketers, but
I think the biggest mistake that we've made, and this
is not unique to our industry, I think it's how
many companies have dealt with digital and short form. Is
they take something that would have been a linear execution,
you know, the thirty second spot, the trailer, and just
slapped it on these new platforms. And I think that's
how you don't do it. I think what you have
(20:22):
to do, first of all, is understand how do we
take a creative idea and build an execution that's organically
suited to this platform. The other thing that you have
to take into consideration it is not a homepage takeover.
You know, it's not something that's just going to show
up in as a banner ad. But it's sitting in
a real filled with immense amounts of clutter. Clutter on
(20:47):
a level that we've probably never experienced before. You know,
when you think about TikTok, every thirty seconds people are
seeing a fresh piece of content. So another major consideration
is how do we how do we stand out from
all that noise? And I think taking conventional forms of
advertising and thinking they're going to work within the context
of that clutter is not not the right path forward.
(21:10):
I actually think what makes this exciting for marketers is
they have an opportunity to really kind of dog food
new approaches to building trailers. How do you take a
trailer that's you know, sixty seconds long and make it
thirty seconds or twenty seconds and do it in a
way that's going to kind of stop the scroll. And
I think that's kind of, you know, an interesting challenge it,
(21:35):
you know, I think provides an opportunity for us to
think differently about the role of visuals, about the role
of audio. So I think there's an opportunity to really
rethink historically what would have been a traditional marketing execution
in the world of entertainment. I also think, you know, trailers,
of course, have never really changed over the course of
(21:58):
fifty sixty seventy years. I think there's a lot that
we can do differently with trailers that these these platforms
are built for. Thinking about audio differently, thinking about seating curiosity,
not showing every epic moment in a movie or TV
show through the trailer, but maybe showing just one moment,
having the bravery to just kind of pick a moment
(22:20):
or a piece of dialogue or a set and focusing
on that momentarily, and you know, using that to capture
attention and get people excited about what they're seeing.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
Clips and compilations haven't really changed.
Speaker 3 (22:35):
You know, I think there's sort of a formula that
we followed, you know, like bloopers or you know, funny
moments or the best kisses, and I'm not saying those
don't work. But again, there's so much creative latitude that
that I think marketers can deploy to capture attention on
these platforms. And you know, honestly, one way to get
(22:56):
inspiration is to look what fans are creating, what consumers
are creating, what influencers are creating. And I'm not saying
necessarily we want to mimic it, but to use the
stuff that's happening in the wild, happening organically on these
platforms and use it as a source of inspiration to
think differently. I also think there's this hygiene stuff. Is
(23:17):
this going to be something that is this a promotion
or is this a marketing campaign that sits best on
YouTube or TikTok? Should it sit on both? Is this
something that would work better on Instagram? So I think
we need to think about these platforms discreetly and understand
which we should be using or how we should be
using them in tandem. And then you know, one of
(23:39):
the interesting bits that we've from the research that I
think we're going to dig into, that we're certainly going
to dig into more in twenty twenty five is how
do we think about these different formats? Is there an
instance where trailer really is going to be the best format?
And I think what the research is showing us in
the early stages is trailers still work best for movies.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
But again, let's rethink what a trailer is.
Speaker 3 (24:02):
Let's not just mimic what we've always done, but think
about new creative ways of deploying trailers on these platforms.
And we found that clips and compilations work best for TV.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
You know, we should note though that it's like, you know,
all of this is not necessarily a new revelation, as
if you know, the studios have not been marketing on
these platforms at all prior. I mean to the point
where we saw a bunch of experiments in recent years
where you know, they're slicing and dicing entire movies or
(24:37):
TV shows. I'm thinking, you know, Paramount got a lot
of attention for putting mean girls on TikTok in discrete episodes,
and so I'm curious if are we is the data
that we're looking at here the result of that increased
tonnage or we need to see more incre he's tonnaged,
(25:01):
and that's what this data is telling us.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
I think it's a little bit of both.
