MIPCOM has long been the other show in Cannes.
It’s nowhere as glitzy as Lions. Or as crowded. Most people in ad tech/advertising have never even heard of it.
And yet… it’s become far more relevant than Lions or any of the other ad-related shows this past year, precisely because it’s all about what’s going on with the people who actually create and distribute the content.
You know, the stuff that surrounds the ads.
As such, it was heartening to see that unlike the ad/adtech industries, which, as I noted last week, can often feel as if they’d been frozen in amber back in 2015, the content industry is somewhere in the 2020s, having seemingly woken up to the notion that the world has changed.
Why It Matters
Part of that is due to where both sit in the ecosystem. Content producers and providers are in a competitive race for eyeballs, meaning they not only feel the winds of change first, but that they are also in competition with each other for those eyeballs.
Versus advertisers who just need to chase said eyeballs, or pretend to chase them from behind brightly colored spreadsheets of easily-manipulated data.
So there’s that, but there’s also the fact that YouTube made its first appearance at MIPCOM this year, and their main session, featuring YouTube EMEA head Pedro Pina, BBC Studios’ Jasmine Dawson and Mapmeister E-Shap was the most talked about event at the show.
Well, at least with the people I was talking to. (Sorry Walking Dead zombies.)
The BBC/YouTube session was all about how, by promoting their programming on YouTube and creating their own YouTube channels, BBC Studios has been able to see a positive uptick in viewership along with something far more important: the creation of passionate fan communities around its programming, which is the Holy Grail in this age of Feudal Media.
The idea that traditional media should take a page from influencer culture and actually build and nurture fan communities is easy to dismiss as more “Millennial bullshit.”
Until of course, it’s not.
Take, for instance, the aforementioned BBC Studios.
Their BBC Earth YouTube channel has 14 million subscribers and pulls from a range of BBC programming on the BBC, including the David Attenborough-narrated Planet Earth.
The purpose of the channel though is not to provide a dumping ground for clips, but rather a place for the community to gather, creating the sorts of fandoms that drive loyalty.
It works, as Dawson noted, because it’s not stealing viewership or revenue from the main channels. If anything, it’s incremental.
That ties in closely with the next thing I want to hammer into you.
Years ago I used to write about a phenomenon I called “Flipping Through The Internet” wherein brands and publishers would put up microsites and then magically expect consumers to find them, as if the internet was a TV set and that at some point they’d be flipping through the internet and stumble onto the site. No need to actually, you know, promote it.
Or, as I wrote way back in February 2009, With the push method of advertising, we must take action in order not to see the ad. With widgets, apps and other online vehicles, we must take action in order to see them. People don’t stumble upon widgets and apps by accident. Which means they need to be judged by a completely different set of standards than push advertising like TV and print, the primary one being: Would anyone actually go out of their way to use it?
So it’s sort of not surprising to hear a similar take from Pedro Pina on the obtuseness of so many traditional media types who figure ‘I have a piece of content right now and YouTube reaches however many million people, so I’m just going to push the content, and somehow magically it shows up in front of people on the other side.’ And that’s just not how it works.
Bingo.
But wait, there’s more—here’s the money quote of the conference:
It’s not a push mechanism anymore, it’s a pull mechanism. That’s why hiring YouTube creators is so important, because they understand fundamentally that this is about curating, taking care of your fandom, feeding your fandom what they need in order for them to start pulling their audience.
Pull, not push. If you take one thing away, let it be this.
What You Need To Do About It
If you are a traditional media company then you need to look at YouTube as a friend not a foe.
Which I get can be a lot like being one of those sharks in Finding Nemo, but still.
You need to build and cultivate fandoms for your shows. And those fandoms are not going to build themselves—you need to engage with people who actually know how to do this.
They exist, they’re not all 24, and they know what they’re doing—find them.
If you want to do more than just the bare minimum—which I get will be a stretch in many of your organizations—take a cue from Dawson and BBC Studios who have hired creators to work in various roles throughout the organization. Because why guess at what it takes to succeed in an area you know very little about when you could actually go out and hire experts?
Which sounds like a pretty obvious thing to do, but well, you’d be surprised.
If you are a network or streaming service, follow Tubi’s lead.
They have been doing a stellar job of bringing creators onto the platform and using the built-in audiences that come with them to drive viewership.
This is, of course, not rocket science.
For decades, TV studios have been casting stand-up comedians in sitcoms, relying, at some level, on their fan bases and buzz to create the same for the show.
Sometimes they got Seinfeld and sometimes they got Margaret Cho in All-American Girl. There’s no actual formula for this.
It will be thus with creators too.
Some will resonate with audiences and being on TV will help to grow their fame and yours, and others will be Scare PewDiePie.
But here’s the thing: you’ll never know unless you try.
Remember too that this world extends way beyond YouTube. There are other channels, other platforms and you owe it to yourself to explore all of them.
Because again, your competitors surely will.
And if you don’t try and your competitors do, well then, you’re doubly screwed.
If you’re the advertising industry, you need to start taking this shit seriously.
As in you can’t just put out a brief about “utilizing influencers”, hire some corporate influencer rep firm, show the client that you’ve got a balanced diet’s worth of influencers: two macros, two micros and a niche guy just for a change and then go back to pushing :30s and banner ads.
You need to come to terms with the fact that this part of the industry is real. So stop treating it like it’s just another box to check and start treating it like it’s something that will affect your bottom line.
You’d be surprised.
One more thing: if you are everyone in this industry, you need to rethink how you’re measuring things.
Because the creator economy is an attention economy.
Meaning that the number of people who watch your shows as background noise while they’re making dinner is nowhere near as important as the number who comment, like, share and otherwise engage.
Even if that second number is much, much smaller.
If that sounds like some bullshit excuse for a bad media plan, then you need to spend some time understanding how this new world works. Because the old one’s not coming back and you need to not be a dinosaur.
Which doesn’t mean the old world is dead or even close to it. Just that the action is in the new world and the old one is only going to continue to contract.
Yes it’s scary and yes it can seem chaotic and rule-free.
But in that chaos, there is opportunity.
The old guard has fallen and you can be a founding member of the new one.
You just need a little courage, an open mind and a big dose of faith.
Alan Wolk is co-founder and lead analyst at the consulting firm TV[R]EV. He is the author of the best-selling industry primer, Over The Top: How The Internet Is (Slowly But Surely) Changing The Television Industry. Wolk frequently speaks about changes in the television industry, both at conferences and to anyone who’ll listen.
Week in Review is an opinion column. It does not necessarily represent the opinions of StreamTV Insider.