Branded Content Is The Star Of The Newfronts, BlueSky Dispatch

1. Branded Content Is The Star Of The Newfronts

The Newfronts kicked off on Monday and before we dive into specifics, let’s just acknowledge that streaming is still in the “trying the show out on the road” stage. Budgets, while they may be growing, are still small compared to linear TV and that gives everyone some license to innovate. 

Which is the most interesting thing going down this year: the innovation. Everyone is making it up as they go along and the lower budgets allow for greater risk taking. At some point soon the budgets won’t be small and it won’t be as easy to take risks. But for now, there is a lot to see.

I’m going to zoom in on two macro(ish) trends I’m seeing this year: the growth of branded content and the continued rise of the OEMs.

Why It Matters 

Let’s start with branded content, which, for the uninitiated, is actual programming that is produced for a specific brand and that brand is the sole sponsor of the show. If appropriate, their product or service can be worked into the show, though ideally in a rather subtle manner.

It’s always seemed like a great idea for the FASTs in that it provides them with programming with a built-in sponsor in a category that a decent number of people are interested in.

HGTV, which is actually not branded content, is often cited as the perfect example of how it all works. You’re watching a home renovation show and you see an ad for Lowe’s or Sherwin-Williams paints and it all seems of a piece, the ads are not jarring the way ads often are.

There were a few things stopping branded content from really taking off. 

The first was brand managers who didn’t get that the goal was to make an entertaining show, not a 22-minute commercial. Their attitude was that if they were paying for it, they needed their product to be featured front and center in ways that were not exactly conducive to creating an entertaining show.

The second was a lack of data around who was watching, when they watched, and did they actually, you know, buy anything.

Which made branded content plays, which were not especially cheap, an even harder sell.

Because nobody ever got fired for running a 30 second commercial. 

That’s all changed now as streaming services have access to better and richer data to help brands not only better understand the results but to also target the types of audiences that might be interested in this type of programming and serve it up to them.

More than that though, branded content is a form of contextual advertising, and if you’d read our recent report on the FASTs and advertising (free download here) contextual advertising — targeting people based on the programming they are watching—is being widely acknowledged as the best way to solve a world of hurt around streaming advertising. Among other useful tricks, it eliminates concerns around privacy and data veracity while also allowing advertisers to target a wider audience.

So there’s all that and it’s why you saw announcements about it from a number of players including VIZIO (they’re creating a content studio) and Chicken Soup For The Soul/Crackle (Crackle Connex). Just to name a few.

The other macro story from the Newfronts (which I have made the unilateral decision to spell the same way as the Upfront) is that OEMs are playing a bigger role than ever in ad-supported streaming. The smart TV OEMs—Samsung, VIZIO and LG have all really stepped up their games in terms of innovation, content quality and presence. 

Together with Roku and Amazon (who seem to also be ditching dongles for actual TV sets) they’ve created real traction and the ability to own both the programming and the interface is key in terms of getting more complete data.

What You Need To Do About It

If you’re an advertiser and you have a product that lends itself to branded content…and you have the budget for it, it’s a very smart spend as it also gives you relatively evergreen assets you can repurpose in other ways and on other media. That’s a huge plus and something you don’t usually get from your advertising.

Just remember that if it’s not entertaining then no one will watch it. Meaning resist the temptation to make it sound like an ad. Yes, you are paying for it but you will have many opportunities to share your advertising message before, after and possibly during the show.

If you’re reading this and you’re all jazzed about the shift to streaming, deep breath. 

Yes, it is happening. Yes there’s all sorts of data available now. 

But it’s still very early days and very big brands, the ones who see their audiences as “everyone with a mouth” and the purpose of TV ads as “to reach as many people as possible with a message that enhances our brand image” are still looking at it as an experiment as most of the inventory on streaming is library content, not originals.

That will change soon enough—figure three to six years—when the ad-supported subscription services all have user bases in the tens of millions, thus giving those big advertisers the reach they need. 

At which point the light will go on and they’ll decide that “SVOD is the new prime time and FASTs are the new cable.” 

But until then it’s all sort of a dress rehearsal.

2. BlueSky Dispatch

Sometime in March I saw that BlueSky, Jack Dorsey’s new Twitter replacement app, was in beta and so I signed up, given that tracking these things is sort of my job. 

It is pretty much an exact replica of Twitter, the main enhancement being that it will turn links into image bearing “cards” which do not count against character count.

Things were pretty quiet for the first month, the majority of users seemed to be BlueSky engineers and their friends, who primarily posted their latest Midjourney creations.

Then, at some point last week, it seems that BlueSky became a thing, with numerous articles popping up everywhere and most of Lefty Journo Twitter showing up en masse along with Jake Tapper, AOC and Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI).

What’s followed seems to be a re-creation of Twitter 2011, with lots of “skeets” (no one asked my input on the naming) about how great BlueSky is, how much fun the site is how cool all the people on it (e.g. their friends) are, how awful Twitter’s become, and, to complete the 2011 theme, lots of attempts at humor and photos of meals and pets and pets eating meals.

Which, if I actually knew any of them personally might have been interesting.

Though probably not.

Why It Matters

For most non-political users, the biggest change in post-Musk Twitter is that it’s a lot quieter. People just use it less and for many industries, LinkedIn seems to be the main beneficiary of that shift. It provides a good platform for discussing business-related topics and since people use their real names and CVs on LinkedIn, conversation is generally pretty civil.

That said, Twitter served as a home for people to discuss/live tweet their favorite shows and trade celebrity gossip and the amount of Twitter buzz a TV series or movie generated was a good indicator of how much of an impact it had made on pop culture and how serious the fan base was.

That sort of activity is unlikely to migrate to LinkedIn.

And while I get why all the new users are so excited about BlueSky—the harassment of people on political Twitter can be pretty intense— it’s unclear how it doesn’t turn into a mirror of right wing Twitter-imitator sites, which would seem to greatly limit its reach. (I’ve already seen a couple of examples of thought policing.)

But more than that, because it mimics Twitter’s interface, it won’t solve that site’s two core problems: the interface rewards people for over-the-top antics and posting anything in a public forum only appeals to a very small part of the population.

Which is true of say, TikTok, only most of what is posted on TikTok is mildly entertaining, so people don't mind being passive consumers, whereas most of what is on Twitter, or BlueSky for that matter, is not.

So there’s all that and despite the fact that invite codes (no, I don’t have any to share) are being sold on eBay and the publications that write eight articles about Succession each week are all about BlueSky this week, it seems a lot like Clubhouse 2.0

What You Need To Do About It

If you’re tracking which shows and movies are getting buzz with their fan base, TikTok and YouTube may be better sources for that than Twitter or any of its clones.

Though it’s not as if Twitter is dying:  NBCU just signed a deal to expand its partnership with the site around the 2024 Paris Olympics, so reports of its death may indeed be premature.

And if you’re feeling FOMO because you’re not on BlueSky yet, relax. The NYT Pitchbot isn’t on there yet either, and I suspect you can live without seeing photos of the cats of people you only know from their bylines.