Speaker 3 (25:05):
I think we've dipped our toe in the water, and
this data would indicate that it's working. But I still
feel like we're not thinking about short form as a
bona fide media platform. I think we kind of know
that the kids are watching it, So there have been
these little bits of dog fooding and experimentation, but I
(25:25):
don't know if it's been done in a highly systematic,
strategic way, in the way that we would have thought
about promoting on you know, other platforms, on digital platforms
or on TV. So I think I think there has
to be more than just experimentation. It has to become
a discipline within marketing groups. And I think some companies
(25:46):
have been doing it more as a discipline, maybe some
more than others. But I also think, you know, we
have to learn to I think so. I think part
of it certainly is that that whatever experimentation or even
more systematic marketing is happening on these platforms, it's it's
definitely working, But I think a big part of what's
(26:08):
driving the discovery and immersion is also stuff that's just
happening in the wild. That is, you know, classic user
generated content.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
And I think.
Speaker 3 (26:18):
You know a lot of creatives and a lot of
entertainment companies have had an uneasy relationship with that user
generated content because it's sort of outside of our span
of control. And I understand, you know, when your ori
IP is so precious to us, and I think every
company feels the same, and when you're sort of letting
that loose to you know, millions of people out there
(26:40):
who are doing weird and wonderful things with it, you
lose a huge amount of control. And you want to
make sure that you know people are being good custodians of.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
Your brands and your franchises.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
One last question you talk about, you know, social video,
as you know, studios need to be thinking about it
as a media play platform in itself. You referenced Quibi earlier.
Isn't the logical extension of what you're talking about is
forget about thinking about this as a marketing platform. Shouldn't
(27:15):
you guys be thinking about this as a programming platform
If it's so powerful?
Speaker 3 (27:23):
I mean, I would based on the consumer data that
we've seen, based on this year long short form initiative
we've engaged, and I would say that that would be
a viable in my view, that would be a viable
long term strategy. So we very very consciously decided to
do a crawl walk run approach. So the crawl is
really marketing, you know, that's really that's the table stakes.
(27:47):
The next step up is using short form content for
immersion to drive that emotional connection, that longitudinal engagement with
the content, both pre and post viewing. Then the run is, yeah, like,
let's jump on that bandwagon. So I can tell you
what we've heard from consumers pretty consistently. If you've got
(28:10):
strong IP and you've got narratives, you've got characters, you've
got franchises that consumers love, they have a huge appetite
for seeing that content in shorter bursts. So it doesn't
necessarily have to be as.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
I mean.
Speaker 3 (28:27):
You can certainly take a TV show, chop it up
into smaller pieces and throw it on these platforms and people.
I mean, we've seen a number of different studios do
that and it works, and that can also be a
marketing tactic that drives people to the platform to view
the you know, the multiple seasons of that show, or
to watch that show in a more sort of conventional
(28:49):
long form plat on a more conventional long form platform.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
I sense a Gilmore Girls mobisode reboot coming in twenty
twenty eight. Well, Natasha, thank you for taking the time
out to walk us through some fascinating research my pleasure.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
Be sure to leave us a review at Apple Podcasts
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Speaker 2 (29:13):
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Speaker 3 (29:18):
For the free weekly Strictly Business newsletter, and don't forget
to tune in next week for another episode of Strictly Business.
Welcome to another episode of Strictly Business, the podcast in
which we speak with some of the brightest minds working
in the media business today. I'm Andrew Wallenstein, chief media
analyst at Variety Intelligence Platform. When it comes to social video,
the view here in Hollywood is that it's the competition. TikTok, YouTube,
(00:29):
Instagram reels are all algorithmically trained to addict the brains
of viewers to endlessly watch and create super brief and
super cheap videos on mobile phones, and that time could
be better spent focused on screens and living rooms for
TV or theaters for movies. But what if Hollywood has
(00:50):
got it all wrong. What if instead of thinking of
short form video as the enemy, it's actually a friend,
extending just the helping hand it needs right now to
get more attention back on long form content. The latest
research for my next guest suggests just that. We'll be
back with Natasha Haritzuk from Warner Brothers Discovery Research to explain.
