Latest / Brighter Path: Data, Marketing, Entertainment, and Storytelling / What Created in LA Revealed About the Future of Creators and Disney

Transcript

What Created in LA Revealed About the Future of Creators and Disney · Brighter Path: Data, Marketing, Entertainment, and Storytelling

• 0:00
  Stories to, to, to all parts of the world in different forms.
• 0:04
  That's what Wall did. Absolutely unafraid.
• 0:07
  He was one of those zero to 1 people and and changed the world
• 0:12
  in many ways. And here we are today.
• 0:14
  I got a room full of really cool people with amazing stories who
• 0:18
  are unafraid or entering this this brand new space of
• 0:21
  storytelling. I think one of the most outdated
• 0:24
  questions in entertainment right now is when does the creator
• 0:27
  become real media? After following the last two
• 0:30
  days of Created in Lai think the more useful question is what
• 0:34
  happens when the way creators build audiences starts moving
• 0:37
  deeper into the entertainment system itself.
• 0:39
  That is what made this event interesting to me.
• 0:41
  Created in LA, put together by John Yushai with Disney, brought
• 0:45
  more than 350 creators, storytellers and executives
• 0:48
  together. But the structure of the event
• 0:50
  said almost as much as the sessions did.
• 0:53
  Day one was at the El Capitan Theatre.
• 0:55
  Day 2 moved on to the Walt Disney Studio slot.
• 0:58
  One day gave creator work the kind of treatment Hollywood has
• 1:01
  historically reserved for films. The next focused much more on
• 1:05
  how creator LED businesses actually work, how they build
• 1:08
  repeat audiences, and what happens when those skills start
• 1:11
  connecting with a company like Disney.
• 1:13
  Day one started with something that sounds symbolic, but I
• 1:16
  think matters. For the first time in the El
• 1:19
  Capitan's 100 year history, creator videos were given a red
• 1:22
  carpet premiere. There, Styx premiered the
• 1:25
  Technoblade movie and Zach King screened his handmade cardboard
• 1:28
  Star Wars satire. These are projects that would
• 1:31
  normally reach audiences through YouTube or a phone now sitting
• 1:34
  inside one of Hollywood's most recognizable premier venues.
• 1:37
  The interesting part was not simply putting YouTube on a
• 1:40
  movie screen, it was what the change in context said about
• 1:43
  status. Hollywood has spent years
• 1:45
  putting creator content in a somewhat separate lane, often
• 1:48
  connected to marketing younger audiences or talent discovery.
• 1:52
  At the El Capitan, the work itself was being presented as
• 1:55
  entertainment worthy of the same room.
• 1:58
  Dana Walden made a point that gets closer to why this matters.
• 2:01
  She talked about how intimately creators know their audiences,
• 2:04
  how constantly they hear from them, and how quickly they can
• 2:07
  adjust based on what those audiences are doing.
• 2:09
  A movie or television series can spend years moving from an idea
• 2:13
  to an audience. A creator can publish something
• 2:16
  and begin getting that feedback almost immediately.
• 2:19
  That difference in speed does more than change production, it
• 2:22
  changes the relationship between audience and creative.
• 2:25
  Creators learn where someone enters a story, where interest
• 2:28
  falls away, which characters or ideas travel, what people want
• 2:31
  more of, and what gives somebody a reason to return.
• 2:34
  Over time, they are effectively running thousands of small
• 2:37
  audience experiments in public. That is why I think the value of
• 2:41
  creators to entertainment companies is becoming much
• 2:43
  broader than reach. Of course, a creator with
• 2:45
  millions of followers brings distribution, but there is also
• 2:48
  a huge amount of audience intelligence sitting behind that
• 2:51
  audience. They have been learning
• 2:53
  packaging, retention, community feedback, and iteration every
• 2:57
  time they publish. Then Day 2 moved on to the
• 2:59
  Disney lot and a lot of those ideas became much more practical
• 3:02
  because creators started breaking down exactly how they
• 3:05
  operate. Zach King talked about pressure
• 3:08
  testing ideas before going deep into production.
• 3:11
  His process includes what he calls a tea test built around a
• 3:15
  basic title, concept, and visual before the idea moves further.
• 3:19
  I like that because it shows how early audience consideration
• 3:22
  enters the process. Packaging is already part of the
• 3:25
  creative thinking. The question of why somebody
• 3:28
  would choose to watch cannot be something that only gets
• 3:30
  discussed when the marketing campaign starts.
• 3:33
  For creators, that decision has to work much earlier, because
• 3:36
  the title, thumbnail, visual or opening idea may determine
• 3:39
  whether the audience ever gives the story a chance.
