Spotting Winners - Picking Winning Shows/Movies is Easy, Follow the Audience

“When we first started out, it was so good; w-we had fun. And... and then you started in on the clothes. Well, I'll wear the darn clothes if you want me to, if, if you'll just, just like me.” – Judy, “Vertigo,” Paramount, 1958

Sometimes we wonder why folks in the theater/home entertainment industry are so worried about/can’t wait for AI.

Yeah, we know studios, networks and streamers want to dig deep and discover those gems that will get people in their seats – movie house or home – and get them to keep coming back for more.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to determine what resonates with people and then give them more with a slightly different wrinkle.  

Did you fall all over yourself to get in line to see Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes?

You knew – we’re pretty sure – it was going to be good because most of the earlier ape planet films (we’re now at 10) were good and each one was better, more “real” than the last.

Okay, you may have waited till Disney added it to the Disney+ roster and may have signed up for the service just to watch it at home.

Actually, you signed up for Disney + before that so you could watch as many of the past Apes projects as possible just to “brush up.”

John is Back – Good franchise projects like John Wick, Planet of the Apes and Mad Max don’t just happen; but when they do, people can’t wait to catch the latest chapter.  Of course, we’ll wait till they stream.  

You couldn’t wait to see John Wick 4 because you’d seen/rewatched the earlier three and honestly can’t wait to see Keanu Reeves again in Matrix 4 because he was great in the first one. It set a new standard and WBD has already said there will be a fifth installment.  

Furiosa was another in a long line of Mad Max films. Barbenheimer?

Surprises – Okay, maybe Barbie and Oppenheimer didn’t surprise many folks; but fortunately, they lived up to their pre-theater release hype.

They were anomalies with Barbie really clicking with 50 percent of the population and Oppenheimer.  Well, you only need one big bomb to be dropped.

Taylor Swift filled outdoor venues around the globe then bypassed the studios and went directly to theaters with her Taylor Swift The Eras Tour. It racked up more than $100M and became the most profitable concert movie…ever.

Beyonce’s Renaissance sold nearly $50M of tickets and that was before she went back to her Texas roots to add country western -  Cowboy Carter - to her R&B singing repertoire.

Billy Joel and Bruce “The Boss” Springsteen had their respective Met and Broadway concerts captured and shown by streamers.

Yes, concert films are back and could really supplement the modest growth for theaters and make up for the volume of people who never did/probably never will go “to” a movie given all of their home entertainment options.

For many of the Gen Alpha/Z and Millennials, the films are the only way they are able to see the concerts.

But films, especially expensive ones, still need to get box office exposure if they’re going to provide a positive effect on the studios bottom-line.  

They need to be made available to the dwindling number of people who still spend time/money to “experience” a movie in the theater. Not just in the Americas but around the globe, especially China which is the world’s second largest film market behind the Americas.

But let’s be brutally honest, the biggest market is really the home viewing market where people spend most of their entertainment time and where companies want a decent chunk of your entertainment time.

And if you hit this year’s Upfronts in NYC – it’s where broadcasters, networks and streamers tout all that glitters to marketers and ad agencies – and you’ll obviously notice that lots of folks were interested in you and your viewing habits.

Dogg n’ Pony – Snoop Dogg pulled double duty at this year’s advertising upfronts giving NBC some personality and levity as he promoted his ambassadorship at this year's Paris Olympics.  

NBC highlighted Dick Wolf’s Chicago trilogy – Med, Fire, P.D., Justice – and Law & Order group – Law & Order, SVU, Criminal Intent.

CBS paraded its audience-holding series – FBI, Most Wanted and International as well as the refreshed NCIS series – NCIS, Tony & Ziva, Sydney, Origins – while New Orleans, LA and Hawaii are available as reruns.

The pay TV folks leaned heavily on their scripted and unscripted franchises and their large and long-standing audiences.

Loyal – During the week of advertising upfronts, marketers were reminded that the networks had a wide number of series that have been on the air for as many as 20 years.  It was long enough for one Law & Order SVU fan to demonstrate her loyalty to the show by sporting her special tattoo.  

You have to admit when a project has a 20-year history of connecting with folks around the country, maybe Mark Twain was right when he wrote, “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”

The big problem is that tracking and rating services haven’t figured out how to measure, quantify/qualify all of the home viewing options yet.

The services and content providers have been so busy establishing new names and new viewing opportunities that they have no clue where each of the entertainment delivery services are in the eyeball race.