(01:24):
We are back with Natasha Haritzuk, head of corporate Research
at Warner Brothers Discovery. Thanks for being here.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
It's wonderful to be here.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
So before we get into where your research is now,
let's get to where it began with regard to understanding
where short form video fits into the broader media diet
of the consumer.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
I think all of us who follow consumers within the
broad entertainment ecosystem new multiple years ago that short form
was starting to sort of creep into the viewing time
of our audiences. Now, what we decided to do at
(02:09):
Warner Brothers Discovery, within the context of my team, was
take a study that we had been doing, oh my gosh,
probably for fifteen years. So that year we decided to
call the study Entertainment Now and cast a much wider
net than we had done historically. So what the study
at the heart of it does is it looks at
the share of time people are spending across a broad
(02:31):
range of entertainment platforms. So we look at, of course,
linear viewing, we look at streaming, but for the first
time ever, we started to look at these different platforms
that we're pretty sure were encroaching. That was our view,
encroaching on linear viewing or TV viewing.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
What platforms are we talking about?
Speaker 3 (02:49):
So we looked this was kind of an interesting nuance
that I think made a big difference for us. We
broke out social video from social media platforms. So by definition,
social video is what I think we would call traditional
short form viewing, so YouTube TikTok explicitly, Instagram reels explicitly.
(03:10):
We also looked at music and gaming, which you know,
instinctively we knew well not even I mean gaming, we
know is a big thing, particularly for teenage boys, but
we knew with younger generations music was also becoming a
big chunk of the time that people were spending on entertainment.
So when the study came back, there were a whole
(03:30):
bunch of kind of fascinating things that confirmed some suspicions
we had, but we had the numbers to back up
these these hypotheses. These are these suspicions. So first of all,
we saw that okay, surprise, surprise, linear viewing was, particularly
with younger generations, just you know, marginal, so you know
that that kind of ship had sailed. We knew that,
(03:51):
you know, linear viewing was declining with younger generations, that
streamed content was starting to usurp it, and you know,
it was really you know, the primary way that younger
generations are watching.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
TV shows and movies.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
But then there was this massive proliferation of other platforms
they were tuning into. So Alpha Z millennials are highly
omnivorous entertainment consumers, and so there's a chunk of time
spent watching TV shows and movies, but the rest of
(04:24):
their time is divided pretty evenly between these short form
platforms like YouTube and TikTok social media.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
So, I mean, frankly, none of this is surprising.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
It's not surprising you've got young omnivores.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
Yes, where did you want to go from there? In
terms of your research, what questions? What did you want
to ask in a survey? Where did you want to
dig further?
Speaker 3 (04:49):
So the first thing is I think the first instinct was,
oh my god, is our lunch being eaten by these
new platforms? Is this like an existential threat to the
TA and movie business? And on the surface, it definitely
looked like it could be. But I thought, this is
simplistic to assume that this is a bad thing until
(05:09):
we dig a little bit deeper. So there were three
things that I think jumped out. So the first thing
that strikes you is that when you see this two
point two hours a day, you're immediately wondering, is there
a distinct set of values or needs or is there
a set, a separate occasion that's driving the decision to
watch TV shows and movies And is this something that's
(05:32):
really discrete from the decision to watch short form. We
didn't have on the surface ready explanation for that. You know,
we had hypotheses, but we wanted to really dig in.
I think the second thing was is short form a
bad thing?
Speaker 2 (05:48):
Is it a good thing?
Speaker 3 (05:49):
We didn't really understand the inter relationship between short form
view and entertainment viewing where they mutually discrete. Was short
form viewing something that was really going to be in
the long term detrimental to long form viewing. Was it
something we genuinely needed to worry about, or was there
something more nuanced that we didn't understand Because.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
At first, blush, it's a zero sum game exactly, you're
watching short form, you're not watching long form.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
And that's almost the way I think we'd historically thought
about anything else that was tearing the eyeballs away from
TV shows and movies that by definition it had to
be bad because if they were spending time on something else,
it was bad for TV shows and movies. So it
was this kind of sense of mutual exclusivity, and that
turned out to not be a very nuanced view, and
(06:38):
we needed to kind of prove out that these guys
are our enemy and it's going to get worse, or
is there something else beneath the surface that we're just
not really tapping into. So that was I think the
second That was the second piece that we needed to
dig into. And I think the third piece was that
these younger generations are spending upwards of six hours too
(07:01):
in some instances seven hours a day, so somewhere, you know,
in the ballpark of six to seven hours a day
engaged with entertainment content. So these guys are spending a
lot of time on entertainment and so that immediately made
me think, well, there's a malleability here, like, are these
you know, is the time spent on each of these
platforms immovable or could there be with the right inputs
(07:24):
from us, with the right content or with the right marketing,
some malleability where we could still share Because just because
that's the snapshot of how entertainment is being consumed today
doesn't mean that it has to be that way moving forward.
