Going short to go long: The symbiotic relationship between short-form and long-form content
Editor's note: This article is an automated speech-to-text transcription, edited lightly for clarity.
What kind of relationship does short-form content and long-form content have?
In their session at the Quirk’s Event – Virtual Global, Vera Chien and Natasha Hritzuk delve into a study Warner Bros. Discovery conducted to better understand the effects the rise of short-form content has had on long-form content, and the symbiotic relationship they have.
Session transcript
Emily Koenig
Hello and welcome to the session “Going short to go long: The symbiotic relationship between short-form and long-form content.” My name is Emily and I'm an editor at Quirk’s. Before we get started today, let's quickly go over the ways you can participate in our discussion. First, you can use the chat tab to interact with other attendees during the session. Second, you can use the Q&A tab to submit questions for our speakers during the session. This session is presented to you by Warner Brothers Discovery, enjoy the presentation.
Natasha Hritzuk
Hi everyone. Vera and I are very excited to share with you a core piece of research that's part of our broader initiative around how short-form research can be leveraged to enhance a business that's predominantly studio based and delivering long-form TV and movies explicitly. So, let's get started. So this study, I think, like many of the pieces of research that we do in the corporate team at Warner Bros. Discovery is often kicked off when we see something interesting in a press article or in a presentation that is made public in a webinar or by another company that kind of gets us to sort of pause and reflect and think, this is interesting, this may have implications for our business, what do we do with it? So that is really what kicked off this study.
Vera and I and our team do an annual study that was initially called TV Now I think, then we called it Video Now and then we started to realize, oh my gosh, it's not just about TV anymore, it's not even about video anymore. The entertainment landscape is becoming really fragmented. So, we decided this particular year to broaden the study out to look at all different types of entertainment that are adjacent to the heartland of our business and movie viewing.
So, Entertainment Now was run, and Vera and I are pouring over the results. And the first thing that jumped out at us was that particularly with younger generations, on a positive note, they were consuming and are consuming immense amounts of entertainment content. Nine and a half hours give or take a day are spent consuming content, which doesn't even seem real. How can people be spending that much time on content?
Well, the simple answer is that more and more of their time is spent on what we're considering short-form video as discreet from social media. Both of these are critical platforms that younger generations are engaging with, but the one that really jumped out to us was short-form video. So, the sort of Reels or videos that are being viewed on TikTok, on YouTube, on Instagram Reels and why that out at us is because it's about as close to long-form content as you're going to get across this competitive set. Social media is a bit more text-based, so we accepted it, we put it aside, we're monitoring it, but the short-form video thing really kind of stuck in our stuck in our brains and we thought, so streaming is still fairly saturated, but we really need to understand what's going on with this growing chunk of time being spent viewing entertainment-based videos on these short-form platforms.
So again, we were very heartened to see that streaming is still being engaged. Streaming is still an engaging behavior for younger generations. They're still spending time on streaming. But I think again, what we really needed to understand is, is this kind of a glass ceiling? Should we expect year-on-year that this chunk of time that these younger generations are spending on streaming content, so TV shows and movies on platforms like HBO Max, going to continue to shrink? And is short-form video going to continue to grow or are there other dynamics that we can pick apart that can help our business understand what's going on here and maybe even understand whether there are different paths that we could light up through the insights for our business to respond to what was going on in the landscape.
When you're dealing with an emerging dynamic, you can't just do a quant study because we didn't really even know what questions to ask at this point. What we tend to do is really, and this is a feature of the corporate research team in particular, we do very multidimensional research. In this instance we thought, well, this is something that's going on specifically with, or it's more attenuated with Gen Z and Millennials, with younger generations. So, we definitely need to deep dive into what's happening with the “younger folk,” but we also need to really start to get under the skin of what short-form video is, what are the different needs it's satisfying, what are the different content formats, how are they connected to long-form viewing.
What this ultimately amounted to is a range of different research approaches. So, we did everything from, not unexpectedly, deep qualitative research with younger generations to understand what they were doing, but also why, we also wanted to of course make sure that what we were seeing in the qual, the patterns that were emerging were validated and scalable behaviors and scalable rationales for the behaviors through quant. But the short-form piece was a little more complicated because ideally what we wanted to understand is, is there a relationship between what's happening in the short-form universe and our world, the world of TV and movies. That led us to light up a bunch of different approaches ranging from using zero-party data. So, zero-party data is permission digital data that enabled us to distill whether there was a correlational or high-level causal relationship between short-form viewing and long-form viewing, whether there was maybe an adverse reaction, the more short-form viewing people are doing, the less they're going to view long-form. And we felt that behavioral data was going to be a really critical starting point for that kind of analysis. And we even used biometric methodologies to understand whether these new content types, not really new but new for us, these really ephemeral videos were causing a different physiological response than other types of content that we're a little bit more familiar with. So, Vera will magically walk you through all of the different results from these studies woven together and give you a lens into what we learned.
