A spotlight on how several leading IP owners are looking at the social video and FAST spaces to boost discovery, build fandoms, drive monetization, and sustain engagement between seasons.
“Think like a fan.” That was a key piece of advice from Fremantle’s U.S. digital chief, JR Griffin, on a panel about discovery I had the great pleasure of moderating earlier this year at NATPE Global. “What would a fan want to see? What would they make if they could?”
The ScreenMDM Digital-Shift White Paper features a wealth of insights on how execs from across the landscape are making sense of the new normal. For traditional producers and distributors, embracing social and other forms of monetization has been essential—not just to make up for the commissioning squeeze and diminished broadcaster and streamer budgets, but to keep brands front and center in a fragmented viewing environment.
Build communities and fandoms, not marketing channels.
“Five, six years ago, we probably were still seeing [social] as a marketing platform,” said BBC Studios’ Helen O’Donnell at StreamTV Europe. “It was a place that we could put out clips of our brilliant shows, and people would engage with them en masse. If you’ve got a big brand like BBC Earth, for example, we do get really good numbers when we put out a trailer. However, the business model has changed: it’s now creating a front door to some of our shows. Some people like to have a deep interaction with our shows by watching them on TV, while others prefer to engage with them on one of our digital platforms. So that means we have formed a really integrated digital brands proposition, where we have channels that put out not just clips but also original content for audiences, tailored to the platform it’s going out on. So I think we’re less worried about where our audiences sit, as long as it’s a front door and a window to some of our great channel brands.”
Find new ways to resurrect beloved IP.
Baywatch is returning to screens soon with FOX’s reboot, arriving in 2027, and already licensed to Sky in the U.K. But Fremantle has been building on the classic IP for a while, remastering the original several years ago, launching a FAST channel, and deploying clips and compilations across social video platforms. “That helps us because we have an audience we can speak to and carry into the reboot with FOX,” Griffin said.
Your commissioning partner is probably not always on with your brand.
“We can talk about our brands year-round,” Griffin said. “You sell a show to a broadcaster, they talk about it for four months while it’s on air, then they go away. They focus on their other shows. We care about our IP as creators and content owners, and we want to talk about it all year long.”
Jay Bennett, discussing the social machine around the long-running hit Murdoch Mysteries at NATPE Global, said, “It is just the reality that you have to get out there and do it yourself. It is about supporting the fans, and showing the strength of the brand and the love for the brand.”
Social is easier when it’s baked into your production workflow.
Christine Waage, who leads sales for The Bold and the Beautiful, spoke at NATPE about how Bell-Phillip Television Productions meets fans’ demand for constant updates on the series.
“We’re always on set; we film 40 weeks a year, 252 episodes,” she said on the discoverability panel I moderated. “We film with iPhones and feed it to CBS. And internationally, I have a Tom Sawyer approach. I find a super fan in any country that we need, and then we feed them content, and they run our local language, because we would not be capable of running all of our languages.”
Upgrade to a paid subscription on Substack to continue reading, or purchase the ScreenMDM Digital-Shift White Paper here. Use SCREENMDMEXTRA to get a 20% discount. The IP owners chapter of the White Paper includes breakout sections on Banijay, ITV Studios, and Sony Pictures Television.