So you know, if you're looking at one generation and
they're spending forty minutes on entertainment consuming entertainment content a day.
(07:46):
That's a bigger issue because there's no headspace when people
are spending six to seven hours. Well why can't that
two point two hours of TV viewing be three hours
or four hours?
Speaker 1 (07:57):
You know?
Speaker 3 (07:58):
So I wanted to understand whether there were level or
triggers that we could engage to maybe steal some share
back from short form.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
So what were the the data collection tools you trained
at getting at the problem here?
Speaker 3 (08:10):
So we wanted to approach it from multiple angles. I mean,
first of all, when you're looking at what are the
needs the motivations that are driving the decision to view,
I mean quants a blind instrument, as we know, and
first party data will tell us what's happening, but not
tell us why. So these are you know, well established
facts in the research world. So we started off with
(08:31):
mobile diaries that dug into not just what people were
watching but why. So the final piece that we did
was with.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
Midge, which explain who they are.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
So Midge is a brand new company which is a
division of Mavericks, a company that's run by Liz who's
Eric and what is fascinating when they built this offering
that's called Midge. What sparked my int was that they
have this massive first party data set. I think they've
(09:05):
got three million users who have permissioned the use of
their entire digital footprint to the company. And so why
is that interesting? Because suddenly, you know, in the world
of entertainment where we can't knit together a lot of
different data sources, so we can't say that we know
(09:25):
that somebody viewed this show and therefore you know what
short form platforms where they are on prior viewing because
we don't have access to the short form data.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
And I'm glad that we had.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
The opportunity to work with Midge to kind of figure
out the model for tackling this first party data relationship
between short form viewing and subsequent long form viewing. It
took a little bit of wrangling, but what we finally
were able to do is identifying when somebody watched We
picked fifteen TV shows, and we picked fifteen movies. They
(09:57):
were then able to go into their data and find
people who had viewed these fifteen shows, these fifteen movies,
and then go back in time to see whether or
not they had viewed any short form content that was
connected to these fifteen shows, these fifteen movies, and we
(10:19):
were able to effectively build that journey out so we
could see that if somebody had watched short form content
related to Doune Too, what was the correlation between that
short form viewing and subsequently watching the movie? And it
was pretty the patterns were pretty consistent, and I can
go into detail.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
Yeah, what'd you find?
Speaker 2 (10:41):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (10:41):
So what we found was that in pretty much every instance,
for both TV shows and movies, there was a really
high correlation between short form viewing and subsequent long form viewing.
And then we picked a range of different TV shows
across our competitive set as well as within the Warner
Brothers Discovery family, and we made it We did a
(11:02):
similar sort of exercise with the fifteen movies that we picked.
We didn't want it to just be Warner Brothers Discovery.
We picked movies that ran across the competitive set, and
we also picked movies that were massive tent poles, movies
that were hits, and then we picked movies that didn't,
you know, do so well at the box office, again,
so that we had a mix of different test cases
(11:24):
to understand whether short form work better in some instances
versus others in terms of again driving the long form viewing.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
But you're saying you saw these high correlations across this
broad variety of kinds of content. Yes, the implications are.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
The implications are that there is an extremely strong relationship
between viewing short form content related to a specific TV
show or movie and they're going on to view it,
going on to buy a movie ticket, to actually buy
a digital version of a movie, and to watch a
movie or a TV show and a streaming on a
(12:02):
streaming service. So we again broke it down. So for movies,
we looked at whether or not short form viewing led
to a movie ticket purchase, which is of course a
huge deal for us because we're trying to drive people
back to the movie theaters, whether they purchased a digital
version of the movie or whether they watched it on
a streaming service. And so if we talk about movies first,
(12:24):
I think the lowest numbers we saw were in the
sixty five to seventy percent range, but in many instances
it was eighty five percent or higher. So eighty five
percent of the time when people viewed short from content
related to a movie title, they went on to view
the movie in some form.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
But I'm hearing words like relationship and correlation. I'm not
hearing the word the a word the attribution. So what
are we really saying here?
