Dhar Mann Wants to Make Shows With a Few Big Brands
Plus, something seems to be wrong with CTV
First, a quick note on the connected TV advertising market - where exactly is the boom?
In case you missed it, Madison and Wall reported last week, based on its analysis, that connected TV ad spending climbed 4.4% during Q2.
That’s not exactly bad (ask newspapers if they’d take 4% growth), but for ad revenue to be climbing at a clip that’s just a little better than GDP, feels like a big letdown in a category that is supposedly exploding. Consider that eMarketer had predicted 15% growth for this year, while the IAB reported that more than two-thirds of brands consider CTV a “must buy.”
Then, throw in the fact that nearly every TV ad seller is touting the coming wave of new dollars from DTC and SMB brands that are surely coming into the medium; that was the stated rationale behind Magnite’s acquisition of streamr.ai. last week.
So where’s the new TV money exactly? “There’s never been much evidence that CTV was net expansionary,” said analyst Brian Wieser.
Yikes!
Time to Mann Up CMOs
In the meantime, I’ve been writing a lot lately about the need for brands, agencies and tech companies to help figure out how to scale creator ad spending faster.
The thinking is, more dollars clearly need to flow to this sector - but it’s just not that easy to scale in an ad category that is known for (and its strength is in) its authenticity and customization. eMarketer’s Jasmine Endberg has been writing a lot about this.
So someone needs to figure out an infrustructure and a means of pumping out way more creator brand executions at a high volume and speed for the medium to work - right?
Or, maybe it’s the other way around?
It might be that in the new creator studio era - as dubbed by former Whalar CEO Neil Waller, brands may need to narrow down their list of creator partners - and go deep, instead or blasting out messages through tons of brand integrations.
That’s in part because individual creators are likely to push for larger deals - and increasingly have the leverage to do to so.
"This business sort of grew up in the ‘creator needs some money to make a video’ era,” said Sean Atkins, CEO of Dhar Mann Studios, one of the biggest creator-founded media companies.
In the recent past, creators would “beg a brand to give them some money. They make something and they kind of just keep going down the way,” said the former MTV exec Atkins .
“Now, creators don't need that as much anymore. That sort of ‘transactional creators are a commodity’ still sits in that system, but creators are not that open to it anymore because it's not true to the authenticity of their audience…In this new creator world, creators are a TV network and a social good platform and a comms platform,” he added.
I had both Atkins, and his boss, founder Dhar Mann himself, on the Next in Media podcast this week. If you don’t know Mann’s work, he’s one of the biggest YouTubers in the world. And what makes his work distinctive, among several things, is that he produces loads of scripted shows on YouTube for a young/family audience.
Mann talked very openly about the fact that to date, he hadn’t needed to rely much on small brand integrations to build out his company. But now as he’s becoming bigger, and his studio is representing multiple top creators, Mann is pushing for high level brand partnerships - in part because that’s what marketers are looking for, he says - instead of just reaching a creator’s audience with ads.
“In a recent conversation that I had with the CMO of a major financial institution, they're said, ‘Dhar, we are so tired of having to rent our audiences all the time by paying in order to get viewership and engagement,’” Mann said.
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“I think a lot of marketing executives are feeling that paid media and earned media are no longer working the way that they once were,” Mann added. “People are just waiting to hit the skip button for an ad that's popping up on whatever they're watching. So instead, brands are much more interested in owned media. How do I actually own the content? How do I actually own the audiences?”
Of course, it’s not as though brands haven’t tried to make their own digital series, or become ‘creators’ in their own right. But as Mann put it, “they don't really have the infrastructure or the DNA create content that's gonna get a lot of views and carry out their brand mission successfully.”
“So we're talking with one of the biggest home improvement retailers in the world, we're talking with one of the largest cosmetic companies in the world about co-developing a studio together where we support them creating content that they actually own and build their own audience. So I think that's one trend that we're gonna see.”
While I’m dying to know which brands Mann is talking about here, one challenge this concept would seem to entail: do you want to put all your eggs in one creative basket? Wouldn’t such a cosmetic brand or home improvement company risk burning out a creator’s audience if they went all in with a Mann or some other top YouTuber?
I suppose it depends on how original, and compelling said content would be. Mann’s description of this his approach sounds not unlike a classic media/advertising model - wait for it - soap operas. There was a time when giant brands like Procter and Gamble produced and owned shows like “Another World.”
In this case, brands would be both producing shows with creators, and developing/nurturing fandoms - something soap operas never touched.
Regardless, if Mann’s theory proves to be true, it likely means that marketers and their media agencies will need to seriously up their creative metabolisms - and their approval processes.
“We have the ability to do that because we move at a scale that scripted content has never moved at,” Mann said. “We're actually on a 21-day cycle from script to screen. So we can actually move in real time for the first time ever where if things are trending culturally or on social media.”
“I think that's ultimately where it's going to evolve - a CMO is going to have their three to five creators that essentially, can just pick up the phone and be like, ‘I got a crisis, can you do something?’ Or ‘we got a new product launching, can you do something?’ And they'll just sort of be part of the ecosystem.”
One last thought
YouTube accounts for upwards of 11% of all TV viewing. And we just talked about the massive scale and influence of creators. So isn’t a little odd that neither YouTube, nor creators, had any sort of presence during the Emmys the other night? I’m not saying that PewDiePie should have presented a lifetime achievement award to the Chocolate Rain guy - but maybe some nod to this universe would have been appropriate?