Tag Archives: Netflix

advertising, content creating, creator-ing, predicting, streaming

Streaming’s First Decade: Three Predictions I Got Right – and One I Called Totally Wrong

It’s been ten years to the month since Netflix launched in Australia (where I was lucky enough to be working at the time). A decade on, it’s worth reflecting on what’s changed, what I called right, and what caught me (and the industry) off guard.

There’s been some great commentary from Tim Burrowes both via Unmade (paywalled) and on the MediaLand podcast about the impact of the streamers on the broader media landscape down under. In a Mediation post back in 2014, I made some predictions about what the arrival of streaming would mean for marketing in Australia, and the broader media landscape.

I think I mainly called it right.

Three Out of Four Ain’t Bad: Three Predictions That Nailed It (and One That Didn’t)

Prediction one: “In the immediate term there is undoubtedly going to be a firestorm for views and scale – brace for plenty of press releases in the first quarter of 2015 about content deals, views and reach. in the medium term this will play out in a battle for content – with many shows already locked away in local deals, there will be fierce competition between the platforms as distribution rights cycle into play.”

Verdict: Totally called it. The fight for content has not only played out between the streamers, but more broadly across the industry as legacy broadcasters and streaming platforms battled for the content that will drive and retain subscribers. In Australia that battle continues to this day, with the launch of Max on Monday locking HBO’s content library onto the platform – and the arrival of ESPN on Disney+ introducing an additional potential bidder for many of the market’s upcoming sports rights negotiations. Content has, for the last decade, remained king and has been a key defining element of the success – and conversely the struggles – of the streaming platforms.

Prediction two: We’ll see “a radical shift in viewer expectations. more choice, more freedom to choose what we watch and where, how and when we watch it. This future has been a long-time coming and has been with some for much longer than others”.

Verdict: Two for two. If anything has defined streaming’s impact, it’s the expectation of choice, on demand. That expectation has spilled beyond streaming—into podcasts, and even cinema. The streaming age taught many of us that, for the typical movie, it was easier to wait and watch at home – a behaviour reinforced by ever-reducing windows between theatrical and home release.

As the Entertainment Strategy Guy put it in a recent post, we’re drawn to the cinema now for ‘events’; “the actual most popular “genre” isn’t really a genre, but a style: exciting. People go to the movies to see spectacle, which often means action or exciting set pieces …18 of the top 25 films [in the US 2024 box office] have a lot of action set pieces. (Even Wicked ends with one).”

Prediction three: “With increasingly fragmented and diverse platforms and viewing services, advertisers and their agencies will increasingly rely on programmatic solutions to build reach quickly.”

Verdict: Absolutely. Over the past decade, programmatic advertising has transformed the industry by enabling real-time bidding, automating media buying, and enhancing targeting capabilities. On one hand, this shift has driven greater efficiency, has undoubtedly improved ROI, and empowered marketers to deliver more personalised experiences. But it’s also led to concerns about transparency, data privacy, and brand safety – not to mention the broader impact of an over-reliance on short-term, performance-based media on brands and long-term brand-building. It’s all our jobs to ensure we build tech that will serve us better over the next – AI-powered – decade, than we did for the last.

Prediction four: “Many advertisers and ad agencies will finally be forced to break out of the ‘advert’ model – using instead platform-neutral content strategies that can adapt to platform and context more quickly – generating more relevance for brands’ comms. think native content in video form.”

Verdict: So this one is a lot less clear. I genuinely thought back in 2015 that the industry’s long-held affinity for the ‘advert’ would wane. I thought the classic ad, so effective in the broadcast age, wouldn’t survive in a streaming world; a world in which tolerance for content interruption would be significantly reduced.

I was genuinely wrong on that. The power of the ‘ad’ holds sway to this day. The industry didn’t wholesale move on from the ad. It didn’t predominantly leverage more diversified content and ideas-based marketing to create fewer, better, more transformative experiences for audiences.

Too expensive. To difficult to scale and measure. Too hard.

Only it wasn’t.

Because while the industry remained predominantly stuck in ad-land, the last decade has seen a content revolution that has more than delivered on my prediction of ‘native content in video form’.

Native Creators: The Creator Economy Delivered What Marketing Didn’t

In parallel to the growth of streaming over the last ten years, the creator economy had, by 2023, blossomed into a $250 billion industry. This expansion is projected to continue, with estimates suggesting the market could reach $480 billion by 2027.

A report last year (admittedly from YouTube) found that an astonishing 65 percent of Gen Z responders self-identified as video content creators. The number of content creators worldwide has surpassed 200 million, reflecting the increasing appeal of content creation as a profession. The market for global influencer content has more than tripled since 2020, reaching approximately $33 billion in 2025.

