Brian Robbins, the chief executive of multi-channel network (MCN) AwesomenessTV, clearly knows the value of a punchy soundbite to wake up the audience at a television industry conference.
“Everyone knows that traditional TV viewing for teens and tweens is dead. Not dying. Dead,” Robbins told the audience at the MIPTV conference in Cannes.
“In the US alone, networks like MTV and Nickelodeon have lost that core audience that have traditionally kept them afloat,” he continued. “Everyone knows that content consumption has moved to YouTube, online and mobile.”
Robbins’s was the most bullish pitch yet in a conference that’s seen plenty of bullish pitches from MCNs, with all of them talking up the trend of young viewers abandoning linear television.
There’s a paradox, though. At the same time as telling broadcasters that their audience is melting away, the MCNs are trying to repackage their web shows to sell to those networks. Why? Because TV budgets are still – for now, at least – beefier than advertising revenues on YouTube.
The latter’s economics work well for vloggers and “Let’s Play” gamers, but when companies like AwesomenessTV want to make TV-quality shows, selling them to broadcasters for “traditional” viewing is part of the business model. Even if traditional TV viewing for their anticipated viewers is dead.
Robbins, who remained head of AwesomenessTV after selling the company to DreamWorks Animation in 2013, spent much of his MIPTV appearance talking about this “Generation Z” of teens and tweens.
“In less than three years we’ve become the number one destination on YouTube for teens,” he said of AwesomenessTV, which programmes 25 shows a week for its main channels including dramas and reality shows, but also runs a network of 90,000 vloggers.
“Those channels represent over 100 million subscribers and about a billion video views a month. That doesn’t make us the biggest MCN, for sure, but we own teens – and not just on YouTube,” said Robbins, whose company also makes shows for Nickelodeon and Netflix, is producing six feature films, and has a division that manages famous YouTubers like Tyler Oakley and Ingrid Nilsen.
“Why are we so hyper-focused on one audience? Teens are changing the way every generation before them consumes content, creates content and the way they communicate. Being able to understand and create for this audience means being at the front lines of trends, and being at the front lines of innovation,” said Robbins.
“Generation Z is the most influential audience ever … more so than millennials. Paying attention to Generation Z will ensure that your company or brand will be setting the trends instead of reacting to them.”
Robbins talked about AwesomenessTV’s film ambitions, having topped the iTunes chart in December 2014 with Expelled, a movie starring online star Cameron Dallas that had been shot in 22 days as “a modern-day Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”.
“This film accomplished in four months what it takes most studios four years to do: create a hit movie that resonates with the audience most important to follow,” said Robbins, who also talked up an upcoming film starring musical/comedy band The Janoskians.
“If you don’t know what a Janoskian is, you’re probably already in trouble with Generation Z,” he said. “They have nearly 2m subscribers on YouTube and they just headlined a show at Wembley Arena, which we filmed … It’s Spinal Tap for this generation.”
Robbins was joined on-stage at MIPTV by Meg DeAngelis, one of AwesomenessTV’s stable of online stars, with nearly 2.4 million subscribers to her YouTube channel, which started as clips of cheerleading stunts, and has evolved into a mixture of vlogging and how-to tutorials.
“The more views those videos got, the more subscribers I got, and the more feedback I got about my content. They wanted to know more about my world outside of cheerleading,” said DeAngelis. “I’ve grown from 200,000 or 300,000 subscribers to 2.3 million in the last year, which is kinda huge for me.”
In some respects, AwesomenessTV is following a well-established playbook in how it handles its stars: building their audiences online may be new, but creating TV-style vehicles for them is reminiscent of Disney.
In DeAngelis’s case, thats a show called Royal Crush, which Robbins said has averaged more than 1 million viewers per episode online.
He added that it’s the result of a brand partnership with cruise operator Royal Caribbean: “One of the best examples of how brands, no matter who they are, can make content with us to market to this audience in a meaningful way.”
To prove to the MIPTV crowd how popular DeAngelis is, she snapped an on-stage selfie with Robbins and uploaded it to Instagram and Facebook, popping back onto the stage later during his speech to announce that “our selfie has more than 50,000 likes now”.
Curiously, it had just over 2,300 likes on Instagram at the time (and has since been deleted) while the Facebook version has less than 1,000 likes at the time of writing: perhaps a hint that TV companies should take some statistics thrown at them by digital disrupters with a pinch of salt:
Still, AwesomenessTV is pressing on with its plans to expand, making its Richie Rich show for Netflix, and signing a partnership with US telecoms firm Verizon for its upcoming YouTube-style online video service.
“70% of our audience consumes our content on mobile devices. They watch content on their phone, but it isn’t a phone, it’s a media hub that happens to make calls,” said AwesomenessTV president Brett Bouttier, who also joined Robbins on-stage in Cannes.
“We recently partnered with them [Verizon] to create 200 hours of original programming in the next year. They are shortly announcing a new service that will feature several channels from our studios,” he said.
“The importance of our partnership with Verizon is massive: not only getting into the content business, but doing so in such a way that puts such a strong focus on the behaviours of Generation Z.”
AwesomenessTV is also expanding globally, with its chief digital officer Kelly Day announcing on-stage plans to open local production offices in the UK, Spain, Germany, France and Brazil.
“We’ll develop TV series and movies that speak to teens in their own languages, and distribute them across all of their favourite social and online video platforms. And we don’t plan to stop at those countries,” she said.
Robbins finished off by announcing that another AwesomenessTV movie, made with YouTubers Smosh, will premiere 23 July at the VidCon conference, before returning to the central theme of his pitch to the television industry.
“Generation Z is shaping the way that every other generation communicates. They’re our new trailblazers.”
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