Speaker 3 (12:52):
So what we're saying is that there's an extremely strong
relationship between short form viewing long form viewing. The reason
why we can't use attribution is because we had to
start off with the title viewing and work backwards to
see if they'd seen short form related to that title.
It's not perfect, So in other words, we can't say that.
(13:16):
To really prove out attribution, you need to start off
and say, Okay, somebody watched a Barbie consumer, a Barbie
clip or a Barbie trailer on TikTok, and then four
days later they bought a movie ticket. We weren't able
to do that just because of this the way the
data was structured. We needed to start off with the
title explicitly, but by working backwards we could see that
(13:39):
they still that there was still a connection.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
But what you are saying is that you've discovered that
short form is a powerful conversion tool to long form content.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
Yeah, one hundred percent. I mean, you know, if the
numbers had been in the thirties or the forties, you'd say, well,
maybe there's some connection, But when you're seeing numbers of
a magnitude of on average seventy to ninety nine percent,
you know that there's something going on there, that there's
a synergy, that there's a strong connection point.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
And I would go so.
Speaker 3 (14:12):
Far as to say, especially based on the survey data
and what we heard in the Mobile diaries, that short
form is a vital marketing tool for studios. So short form,
when consumers see a clip, a trailer, a compilation, even
fan generated content, that becomes a powerful signal, a powerful
(14:33):
discovery tool, especially for young younger generations, that then encourages
them to go on and watch the content. And so
I would go so far as to argue that it's
a critical media platform for studios who want to promote
their content to younger generations. And I think what we
found with the Mobile diaries and with the survey research,
(14:56):
and actually a whole separate generational study that we did
into long form viewing with younger generations was that it
wasn't just about content discovery, and that alone, I think
is fascinating. You know, if you want people to watch
your TV shows or movies younger generations, and by younger,
I mean anybody from thirteen to forty three, because millennials
(15:20):
are now middle aged. If you start to seed your trailers,
seed clips and compilations on YouTube and TikTok, that's going
to increase the probability these guys are going to watch
your TV shows and movies.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
That's I think a pretty.
Speaker 3 (15:32):
Important, you know, development, a pretty important finding. But what
we also found that I thought was really interesting is
that when younger generations make a decision to watch a
TV show or movie, it's highly intentional. And that was
the interesting distinction between short.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
Form long form.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
Short Form is more about passive viewing. You know, throughout
the day, they're kind of scrolling, they're sort of passively
absorbing this content. But it's not something they don't set
a side time to view short form, and it's not
an immersive, emotionally engaging experience. It's probably more soothing and
it's more leaned back. When they make a decision to
(16:10):
watch a TV show, they carve out the time. It's
highly intentional, and this is where the short form becomes important.
They start to build up anticipation and excitement around that
viewing session and so not only is short form flagging
that this TV show exists or this movie exists, but
they keep rewatching clips and compilations, and the algorithm keeps
(16:33):
serving up content related to that title, and that starts
to build an emotional connection to the content. So the
more clips they see, the more fan content they see,
the more compilations they see, the more excited and the
more connected and invested they become in that piece of content.
So not only is it a tool for discovery, but
it's a tool for kind of immersion, and it builds
(16:55):
up excitement and anticipation around the title that they're going
to watch. And you know, I think that's an interesting
distinction for me, because when you think about historical advertising
and promotions for TV shows and movies, like, if somebody
sees a trailer five times, is that going to increase
their excitement to see a TV show or movie?
Speaker 1 (17:15):
Might decrease it might actually decrease it.
Speaker 3 (17:18):
And you know, for decades and decades we've talked about
frequency capping, and you know, at what point, what's that
tipping point between seeing too much of the promotional materials?
You know, and I think everybody you know, historically there's
a lot of debate about like what that magical number is,
but more has never been more. But what's fascinating about
(17:38):
short form because you're not just looking at one single
creative execution. There's infinite, infinite variety in the short form universe.
So because you're not seeing that one trailer or that
one promotional piece, you're seeing maybe twenty thirty different executions.
It could be something a fan, a spoof that a
fan created, it could be clips that the studio created,
(17:59):
It could be different version of a trailer. But they
may see twenty unrelated piece of content for that TV
show or movie, and that just keeps sparking their interest
and sparking their anticipation around viewing the actual piece. And
I think that's probably what makes short form particularly powerful.
