Tag Archives: movies

co-creating, collaborating, community-building, content creating, creator-ing, realtiming

Streaming’s Next Decade: From Ads to Audiences – and Why Creators are Set to Win

I evaluated in my previous post some media and marketing predictions I made in late 2014. Netflix had announced their arrival in Australia for the following March. My expectation that content would win out over channel, that ability to deliver on desire for choice on-demand would determine growth, and that programmatic would swallow huge swathes of the industry – have all proved I think, largely, true.

My prediction however that the industry would largely fall out of love with the ‘ad’ didn’t come to pass as expected. Adverts have remained the predominant unit of currency for paid branded messaging.

Instead, the group that capitalised on the opportunity as I saw it – to create “platform-neutral content strategies that can adapt to platform and context more quickly – generating more relevance for brands’ comms” were not brands, but creators. The “native content in video form” that I foresaw becoming predominant in video did come to pass, but with a generation of content creators – rather than brands – at the helm.

For many brands and marketers, success is now dependent on engaging and fuelling this generation of content creators – who intermediate between products and services on one hand, and customers and consumers on the other.

Last week saw two awesome examples of this now established marketing model in practice.

How Capcom Inspire an Army of Creators to Fuel Monster-Hunting

Monster Hunter Wilds, which released worldwide on February 28, has had a great launch. Within the first three days, the game sold over 8 million copies (it’s now over 10m), setting a record as Capcom’s fastest-selling title. On Steam it attracted more than 1.3 million concurrent players shortly after launch, securing a position among the platform’s top 10 most-played games by concurrent users.

Whilst this success wouldn’t be possible without a great product – Wilds has been critically well-received, earning 90 out of 100 on Metacritic with reviewers praising engaging combat, impressive creature design, and innovative gameplay features – its success is also down to a determined effort to engage audiences thru the game’s affiliated army of creators.

Last Tuesday’s Monster Hunter Wilds Showcase, hosted by producer Ryozo Tsujimoto, revealed the first free update, which is scheduled for this coming Friday. The content is relevant of course for people who play the game (declaration: I’m 49 hours in and counting), but I’d suggest that’s not the primary audience for this content.

Rather, Tuesday’s content was designed and deployed not primarily for the game’s 10m players, but for creators. The update had more than enough new information to fuel new content, but enough details held-back and teased to allow room for all-important speculation and prediction. This video from the awesome Khraze Gaming channel is a great example.

There’s now a very established – and mutually beneficial – relationship between the Monster Hunter Wilds dev team and the game’s content creators. The game’s owners are supporting their community of content creators, who in turn are producing content to build their community of subscribers.

This isn’t all one-way. There’s been plenty of pushback from hardcore fans of the series, critical that the game is too easy. But the devs aren’t shying away from this. They are embracing this community feedback, in an open letter this week announcing that:

“We would also like to thank you for the many comments, thoughts and feedback we have received since the game was released.

The development team has been reading your feedback, and we are encouraged by it. We are also using the comments and feedback we have received to help us plan our future actions.

Future updates will see more Tempered Monsters (★8) added to the game … And for even more of a challenge, Arch-tempered monsters will make an appearance. These are even stronger versions of tempered monsters.”

Another masterful example of a marketing team engaging and fuelling content creators was from Marvel.

How Marvel Inspired Creators to Create with a Five-Hour Plus Livestream

In this even more astonishing and finely-tuned example of the marketing-to-creators model, Marvel revealed the cast of the now-in-production Avengers Doomsday via a five hour plus live-stream – with a new cast member being revealed on the back of a director’s chair every 12 minutes. The announcement concluded with Robert Downey Jr. – who will play Doom in the strategically crucial film for Marvel – walking out to sit in the final chair and asking the audience to be quiet on set.

Just to reiterate in case you read that quickly – the Avengers Doomsday cast reveal announcement video was a panning shot of 27 director’s chairs … which lasted five and a half hours.

This clearly is content designed not to be watched by audiences. Rather – just like Monster Hunter Wilds – its content precision-made for creators. Content machine-tooled to be poured-over in crazy detail in real-time by an army of creators (many of whom are of course huge fans).

Creators like The Breakroom team, who scrambled into their studio to livestream their discussions and reactions to the Avengers announcement video, in real-time. A livestream of a livestream. Marvel designing and deploying content for creators.

This is the new and now established model. Content from brands tailor-made for creators, designed to fuel the production of content for their audiences. Creators are the intermediaries and amplifiers of brand messaging. Communities are maintained and managed not directly by brands, but by a team of creators the literal job of who is to drive engagement with audiences for brands; either because they are fans, or their income depends on it – and in reality, usually and probably both.

This is what will underpin brand success over the next decade of video.
This is a model about to be supercharged by next-generation AI production capabilities.
This is what marketing precision at scale really looks like.