• 3:42
  Jenny Hoyos pushed that even further in her session.
• 3:45
  What are You? Thinking I thought she was going
• 3:47
  to come on here to talk about how she has over 15,000,000
• 3:51
  followers and how she's on over 10 billion views and how she's
• 3:55
  worked with some of the biggest brands and some of the biggest
• 3:57
  creators. Her rule was pretty direct.
• 4:00
  If you don't have a good hook, don't make the video.
• 4:03
  I would not take that as every movie series or video suddenly
• 4:06
  needing some loud 5 second stunt.
• 4:08
  What I found more useful was the discipline behind it.
• 4:11
  Before investing time and money into making something, she is
• 4:14
  forcing herself to answer a very basic audience question.
• 4:17
  Why should someone care enough to stay?
• 4:20
  That puts audience psychology inside the creative process
• 4:23
  instead of treating it as a measurement you look at once the
• 4:25
  content has already been released.
• 4:27
  The Try Guys approach the same challenge from another
• 4:30
  direction. Their session was about making
• 4:31
  shows rather than individual videos, and they talked about
• 4:34
  their this but that approach where they begin with a format
• 4:37
  or behavior people already understand and then add the
• 4:40
  element that makes it distinctly theirs.
• 4:42
  That shift from individual videos to recognizable formats
• 4:46
  is important. A video can generate attention
• 4:48
  once a format can start creating repeat behavior because people
• 4:52
  understand what they are coming back for.
• 4:54
  Once that happens, the business changes too.
• 4:56
  You can program around a format, build talent around it, extend
• 5:00
  it into live experiences, subscriptions or products, and
• 5:03
  begin creating franchises inside a creator LED company.
• 5:06
  Jordan Matter gave another version of that story.
• 5:08
  He focused on the jump from someone watching content to
• 5:11
  someone becoming enough of a fan to physically show up, including
• 5:14
  a meet up with Salish that drew 87,000 people.
• 5:17
  That is where I would separate audience scale from audience
• 5:20
  movement. A view tells us somebody watched
• 5:23
  somebody leaving their house and attending an event tells us the
• 5:25
  relationship moved into a completely different behavior.
• 5:28
  That is a much stronger expression of fandom, and it
• 5:31
  starts to show why direct audience relationships can
• 5:33
  become valuable well beyond the platform where the relationship
• 5:36
  originally started. Then you had Darman and Dude
• 5:39
  Perfect, which takes the conversation into
• 5:41
  infrastructure. Darman is working out of a
• 5:43
  125,000 square foot studio with more than 65 sets and multiple
• 5:48
  production crews, creating content at a pace that would
• 5:50
  look unusual inside a traditional production model.
• 5:53
  Dude Perfect has spent 17 years building around essentially the
• 5:56
  same core group while expanding into a much larger company
• 5:59
  headquarters, live experiences, and other businesses.
• 6:02
  At that point, content creator starts feeling a little too
• 6:05
  narrow. These are media companies with
• 6:07
  their own development processes, production systems,
• 6:10
  distribution, and direct relationships with their
• 6:12
  audiences. And then Disney connected a lot
• 6:15
  of this thinking back into its own business.
• 6:17
  Asad Ayaz talked about pathways that can take creators into
• 6:20
  Disney campaigns, scripted series and films, while also
• 6:23
  pointing toward opportunities around major franchises, parks,
• 6:26
  cruises, live events and some of the company's biggest cultural
• 6:30
  platforms. We've worked with creators for
• 6:32
  years across every part of Disney, and this year, creator
• 6:36
  content featuring Disney and our brands has generated more than
• 6:39
  52 billion views. But I think there's a much
• 6:43
  bigger opportunity here. We want to bring you in earlier
• 6:47
  to understand what your fans care about and shape ideas with
• 6:52
  you. And because everyone in this
• 6:55
  room is building something different, there isn't one way
• 6:58
  that relationship has to start. That opens a much broader role
• 7:02
  for creators than bringing someone in during the final
• 7:04
  weeks before a movie opens. A creator can potentially become
• 7:07
  part of how an audience discovers a franchise, spends
• 7:10
  time with it between major releases, and moves into other
• 7:12
  parts of the Disney experience. Disney's TikTok relationship
• 7:15
  makes the distribution side of this especially interesting.
• 7:18
  Participating creators can make Disney focused content that
• 7:21
  lives on TikTok and can also appear inside verts on Disney
• 7:24
  Plus. Think about that movement for a
• 7:26
  second. Creator content produced outside
• 7:28
  Disney's traditional studio system can become part of the
• 7:30
  experience inside Disney's own streaming product.