The repetition isn't driving sort of on Wii and boredom.
(18:22):
It's driving anticipation, interest, and it becomes more and more
immersive as a content format.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
We're going to take a quick break, but we will
be back with Natasha Heritzuk from Warner Brothers Discovery in
just a moment. We are back with Natasha Heritzuk from
Warner Brothers Discovery Research. She first began studying social video.
(18:51):
The view was that it was a distraction from long
form TV and movies, But the deeper she got into
her research, she realized there were a more complicated dynamic
at play. So yeah, I guess you know, as you're describing,
there's obviously lots of different kinds of video that can
(19:13):
be a discovery tool, marketing clips, user generated content that
doesn't necessarily even have any intellectual property. You know, people
could be talking about Severance, which is on the air
right now, but not necessarily showing a single second of it.
So if you're a marketer at your company or any
other company, how do you know how to harness these powers?
Speaker 3 (19:37):
So I think there's a number of different considerations, and
any way, it's sort of I think the way that
we would have you know, digital has definitely I think,
added multiple layers of complexity for marketers, and then social
video adds almost this whole new dimension of complexity. But
I think the biggest mistakes and I'm so this is
(20:00):
a researcher, you know, wagging the finger at marketers, but
I think the biggest mistake that we've made, and this
is not unique to our industry, I think it's how
many companies have dealt with digital and short form. Is
they take something that would have been a linear execution,
you know, the thirty second spot, the trailer, and just
slapped it on these new platforms. And I think that's
how you don't do it. I think what you have
(20:22):
to do, first of all, is understand how do we
take a creative idea and build an execution that's organically
suited to this platform. The other thing that you have
to take into consideration it is not a homepage takeover.
You know, it's not something that's just going to show
up in as a banner ad. But it's sitting in
a real filled with immense amounts of clutter. Clutter on
(20:47):
a level that we've probably never experienced before. You know,
when you think about TikTok, every thirty seconds people are
seeing a fresh piece of content. So another major consideration
is how do we how do we stand out from
all that noise? And I think taking conventional forms of
advertising and thinking they're going to work within the context
of that clutter is not not the right path forward.
(21:10):
I actually think what makes this exciting for marketers is
they have an opportunity to really kind of dog food
new approaches to building trailers. How do you take a
trailer that's you know, sixty seconds long and make it
thirty seconds or twenty seconds and do it in a
way that's going to kind of stop the scroll. And
I think that's kind of, you know, an interesting challenge it,
(21:35):
you know, I think provides an opportunity for us to
think differently about the role of visuals, about the role
of audio. So I think there's an opportunity to really
rethink historically what would have been a traditional marketing execution
in the world of entertainment. I also think, you know, trailers,
of course, have never really changed over the course of
(21:58):
fifty sixty seventy years. I think there's a lot that
we can do differently with trailers that these these platforms
are built for. Thinking about audio differently, thinking about seating curiosity,
not showing every epic moment in a movie or TV
show through the trailer, but maybe showing just one moment,
having the bravery to just kind of pick a moment
(22:20):
or a piece of dialogue or a set and focusing
on that momentarily, and you know, using that to capture
attention and get people excited about what they're seeing.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
Clips and compilations haven't really changed.
Speaker 3 (22:35):
You know, I think there's sort of a formula that
we followed, you know, like bloopers or you know, funny
moments or the best kisses, and I'm not saying those
don't work. But again, there's so much creative latitude that
that I think marketers can deploy to capture attention on
these platforms. And you know, honestly, one way to get
(22:56):
inspiration is to look what fans are creating, what consumers
are creating, what influencers are creating. And I'm not saying
necessarily we want to mimic it, but to use the
stuff that's happening in the wild, happening organically on these
platforms and use it as a source of inspiration to
think differently. I also think there's this hygiene stuff. Is
(23:17):
this going to be something that is this a promotion
or is this a marketing campaign that sits best on
YouTube or TikTok? Should it sit on both? Is this
something that would work better on Instagram? So I think
we need to think about these platforms discreetly and understand
which we should be using or how we should be
using them in tandem. And then you know, one of
(23:39):
the interesting bits that we've from the research that I
think we're going to dig into, that we're certainly going
to dig into more in twenty twenty five is how
do we think about these different formats? Is there an
instance where trailer really is going to be the best format?
