Month: February 2021

In the time of coronavirus, however, studios vying for votes are leaning more on trade publications like Variety, TheWrap, The Hollywood Reporter and Deadline (the later two declined to comment for the story) and publications with a Hollywood-focus like the Los Angeles Times, to promote the projects they hope will win anything from best picture at the Academy Awards to outstanding lead actor or actress in a comedy series at the Emmys.

“The live, in-person piece is critical to the race,” said Sharon Waxman, CEO and editor-in-chief of TheWrap, adding that it’s an opportunity for voters to exchange ideas before casting votes. But as that cannot safely happen right now, “trade publications are much more important in the award space this year,” she said.

Publishers are hosting the virtual events to facilitate those conversations online. But this year, the custom campaigns on all mediums from podcasts to print inserts are designed to capture the valuable voter eyeballs pursued by the swarms of online content published during the pandemic.

“The amount of shows vying for your attention has increased, forcing advertising to extend from a timeframe perspective and also experiment with new ways to engage the audience,” said the Los Angeles Times’ chief revenue officer Josh Brandau. “The need [for content] to be stickier has never been more necessary.”

In January, TheWrap hosted 40 virtual film screenings for film studio advertising clients, none of which had fewer than 20,000 people on the live streams, Waxman said. Not all of the viewers were voters, she said, but the online events had a much larger scale than any of the traditionally staged in-person events would be able to host. 

In addition to virtual events, Waxman said that FYC campaigns also include digital advertising for the site’s editorial awards, which represents a larger portion of the publisher’s FYC revenue than the virtual events. Waxman would not disclose the exact amount of revenue FYC advertising brings in for the company.

Usually the fourth quarter is a bigger time for spend in the FYC category, Waxman said. But with the Oscars getting pushed back two months, spend on awards promotion did not truly start until January. “Everyone is having a great Q1 for sure,” she added. 

Though Variety is one of three major Hollywood trades owned by Penske Media (THR and Deadline are the other two), it is the only brand with a content studio, which it launched in 2017, according to CMO Dea Lawrence. And the studio has played a special role in Variety’s FYC content business this year, allowing it to do extensive print and digital advertorial projects, including building a landing site and a digital and print content package for Amazon’s “One Night in Miami…” that ended up being the most multifaceted deal the content studio has done in the FYC category to date.

Lawrence would not disclose the total number of FYC campaigns that Variety ran in the 2019/2020 awards season versus this season. David Cohen, the senior producer of Variety Content Studio, said, however, that last season the content studio sold four FYC branded content campaigns and this year it has sold two so far, with about two months to go before the Oscars.

What’s also different about this year is that a lot of the spend is coming from streaming-based studios. Netflix and Amazon have been “consistently big spenders” in the FYC category, according to the Los Angeles Times’ Brandau. Both Variety and TheWrap also noted that they have seen more spending coming from production companies including Apple TV+ and HBO Max.

Studios, like Warner Brothers and Paramount, that rely on theaters for audience engagement, have rescheduled releases to when films can have a safer theatrical debut, leaving fewer contenders for FYC campaigns. The pandemic has also limited the number of shows and movies that were able to be in production, Lawrence said, and therefore, there are fewer competing for awards and fewer spending on campaigns.

The Los Angeles Times’s focus this year was extending partnerships with studios — from launch campaigns to FYC campaigns, according to Brandau.

For example, the LA Times started a branded content push around Apple TV+’s comedy series “Ted Lasso” nine months ago when it premiered. Rather than just returning to that partnership during awards season, Brandau said his team and Apple continually ran ads for that show throughout the year in order to keep it fresh in voters’ and viewers’ minds.

He expects the award season window to look different in future years to include more evergreen branded content that falls within the FYC category, but is engaging enough that it can serve as an advertising tactic for non-voter readers later in the year as well.

One executive who is familiar with how FYC brand deals are conducted but asked to remain anonymous said that the prime clients that buy custom content campaigns during award season are the cusp films and shows that know they are not shoo-ins.