It seems trite to point-out that this incredible growth – and it is incredible – is largely down to the fact that creator-made content is typically significantly more engaging than traditional ‘adverts’; it feels authentic, personal, and tailored to specific communities … because it IS authentic, personal, and tailored to specific communities.

Audiences tend to trust creators they follow, viewing their recommendations as more genuine and relatable than polished brand messaging—leading to higher attention, interaction, and emotional connection.

The prediction I made a decade ago suggesting that the industry’s ad-venture would come to an end was correct, it just turned out to be a generation of creators – powered by platforms like YouTube and latterly TikTok – that delivered on that strategic opportunity of ten years ago. The great irony of course is that advertisers did end up being an integral part of this creative content revolution; they were the money.

In other words, it wasn’t the brands who changed the game—it was creators and their audiences. And it’s that shift – from ads to creator-audiences – that will define the next decade of streaming.

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converging, fragmenting, podcasting, streaming

Netflix’s Next Move? Video Podcasts – And Why Marketers Need to Be Ready

Business Insider reporting this week suggests that Netflix is exploring deals with prominent podcasters. According to sources ‘familiar with Netflix’s strategy’, “Netflix insiders had warmed to the idea of tapping podcasting talent to host a talk-based video show, after previously expressing scepticism that the format could work on the platform.”

The availability of the podcast in video form has been surging of late. Most notably on YouTube – where prominent podcasters have been streaming their conversations for a good while now – but also on Spotify, where earlier this year I was surprised to see Alistair and Rory of the popular The Rest is Politics podcast pop-up within my Spotify app in video form.

Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell, hosts of Britain’s biggest podcast The Rest Is Politics, popping up in video form on Spotify

Spotify pivoting to become a video streaming channel is just one part of a wider – and sizable – convergence into the video format, which in many ways represents one of most significant shifts in media and content consumption of recent times.

Forces of Fragmentation and Consolidation

When the industry initially debated fragmentation in the media landscape it was, generally, in reference to channels. Back in olden days when I started planning you basically had TV, print (both newspapers and magazines no less), radio, outdoor – plus something we called ambient media (out of home contextual ideas that popped up to generally surprise and delight urban audiences).

Digital was nascent, and streaming was still way over the horizon (I still have the presentation I gave to a major UK TV broadcaster client in around 2005 communicating the existence of a website I thought they should be paying attention to, called YouTube).

Since then, one of the seismic forces shaping media planning and strategy has been fragmentation. But it wasn’t channel fragmentation – which has been more than countered by consolidation within digital platforms over the last two decades.

2024 global advertising revenues surpassed $1 trillion. Major technology companies—specifically Alphabet (Google), Meta (Facebook), Amazon, Alibaba, and ByteDance — collectively accounted for over half of this expenditure source. EMarketer reports that in the US, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, and Alphabet last year attracted nearly two-thirds of digital advertising dollars. The media landscape has many issues, platform fragmentation is not one of them.

What has fragmented is attention. The platforms that now dominate media have distributed audiences – which poses an ongoing challenge for brands looking to leverage Ehrenberg Bassian principles to reach as many light and non-buyers of their products in advance of an many purchase occasions as possible.

Advertisers are chasing, and demanding, scale … which is where Netflix’s potential foray into podcasts comes in. The streamer announced last year that it would stop reporting quarterly subscriber numbers from Q1 2025 – a sign interpreted by many in the industry that future growth from more subscribers was expected to plateau. Growth for Netflix must come next from driving increased time spent on the platform: in particular amongst subscribers to the ad-tier where a consistent source of advertiser-friendly audiences in a strategic priority.

Netflix’s Podcast Move

Enter podcasts … a potentially dreamy next step in their ongoing conquering of the video landscape. Let us count the ways in which Netflix must be salivating over the potential of the video podcast:

• Low barriers to entry and production costs
• In-built reach from influencer hosts (I find it significantly more useful to think of – and plan – podcasters as influencers and creators, rather than hosts) – which at the head drives scale, and into the tail offers relevance for selling on to advertisers
• Long dwell times, creating consistent high volumes of impressions and platform engagement (remember some podcast episodes are longer than the average movie run time).

Netflix are uniquely placed to take advantage of the opportunity. Video content platforms have always largely divided along two lines: professionally-created content (Netflix, legacy broadcasters offering BVOD etc, legacy conglomerates such as Disney+ and Paramount+ etc), and creator content (such as YouTube and the majority of video on social platforms). The former have never really wanted to do the latter, and the latter have struggled to do the former.

Netflix can genuinely move to deliver both professionally-created, and now premium creator content via high-reaching quality podcasts. I’d be stunned if Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway – who are currently in renewal negotiations with Vox Media for the home of their wildly successful Pivot podcast – weren’t talking to Netflix about taking the show to the streamer … opening the opportunities for the Pivot brand itself to expand into a range of video formats and series on the platform.

Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway – of the Kara and Scott Universe – hosts of the wildly popular Pivot podcast … a move to Netflix would make strategic sense

What This Means for Marketers

For marketers – this is all upside. Yes, it will mean more of that fragmented attention being sucked behind the Netflix walled garden, but if packaged up right it opens large swathes of addressable audiences in one targetable place – as well as scale, along with depth and diversity, of those audiences.

To succeed, marketers will need big proprietary data sets to create effective audiences to buy from Netflix, the agency support to build significant and meaningful partnerships and JVPs with the streamer (as well and others) that gets access to the best talent on the platform, and – most importantly – have an idea that can travel.

Because my hunch is that if Netflix push the podcast video door open, and if they can scale it and commercialise the audiences, then it’s the brands with clear, big (sorry) ideas that can be co-owned and co-created with Netflix’s creator community – that will be the brands that succeed. It would be such a shame for Netflix to sit astride a converged platform offering video podcast shows created by such talented influencers – only for brands to spot-buy their way into the party.

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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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adserving, broadcasting, distributing, television, viewing

The Netflix Spark: Why the arrival of the SVOD platform heralds a more even distribution of the future for everyone

so yesterday as I was meandering along the freeway in Melbourne I heard the most startling comment on the radio. a contributor to the city’s 3AW station was talking through the highlights of the evenings TV schedule – and suggested that because TV was ‘out of ratings season’ there wouldn’t be much to watch that evening … she gave a special shout-out to Nine who “bless them, were treating us to a new episode of Person of Interest”.

that broadcast TV networks take their foot off the pedal whilst out of season in order to hold new content back for the weeks when ratings is once again tracked is one thing – but for it to be such a consumer-facing matter of fact took me by more than a little surprise. this after all isn’t an industry conversation or debate, but a public radio station – openly discussing the fact that a TV network was “treating” the audience by actually offering them something new to watch.

this rather startling starting point underlines the extent of the firestorm now fully smoldering in the Australian TV market – the spark for which came courtesy of Netflix. on November 19th, after months of rumours and speculation, Netflix finally announced (with timing naughtily designed to crash Nine’s AGM) that it would launch in Australia in March 2015. the response from local Aussie players had been in development for some time. in short:

  • Foxtel, who arguably have most immediate disruption to face, have revisited their pricing strategy across the board and in particular halved the price tag of Presto (their SVOD or Streaming Video On Demand service) to $9.99. in addition they’ve partnered with Seven West Media who will contribute programming to the service from next year.
  • Nine and Fairfax’s joint forces have combined to create the $100m SVOD service StreamCo – with the consumer-facing platform brand Stan. Stan has subsequently announced deals with CBS, BBC Worldwide, MGM and SBS (who will bring their world movies to the party).

all of which leaves us with a three horse race between Netflix, Presto and Stan right?

wrong.

in fact it’s barely the beginning.

there’s Quickflix, Fetch TV, the individual channel catch-up services, Ten have yet to pick a dance partner, the ABC’s iView and of course YouTube – which in July accounted for over 1.5m content streams, reaching almost 11.5m people (source).

taken together there’s increasing volumes of views being delivered to the 50% of Aussies who watch online content. the numbers are already big … according to Nielsen in July there were 2.7bn streams (and that was down on June), and time spent streaming is increasing – up to around 8hrs per person per month generating 6.5bn minutes of streamed content.

and Netflix is still three months away.

the impacts of all this will be significant; in the immediate term there is undoubtedly going to be a firestorm for views and scale – brace for plenty of press releases in the first quarter of 2015 about content deals, views and reach. in the medium term this will play out in a battle for content – with many shows already locked away in local deals, there will be fierce competition between the platforms as distribution rights cycle into play.

the long-term implications will be two-fold. firstly, with increasingly fragmented and diverse platforms and viewing services, advertisers and their agencies will increasingly rely on programmatic solutions to build reach quickly. in addition many advertisers and ad agencies will finally be forced to break out of the ‘advert’ model – using instead platform-neutral content strategies that can adapt to content and context more quickly – generating more relevance for brands’ comms. think native content in video form.

the second long-term implication will be the long-overdue radical shift in viewer expectations. more choice, more freedom to choose what we watch and where, how and when we watch it. this future has been a long-time coming, and has been with some for much longer than others  … as William Gibson so magnificently put it, the future is already here – its just not evenly distributed.

strap in people … because what’s coming is a radically more even distribution of the future – a future in which the idea of being “treated” to a new episode of Person Of Interest by a network, may by as incredulous as the very idea of tuning in to a broadcast network in the first place.

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