And I think what the research is showing us in
the early stages is trailers still work best for movies.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
But again, let's rethink what a trailer is.
Speaker 3 (24:02):
Let's not just mimic what we've always done, but think
about new creative ways of deploying trailers on these platforms.
And we found that clips and compilations work best for TV.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
You know, we should note though that it's like, you know,
all of this is not necessarily a new revelation, as
if you know, the studios have not been marketing on
these platforms at all prior. I mean to the point
where we saw a bunch of experiments in recent years
where you know, they're slicing and dicing entire movies or
(24:37):
TV shows. I'm thinking, you know, Paramount got a lot
of attention for putting mean girls on TikTok in discrete episodes,
and so I'm curious if are we is the data
that we're looking at here the result of that increased
tonnage or we need to see more incre he's tonnaged,
(25:01):
and that's what this data is telling us.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
I think it's a little bit of both.
Speaker 3 (25:05):
I think we've dipped our toe in the water, and
this data would indicate that it's working. But I still
feel like we're not thinking about short form as a
bona fide media platform. I think we kind of know
that the kids are watching it, So there have been
these little bits of dog fooding and experimentation, but I
(25:25):
don't know if it's been done in a highly systematic,
strategic way, in the way that we would have thought
about promoting on you know, other platforms, on digital platforms
or on TV. So I think I think there has
to be more than just experimentation. It has to become
a discipline within marketing groups. And I think some companies
(25:46):
have been doing it more as a discipline, maybe some
more than others. But I also think, you know, we
have to learn to I think so. I think part
of it certainly is that that whatever experimentation or even
more systematic marketing is happening on these platforms, it's it's
definitely working, But I think a big part of what's
(26:08):
driving the discovery and immersion is also stuff that's just
happening in the wild. That is, you know, classic user
generated content.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
And I think.
Speaker 3 (26:18):
You know a lot of creatives and a lot of
entertainment companies have had an uneasy relationship with that user
generated content because it's sort of outside of our span
of control. And I understand, you know, when your ori
IP is so precious to us, and I think every
company feels the same, and when you're sort of letting
that loose to you know, millions of people out there
(26:40):
who are doing weird and wonderful things with it, you
lose a huge amount of control. And you want to
make sure that you know people are being good custodians of.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
Your brands and your franchises.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
One last question you talk about, you know, social video,
as you know, studios need to be thinking about it
as a media play platform in itself. You referenced Quibi earlier.
Isn't the logical extension of what you're talking about is
forget about thinking about this as a marketing platform. Shouldn't
(27:15):
you guys be thinking about this as a programming platform
If it's so powerful?
Speaker 3 (27:23):
I mean, I would based on the consumer data that
we've seen, based on this year long short form initiative
we've engaged, and I would say that that would be
a viable in my view, that would be a viable
long term strategy. So we very very consciously decided to
do a crawl walk run approach. So the crawl is
really marketing, you know, that's really that's the table stakes.
(27:47):
The next step up is using short form content for
immersion to drive that emotional connection, that longitudinal engagement with
the content, both pre and post viewing. Then the run is, yeah, like,
let's jump on that bandwagon. So I can tell you
what we've heard from consumers pretty consistently. If you've got
(28:10):
strong IP and you've got narratives, you've got characters, you've
got franchises that consumers love, they have a huge appetite
for seeing that content in shorter bursts. So it doesn't
necessarily have to be as.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
I mean.
Speaker 3 (28:27):
You can certainly take a TV show, chop it up
into smaller pieces and throw it on these platforms and people.
I mean, we've seen a number of different studios do
that and it works, and that can also be a
marketing tactic that drives people to the platform to view
the you know, the multiple seasons of that show, or
to watch that show in a more sort of conventional
(28:49):
long form plat on a more conventional long form platform.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
I sense a Gilmore Girls mobisode reboot coming in twenty
twenty eight. Well, Natasha, thank you for taking the time
out to walk us through some fascinating research my pleasure.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
Be sure to leave us a review at Apple Podcasts
or Amazon Music.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
We love to hear from listeners. Please go to Variety
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Speaker 3 (29:18):
For the free weekly Strictly Business newsletter, and don't forget
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