• 7:33
  That creates a very different connection between fan
• 7:36
  creativity, social discovery, and a studio owned platform,
• 7:40
  especially when those videos are sitting alongside IP from
• 7:43
  Marvel, Pixar, Star Wars and other Disney brands.
• 7:47
  There is already evidence that some creators can move even
• 7:49
  further upstream. During the same week as Created
• 7:52
  in LA, Disney announced a development deal with Like
• 7:55
  Nastia that includes an original animated preschool series for
• 7:58
  Disney Junior and Disney Plus, potential live action projects,
• 8:01
  and a curated collection of existing content for Disney
• 8:04
  Platforms. Disney has also been developing
• 8:07
  relationships with creator LED businesses including Darman
• 8:10
  Studios and Gracie's Corner. So when the conversation at
• 8:13
  Created in LA moves toward creators working on series,
• 8:16
  films, and larger projects, there are already examples of
• 8:19
  that bridge being built. That is where the two days
• 8:22
  really connected for me. Day one gave creator work
• 8:24
  recognition inside a space historically associated with
• 8:27
  Hollywood premieres. Day 2 showed the capability
• 8:30
  underneath that work, how creators develop ideas, compete
• 8:33
  for attention, build repeatable formats, create fandom, learn
• 8:36
  from audiences, and eventually put real production and business
• 8:39
  infrastructure around it. And there is value flowing in
• 8:42
  both directions. Traditional entertainment
• 8:44
  companies have decades of experience building characters
• 8:47
  and stories that can live across generations, products,
• 8:50
  experiences, and platforms. Creators operate much closer to
• 8:54
  the audience feedback loop, where packaging, retention,
• 8:56
  community, and iteration affect performance every day.
• 9:00
  I think the most interesting work will happen when those
• 9:02
  strengths begin working together without trying to make one side
• 9:05
  operate exactly like the other. Creators do not need to become
• 9:08
  smaller versions of Hollywood studios, and Hollywood does not
• 9:11
  need to start designing every piece of entertainment around a
• 9:14
  YouTube retention graph. But there is a lot each side
• 9:17
  understands that the other increasingly needs.
• 9:20
  There is also a lesson here for creators themselves.
• 9:23
  Reach is becoming easier to lose as a competitive advantage.
• 9:26
  Platforms change, algorithms change, and somebody new can
• 9:29
  capture attention very quickly. The more durable businesses are
• 9:33
  learning how to turn that attention into something
• 9:35
  audiences recognize and return to, whether that is a show, a
• 9:38
  character, a format, a community and experience, a product, or
• 9:42
  eventually a library of IP that has value outside the feed where
• 9:46
  it started. That is a very different
• 9:48
  ambition from chasing the next viral video for entertainment
• 9:51
  companies. I think the role of creators is
• 9:53
  changing just as much. A creator can increasingly
• 9:56
  become an audience entry point into a story, franchise or
• 10:00
  brand. They can help create adjacent
• 10:02
  formats, bring established communities into the experience,
• 10:05
  extend the life of a franchise between major tent poles, and in
• 10:08
  some cases become the source of the IP itself.
• 10:12
  Monica Kahn has been describing Disney's recent moves as
• 10:14
  something closer to building a creator supply chain, and I
• 10:17
  think that is a useful frame here.
• 10:19
  Look across content sharing, relationships, commissions,
• 10:22
  development deals, and now an event deliberately putting
• 10:24
  hundreds of creators into the same rooms as Disney leadership
• 10:27
  and those moves start connecting.
• 10:30
  That is probably what I will remember most from Created in
• 10:32
  LA. John and the team did something
• 10:34
  smart with the two day format because they did not Simply put
• 10:37
  Hollywood executives on stage to explain Hollywood to creators.
• 10:41
  They also gave creators room to show what their own system has
• 10:43
  learned about audiences, storytelling and building
• 10:46
  businesses. The El Capitan showed how much
• 10:48
  the status around creator LED entertainment has changed.
• 10:52
  The Disney lot showed why the question now feels less like
• 10:55
  whether creators belong inside the entertainment business.
• 10:58
  They are already building entertainment businesses of
• 11:00
  their own. What gets much more interesting
• 11:02
  from here is what happens as creators become part of how
• 11:04
  entertainment is developed, packaged, distributed, and
• 11:07
  experienced. While traditional entertainment
• 11:09
  companies begin using some of the audience intelligence that
• 11:12
  creators have spent years learning in public, Created in
• 11:14
  LA gave us a pretty good look at what that next relationship
• 11:17
  could become.