You have Pay TV, SVOD, AVOD, FAST, bundlers, rebundlers, vMVPDs, smart TVers, social media and players yet to be named that have viewer numbers and value yet to be determined.

Everyone is seemingly changing their tune to “prove” they can deliver the show environment advertisers need to sell folks stuff.

It seems like only yesterday services were touting how they were out there doing a helluva job building their subscriber bases.

Netflix has been the streamer that everyone has been chasing and even Disney’s CEO Bob Iger said the company over-invested in streaming content to catch/surpass the streaming leaders Netflix and Prime Video.

But almost before he had finished praising Netflix for engaging users with appealing content, Nielsen announced that Disney had the biggest share of TV viewers period.

Eyeballs Are Eyeballs – Nielsen seems to be trying to treat all video content viewing as the same but comparing short videos to real creative work seems to fail about everyone in the industry.  

Yep, according to their rankings across every home entertainment segment (streaming, cable, broadcast), the mouse house was the place where most viewers spent their time watching … stuff.

Great - just f***in great – and you know that really irritated Ted (Sandaros) and Greg (Peters), Netflix co-CEOs.  

That was bad, but even worse for the two was Nielsen’s “factual finding” that Google’s YouTube was a solid number two for eyeballs.

Out of seemingly no where, the social video folks were well ensconced in the number two position.

Okay, so you don’t know if there were folks who were getting their entertainment from YouTube TV or YouTube regular; but from the measuring firm’s TV viewing perspective, it didn’t matter … eyeballs are eyeballs.

So what?

We have nothing against the YouTube folks, but over half of the content folks watch there is 30 sec – 2 min long.

It’s where we go if we want to understand how to fix something or see if we really want to buy/use something.

It’s where a friend of ours goes to get his cat video fix.

It’s where gaming friends go to learn new tricks/work arounds for their game play.

It’s where our kids go to watch other kids do dumb (stupid) tricks.

It’s where our wife goes to learn about new recipes, hair styles and make-up she may want to consider (we’re happy with her just the way she is).

It sure as h*** isn’t where anyone – at least in our family – goes to watch a movie or show for an hour or two.

If Nielsen is going to include YouTube, where are TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram and the other social media video apps?

We have nothing against these folks because we know Gen Alpha/Z folks hop in and out of them all the time.

In fact, real entertainment organizations – cable, broadcast, streaming – use them all of the time to promote their shows and movies.

But comparing the viewership value of Disney, Netflix, ABC, Fox, Roku or Tubi with them is really...

In addition, studios and streamers know that to attract subscribers, viewers – and advertisers – they need to invest in the creation of content…quality content and lots of it.  

Steady Investment – Streamers and studios will continue to invest in film and show projects in the Americas and globally to attract more subscribers.  

No, Disney didn’t pump more dollars into its traditional TV activities (ABC, Hulu) but they are sticking with what works and are focusing a lot of attention on the service – Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+ - that can provide increased consumer engagement (subscribers).

The Disney folks are pretty sure they now have the organization’s team focused on the stuff that will help them tomorrow.

Of course, joining forces with the frenemies at WBD to offer a better, richer content delivery solution may also help if the price of the enhanced bundle is attractively priced.

Iger understands the creative and consumer sides a little better than WBD’s David Zaslav; who, a while back, noted that the company’s content was more valuable to consumers, and they’d gladly pay a few dollars more.

We’ll see …

Even when they’re offering advertising opportunities, Netflix still emphasized that it wanted its films/shows to have primacy with their 40M global ad-supported audience (270M total).  

But then, when you had folks watch 183B hours of content last year – equal to 21M years – you can probably understand why advertisers wanted their products/services seen in the same audience surroundings.  

And since Netflix averages 4min of ads/hr. that only appear in natural plot breaks that we hardly notice, we admit, we actually like ads. 

We’ve been around for a while and know what Judy meant in Vertigo when she said, “Well, I understand, all right. I've been understanding since I was seventeen.”

Good advertising can coexist and benefit from great entertainment.

And when we say great entertainment, we mean quantity and quality.

Sure, AI will be around trying to figure out how those smart creative folks came up with all of those fantastically popular projects.

Sorry, algorithms, they just do.

Andy Marken – andy@markencom.com - is an author of more than 800 articles on management, marketing, communications, industry trends in media & entertainment, consumer electronics, software and applications. An internationally recognized marketing/communications consultant with a broad range of technical and industry expertise especially in storage, storage management and film/video production fields; he has an extended range of relationships with business, industry trade press, online media and industry analysts/consultants.