Vera Chien
Awesome. Thanks so much, Natasha. Alright, so really we went down two research paths. One to really understand social video, short-form content, and then the other one to understand long-form content i.e., TV shows and movies and really to understand the interplay between the two. So, we'll start off the social media, social video, short-form path with a glimpse into how consumers think about this type of content.
[Video of consumers answering question on attention span in short-form vs long-form content plays.]
Vera Chien
I think all of us can relate to short attention span. So, as you saw one of the slides, Natasha talked about younger audiences, Gen Z, are spending a significant amount of time on social video, specifically YouTube and TikTok. And we know on top of that it plays an incredible role in their lives. So, when we asked this sort of deprivation question, this is how they answered. We saw that YouTube was number one and TikTok was number three. Netflix was able to wedge in as number two. And if you were to add both YouTube and TikTok together, we really are looking at about half of Gen Z saying that social video is sort of their ride or die when it comes to being stuck on a deserted island. And this is why we believe for younger audiences; social media is the new kind of SVOD for them.
Why is that? Well, there's many advantages in their eyes vs. more traditional TV shows in movies. First and foremost, it is very flexible. It can be about any topic. There's a high amount of novelty and in terms of the pacing and the length of it, it is much more conducive to some of those short attention spans you just heard about. There's also much greater accessibility in that type of content. There's much greater diversity of topics of people, communities represented through these videos. Anyone can create, anyone can distribute this kind of content. You're not beholden to a more traditional green light process and there is a belief you can more easily interact, you can DM any of these creators and potentially get a response from them.
Of course, the platforms these videos sit on are just as important. They are equally as flexible. They can be used for many occasions, they're extremely hyper personalized. TikTok is probably the gold standard for that level of personalization. There's also greater accessibility. There is almost no cost of entry and can be used in quite spontaneous situations where you are away from a big TV screen and then an incredible, incredible amount of volume associated with it. One stat is that there's about 30,000 hours of content being uploaded to YouTube every single hour. And for comparison, Netflix has roughly 35,000/40,000 hours of video in totality on their platform. And so you're really looking at about a YouTube's a Netflix worth of content uploaded every hour or two on the likes of YouTube alone. So incredible amount of volume.
Alright, despite that sobering context what Natasha also showed earlier is that audiences and even younger audience are spending at least two hours a day watching TV shows and movies. So obviously we wanted to dig into that as well. And we found that more so than short-form content, TV shows and movies do capture a great amount of attention as well as intention. They are quite intentional about how and when audiences go about watching TV shows and movies. And again, let's hear about this through their own words.
[Video of consumers explaining what kind of content gets their full attention.]
Vera Chien
So you can see here TV shows and movies really do own this quality time that is very important to these audiences. What we've also done through the research on long-form is identify the drivers associated with choosing a TV show or a movie to watch. And we landed on these 14 drivers that ultimately ladder up into four key themes, drivers that involve a familiar surprise, make something bingeable, reputation as well as tonality. And the other thing we'll just sort of call out on this slide is the graphic that we ultimately created to represent these learnings ended up being quite useful and powerful in the sense that it not only summarized obviously the insights but was something that our stakeholders could use over and over again to obviously remember the insights as well, as you'll see later, what are some of the implications for their respective businesses.
But back to sort of the drivers of long-form, the key area where we saw sort of this critical linkage between short-form and long-form is drivers involving reputation. And so, what we saw was that consumers, now more than ever, are driven to watch a TV show or movie based on what they see on social media or social video. This is where they are seeing the positive word of mouth or where they're seeing potentially good reviews or reactions to a show or movie. Then ultimately that creates this sense that a show has strong social presence and is worth watching.
Of course, we cannot forget about trailers too. They have been around forever and if we think about it, they are short in nature and so they are sort of the OG short form that really is still very powerful and effective today in driving people to watch our TV shows and movies. And it is also becoming a place where trailers are living on the likes of YouTube and TikTok as well.