“The films that think ‘We’re bound to be nominated for best picture for all the awards we want,’ they don’t buy custom content,” the executive said. “And the films that know they do not have a chance at winning only buy if they have another agenda, like talent relations; they may have contracts with talent that require them to put a full effort into a campaign.”

FYC campaigns have positive correlations to earning awards, however. Last year, 40 of Variety’s clients earned an award nomination and 14 won an award, according to Variety’s Cohen.

The company is positioning itself more like a Vice than a Barcelona F.C in the sense that as much as it has an esports team, it wants to be an entertainment business. It’s not a new ambition. In fact, FaZe Clan has been working toward this goal for the last six years. There’s just a lot more pressure on the company to stick the landing now. 

“Esports isn’t a lucrative business in the near term,” said FaZe Clan CEO Lee Trink. “That may change in the long-term, but for now the climate remains challenging.”

Digiday caught up with the former record label exec to hear why there’s trouble ahead for esports, how FaZe Clan has hedged against those issues and how he sees the business evolving over the next few years. 

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

Where do FaZe Clan’s content ambitions come from? 

It can be traced back to the period when FaZe Clan started to take off 10 years ago when the early founders and team members turned the cameras on themselves and filmed things like the trick shots [in Call of Duty games]. It created an intense fandom around FaZe Clan and was cool at a moment when gamers weren’t necessarily. When I joined six years ago from the entertainment world, it seemed like the logical conclusion to take what we’re known for and accelerate that everywhere to a point where we’re in all forms of content, whether that’s a 30-second video on TikTok to a two hour film. If the audience likes it then there’s value in it. As an organization, we have permission from our fans to go deeper into content. 

Why is there so much pressure on building out the content side of the business? 

Esports is challenging right now in the sense that it’s hard to look at it from an ROI perspective. So we have to lean into content. We have the ability to take parts of the pie away from traditional players [in entertainment] given the attrition of audiences that’s happening across the industry, whether that’s film, american football or linear TV. To get out of this situation, those businesses have to spend significant money on coming up with concepts —and that’s before they know whether anyone will even care about it. History is littered with examples of entertainment companies having high hopes, spending big to realize them and then suffering huge failures. It means the hits have to pay for the misses. In contrast, we can create content inexpensively, bring it to market quickly in front of a huge audience. Effectively, we’re able to test whether these creative concepts resonate with our fans. And if we have real success then we can go and create a long-form series on the back of the concept and sell it. It’s a competitive advantage for us in esports and gaming because we have a disproportionately large market.  

Are you selling a lot of the content you produce now? 

We sell content, but it’s an area we’re just getting warmed up in. We recently poached the NFL’s head of content with the aim to supercharge what we’ve been building here so that we can build a team who can take a lot more of what we create to market. We’re looking at podcasts, films, short- and long-form properties as well as documentaries. These are projects that we feel we have permission from our audience to do. The goal is IP creation and to continue to build out our content on our channels for content that we can sell multiple times worldwide. This is about gaming as entertainment and esports is a segment of that. It’s the live professional, competitive side of it which is a smaller, albeit important, piece of the pie when it comes to time spent on gaming. 

Is there appetite from traditional media owners for gaming content?

The popularity of gaming over the last year has definitely increased the tension around content like ours. But i don’t think the traditional media has gotten the memo about the shift that’s happening around gaming. It’s a hard thing to grasp when you’re one step removed from the audience. The problem is that the bottom is going to drop out of this part of the market in a few years because every generation, including the one really connecting with gaming content, has a shift in the way they act and what they like. We have the advantage that what’s happening in the marketplace is funneling more people to us and our content. 

FaZe Clan recently signed a deal with talent agency UTA. How does that help realize your plans? 

In many ways, the deal is an exploration of what’s going to be possible when it comes to allowing us to do more deals in smarter ways. It benefits in three main ways. The first is market intelligence in the sense that UTA has a lot more deal flow than we do so the insights we can get from working with them is key. The second is UTA is able to augment who we’re able to talk to because of the relationships the agency has. Finally, they can play a more traditional agency role for us if we were to launch a film or create a series, for example.