As the creator ecosystem has grown, another new industry has emerged alongside it: the optimizers helping creators and “traditional” content firms maximize their digital footprints.
I’ve spoken to lots of these optimizers over the last few months. Heard many of them speak at markets like MIP London and StreamTV Europe. Their role is increasingly key for both rising YouTube creators and IP owners; as Chronicle Studios’ Aaron Sisto told me recently, “social is too complicated to do by hand anymore.” From thumbnail choices to optimal length, chasing algorithms and finding your “audience neighborhoods,” there’s an awful lot to understand about how to drive the only metric that really matters: engagement.
In this post, excerpted from the ScreenMDM Digital-Shift White Paper, you’ll get expert insights from:
- Aaron Sisto, Co-Founder, Chronicle Studios
- Brian Briskman, Co-Founder, Likewise Media Consultants
- Dominic Smales, Co-Founder, GloMotion Studios/WinnieWood
- James Loveridge, Co-Managing Director, Agency, Little Dot Studios
- Nico Lockhart, Managing Director, TeamFalco
- Scott Greenberg, Co-Founder, Chronicle Studios
- Tobias Schiwek, CEO, We Are Era
(If you’re quoted, DM me if you’d like to see an excerpt of the entire 90-page report.)
There doesn’t need to be a disconnect between the “creator” and “traditional” content worlds.
“Most creators want to expand their ecosystem,” said Brian Briskman of Likewise Media Consultants at StreamTV Europe. “They want to get bigger than what they are, even if they’re huge on YouTube. For expanding audiences, creators are building the brands for Gen Z and beyond.”
Moving beyond a marketing mindset.
Owned by All3Media, Little Dot Studios is among the leading social agencies operating in the international landscape, and one of the most well-established.
“For the last 14 years, we’ve been trying to bring people on the journey to change their perception of YouTube and social and how you can utilize it more than like a marketing platform,” said James Loveridge, who jointly leads a team overseeing social strategy, production, and paid media for a range of big-name clients, managing over 1,000 social channels and generating 11.2 billion monthly organic views.
Not everyone is along for the ride, Loveridge said. “The mindset shift piece is interesting, because there are still pockets in legacy media that see it as a competitor, or it’s a place just to drop trailers.”
Embrace the language of social, not just the platform.
“Lean in” is the key message from many social media optimizers. As in, work with those who have skill sets best suited to this ecosystem.
“Engage with creators and make original content,” Loveridge said. From there, there’s an opportunity to “make original digital formats and repeatable formats.”
You can’t just dump a library on social video and expect it to get discovered.
“The content that you have might be great, but if you don’t put the same amount of focus on the optimization and the packaging and the analysis and the distribution strategy, then it’s just going to get lost,” said Loveridge. “There is an infinite amount of content being uploaded onto these platforms every single second. So you need to make sure that you package it effectively and put as much focus on that strategy as you do the content itself.”
Don’t be Dad at the disco.
That subhead comes from interesting insights from Dominic Smales at GloMotion Studios/WinnieWood at MIP London. The “first wave” of the creator economy, he said, “was done on zero money at all, and they did it really in a very agile way that made a lot of commercial sense. We’re getting to a point where it’s going to be an awkward evolution as the money comes in. There are oceans of cash being spent all over the place [in SVOD], but the audience is getting less and less engaged. The new generations of audience are with [creators] who have done it with zero money. It’s two currents. crashing together in the ocean.”
As such, you can’t win by spending “£50 million on a YouTube video. It’s not about that. It’s about lending the skills and the craft that have made the legacy entertainment industry so successful up to this point to this new generation of talent and distribution platforms that are reaching audiences in a new generation—but trying to do it in a non-dad-at-the-disco way.”
“The idea initially, when creators and television networks were meeting, starting in the earlier days of YouTube, was, this creator has X million followers, we’re going to bring them into our studio system, and they’re going to suddenly become TV stars,” Briskman said. “That, not surprisingly, does not have a huge amount of success.”
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