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cinema, streaming

It’s T-Day in Movie Theatres; can Christopher Nolan’s Tenet save Cinema as we’ve known it?

All eyes are on Christopher Nolan’s latest time- and mind-bender, which is released internationally today after a delay due to the ronacoaster. Can it turn around movie theatre’s annus horribilis and save the cinema business from a historical pivot towards home streaming?

Today could turn out to be a crucial day in the history of cinema. Or more specifically, the cinematic release. Of the many shifts that COVID has accelerated, those associated with our consumption of content across screens have been some of the most obvious and pronounced.

Perhaps most notably, streaming has surged. At the start of the pandemic, Netflix reported a record additional 15.77 million paid subscribers globally in the first quarter (that was double the number it expected). The second quarter saw the streaming platform add a further 10.1 million (2.9 million in the U.S. and 7.2 million overseas).

Netflix aren’t alone. At the start of this month, Disney CEO Bob Chapek announced that there were now 60.5 million global subscribers to Disney+, the House of Mouse’s streaming service which launched last November. Disney+ is now into 60-90 million range it told investors it would get to by 2024.

That puts Disney+ a whopping FOUR YEARS ahead of schedule, and will almost certainly have put to bed any debate about the short-term revenue risk Disney took by pulling their content (and revenues) from other platforms in order to bring the Skywalker, Stark and Oldenburg families under one streaming roof.

That said, the gains in the streaming area of the Disney empire weren’t nearly enough to offset the hits in other parts of the business – most notably in the shuttering of COVID-hit Parks and Resort, which (along with theatrical cinema closures) saw a USD $4.7bn loss in the quarter to the end of June (Disney’s first in two decades). But strength through diversity of revenues (especially in the recurring bundle space) will surely win out.

If the Disney+ news wasn’t enough of a headline, the same announcement also included the showstopper that the long-awaited live action Mulan movie would be available on Disney+ from September 24th, for USD $29.99.

Cinema chains, which have long enjoyed a 70- to 90-day exclusive “theatrical window”, recoiled at the announcement. Theatres were banking on Mulan to be one of the billion dollar-plus big hitters to land in the second half and help claw back what has been an agonisingly bad year for cinema revenues.

In the US, as of yesterday, the year to date box office gross stood at $1,813,328,945. For context, the 2019 haul totaled $11,320,889,639. That tracks as 84% down year on year so far. The likes of Mulan were desperately needed by theatres to mitigate what will be an all-time historically bad year for cinemas.

But the real danger isn’t the historical revenue hit that will be 2020, but rather the potential underlying tectonic shifts indicated by Mulan’s move to streaming. In short, will 2020 be a blip in cinema history, or a pivot?

From a consumer perspective, it will be fascinating to see how Disney’s experiment plays out next month. Will Mulan’s USD $29.99 price tag prove too rich for most, or will there be enough take-up and revenues to enable a sea-change in day-and-date content releases to streaming services?

Additionally, how will consumers perceive the relative value of a one-off payment to watch a new release at home, versus the recurring revenue bundle model that underpins the streaming platforms?

The implications go beyond the cinema industry and land much closer to home in media planning land, where its worth noting the huge consequences for advertisers and media planners should streaming pull the pivot off.

These are valuable and valued audiences and GRPs that, should they jump over and vanish behind streaming’s paywalls, will be unavailable as part of a campaign schedule’s multi-screen reach.

Enter Christopher Nolan, who’s extraordinary directorial CV includes Memento, The Prestige, The Dark Knight Trilogy, Inception, Dunkirk and Interstellar.

The director’s latest offering arrives in international cinemas today (it opens in the US next month) and comes with a weight of unprecedented levels of expectation; an expectation that far outstrips that of the movie itself.

The mind- and time-bending, globe-trotting Tenet, see’s The Protagonist fight an nefarious incursion from the future as time flows in both directions at once. Its typically audacious, huge, and spectacular in its ambition and scale. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw describes it as “amazing cinema”.

Its a movie that surely deserves to be seen on the biggest screen and surrounded by the most surroundest of sound; not glanced at from the sofa whilst dividing attention between The Protagonists unfolding fate and the latest feed from the socials. Surely this will be movie for which people return to cinemas?

Watching on eagerly for answers to those questions will be not only the movie theatre industry, but Hollywood and its counterparts around the world, the streaming platforms, the movie production industry… and this media planner.

Will audiences return to cinemas for Tenet? What scale of ticket stubs and revenues will its release be judged a success by the industry? Will the tide of 2020 be turned or will this year be seen as pivotal (in every sense) in the shift to home-streaming? Can Christoper Nolan save cinema as we’ve known it?

Given the director’s fascination with the temporal, it’s perhaps fitting that the only answer to those questions, is that time will tell.

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