Alright, what we're seeing especially for younger audiences is that social media and social video have become honestly the main source for discovery and engagement. It is the main place they are hearing about not only new TV shows and movies, but just products in general, and that is influencing them to watch something or buy something. The interesting thing is, on top of that, not just driving discovery and engagement, it is oftentimes encouraging them to go back onto some of these platforms and post about their experience or the reaction to watching something or their review of a product that they purchased. So, sort of a great kind of virtuous cycle. And we can see here some of the verbatims from folks in our research that really speak to this symbiotic relationship between short-form and long-form.
Just really quickly, TikTok themselves have also seen evidence of this kind of virtuous cycle in their own data for TV shows and movies. It is now the No. 4 kind of category that is of videos that are on the platform. It has also been a platform that is able to drive discovery to these streaming platforms, specifically HBO Max or Hulu or Disney Plus. And they are more likely to subscribe if they've seen videos about either shows or these platforms. And then once they have either subscribed or watch content on it, they're more likely to post something about it. And again, really share that with then the next crop of viewers that may not be familiar with a show or a platform. So again, fostering this really nice kind of virtuous cycle.
All right, so now that we know that there is this kind of symbiotic relationship between short-form and long-form content, what we did as the next step is how can we leverage short-form, what can we do? How can we create short form that's really going to optimize and help promote our TV shows and movies? And so, what we did was conducted an experiment involving biometrics to give our teams that direction. And this is an example video that we showed as part of that experiment that hopefully many of you're have seen before.
All right, so this is the experimental design as part of our biometrics component of it, we took four of our shows and we found five different short-form formats for each of the shows. What we did with that with respondents was we showed about five minutes worth of these videos. We captured their biometric reactions as they were watching, and then there were a few on app metrics for them to also express their dislike or skip if they really disliked it. And then of course some pre-post survey measures to have some diagnostic data around it.
Once we crunched that data, what did we find? Well, we continue to see that trailers again are working very hard for us. Convenient drive attention and engagement. The metrics that we capture through biometrics are shown on the left here. Gaze tracking is that ghostly blue area where the eye tracking is. We also captured facial expression analysis, i.e., smiling. So, you can see that in the yellow wear and wear in the video, people are smiling. And of course, some of those on app indicators of likes, dislike or skipping. And this is kind of how it looks for the other formats. So, trailers working well. What we also found surprisingly was that scenes also do a good job of driving engagement as well as user impressions. And I'll play just a quick video of an example of that.
[Video of a scene from the show "Friends" plays.]
Vera Chien
These were the types of videos that also garnered really quite high measures in biometrics, highest amount of time people viewed, a high completion rate, this was also substantiated with survey results. People said they were more likely to watch 90 Day Fiance or Ted Lasso after watching these types of formats and they, in general, were more likely to have done this in the past, especially Gen Z. To have watched short-form video and then went on and watched the fuller version on a streaming service or on TV.
Alright, to wrap things up, in addition to the biometrics and all the other components of the research, we again strive to provide recommendations, insights, thought starters. We did that obviously for this research as well. This is a visual example of how we expressed those thought starters that we found to be quite useful. We recycled this wheel graphic to help A. Reinforce the insights and B. Really, again, provide examples on how to activate on each of these specific insights.
And so obviously, as you can tell by now, what we found in our research is that yes, there's absolutely a symbiotic relationship between short-form and long-form content i.e., going short to go long. And so while we learned that we also wanted to, for the purpose of this presentation, kind of reflect back on our learnings as we were going through these research journeys across the various types of methodologies. And from this body of work, there were kind of three takeaways upon the self-reflection.
I think one was that for us, mixed methods, as Natasha talked about, provide really a much better fuller portrait. Each method brings its own strengths and piece of the puzzle, if you will. Next is really taking a dive beyond below the surface and looking for those kind of opportunities and silver linings. When we saw that data initially around share of time, it was frankly quite shocking. And so what we did was really tap into sort of our curiosity and try to look at the glass half full and identify what we can dig into and understand more of to really again, help our businesses take advantage of short-form. And I think we did that quite well. And then lastly, using visual or video or other mechanisms to tell your story, to tell the story of your findings and ideally tailor that to each audience you are presenting to so that not only the insights land, but really the action ability too. And with that, thank you so much for joining our session today. Feel free to drop any questions in the chat and we'd be happy to answer them. Thank you so much.