What the hell is DreamWorks doing with their advertising and marketing?

It’s genius, yes it’s working, and this is a very long post but you’ll get to see some fun photos from when I worked at Cartoon Network while reading.

I started writing this several weeks ago, but @aaawunder ‘s post today prompted me to finish it.

From the outside, those of us who are used to the traditional means of marketing and advertising may perceive the marketing and advertising around VLD as strange or dismal. I’ll explain why it’s not, or rather, why DreamWorks doesn’t have to market or advertise in the way that we are expecting, and they probably shouldn’t. The traditional ways of advertising do not apply anymore, so it looks like DreamWorks isn’t doing anything when they really are.



The problem of advertising and marketing of cartoons, or any media, is multivariate but one that ultimately comes down to the acceleration of media fragmentation, as evidenced by—for the first time ever— marketing/ad jobs have dropped during economic gains, [X] while tech giants are taking seats at the table that once belonged to agencies. [X]

Chart above from “Where Did All the Advertising Jobs Go?” published on The Atlantic. Take another look at that 2009 tick on the bar chart, because we’ll get back to that in a few more paragraphs.

I want to focus on Voltron: Legendary Defender and how it’s a unique case whose success will determine where original cartoon programming for on-demand/streaming video services goes next. Its long-term success (e.g investors reaping rewards) will depend less upon toy sales and more upon new-content-focused merchandizing such as comic books and video games, as well as the perceived value of Netflix’s expanding original programming catalog which translates to new-and continuing subscriber dollars. If the investors don’t see enough gains from tie-in merchandizing, and if Netflix doesn’t see enough gains in subscribers, then we won’t get anything like VLD for a long time.



To be clear—the partnership between Netflix and DreamWorks is seen as successful—they just signed a deal for a Fast & Furious cartoon series. [X] So something is working, despite the challenges of media fragmentation.



This is really a matter of what kind of cartoons will get made: whether they are wholly original (e.g. Trollhunters); or franchise-linked (e.g. Fast & Furious); or spin-offs and sequels (e.g. Legend of Korra); or reboots of much older IP (e.g. TMNT, Voltron, Transformers, Thundercats, etc). At the moment, all of these types of cartoons are in production and airing on Netflix. DreamWorks is producing as much and as different content as they can to see what sticks.



Now for some context and backstory.

Once upon a time I worked for Cartoon Network.

It was like being in a giant toy box.

A giant toy box that had been ¾ emptied out when the parents lost their jobs and had to move to a smaller home. It was wonderful but depressing. It was a privilege to work with the talented folks that were there—that had survived apocalyptic down-sizing—and to see a state of the network (as part of Turner Broadcasting) that very few people outside of the broadcasting industry would ever see.



My brief time at CN taught me a lot about how the production and broadcasting of media (cartoons or otherwise) is inextribably linked to advertising and merch sales, and how difficult it can be to market to a demographic (at the time, CN’s target demo was young boys). I was there during the summer of 2009, in the wake of the economic collapse (take another look at that bar chart!). It was bad. Advertising took a massive hit that unleashed a tsunami of layoffs on the broadcasting industry. CN wasn’t the only network to be gutted during this time, but I suspect that it was far worse for them, than say for Nickelodeon which was still riding high after the success of Avatar the Last Airbender.

Further, this was a time of accelerating media fragmentation with massive shifts in how people perceived the Internet following the release of the iPhone, and just before the launch of video streaming services. Advertisers were freaking out and had no idea where to spend what little money they had left. There were simply too many choices and not enough dollars. Things were so bad that CN wasn’t even creating marketing swag to send out with press kits anymore.

Which was a shame because they had some great swag.

As I was getting the tour—and allowed to raid the swag closet—I asked about Korgoth of Barbaria which had aired in 2006 and I never heard/saw anything about ever again. The art director laughed and said:

“Korgoth was awesome. We loved it. Unfortunately…too expensive to produce.”

“Oh. What’s up with the new ‘CN’ branding and the live-action shows? Reminds me of what happened to MTV.”

“Live-action brings more advertising dollars to the network.”

There it was. The reason for the desolate Class A office space occupying several floors in the main building on the Turner campus.

Two things traditionally sell air time during a cartoon broadcast: food and toys, and in 2009 nobody was buying.

Any show, even of the lowest quality, costs a lot of money to produce. They require investment, and animation is a tremendous investment of time and money. Live-action is faster to produce, thus a faster return on investment. Additionally, cultural perceptions in the U.S. regarding cartoons—and who they are meant for—means that advertisers will prioritize live-action programming as it is seen as having a wider audience to market more than food and toys to. This is why Cartoon Network’s programming is the way that it is. By all accounts, CN has recovered from where it was in 2009. They’ve got a formula now with the kinds of cartoons that they look for from out-of-house studios, and they’re going to ride that for as long as they can.

Many of the successful cartoons today (regardless of network) have content-related merchandise like comic books and art/production books. I am amazed by how much of this kind of merch that I see, because—aside from a few comic book tie-ins (He-Man, Transformers, GI Joe, Robotech, TMNT, Thundercats, etc)—new-content-focused merchandise wasn’t ubiquitous for cartoons prior the 2000s. Now it is, and for shows that I never would have expected to see it for, and we can trace the rise of new-content-focused merchandise to the ATLA and IDW’s Transformer’s comic book lines, both of which appeared in the mid-2000s.

This shift towards a serious push in comic book tie-ins for cartoons (and other new-content-focused merch) comes as toy sales become more difficult to maintain.



Further, somehow I become aware of comics and new-content-focused merch for cartoons that I’ve neither seen nor heard of. I am not the target demo for this merch, nor am I a cable subscriber—millennials killing cable!—and yet I see it in the places that I shop—when I shop—which isn’t that often because I am also a bitchy and sensory-sensitive introvert that prefers to shop online.

So how did I find out about these shows and their comics? How do people like me find out about these shows if we don’t watch programming that airs with commercials? (that’s rhetorical, we’ll get back to that too)



MEDIA FRAGMENTATION:

Before cable tv was a Thing (so pre-1985 but most people didn’t get cable till the 90s) there were only a handful of channels. Cartoons were shown for a few blissful hours on Saturday mornings. Rarely for one hour on Sunday morning. Eventually that crept into after-school cartoons and the dreaded 6am school-day time slot. Anyone else watch Dinosaucers at 6am with shitty reception? With only a few channels and predictable time-slots, media was mostly centralized, and thus advertisers could reach millions of children with less effort and cost than what is required today. There were less cartoons (and related merchandising) competing against one another for either air time or shelf space. Networks benefitted from the lack of competition for advertising dollars, which made them stable enough to air “less profitable” programming such as cartoons.



I cannot emphasize this enough. MILLIONS of children.

All watching the same cartoons, the same advertising, at the same predictable time.

FCC regulations regarding advertising during children’s programming also applies here, but I’m not going to get into that, suffice to say: for a good portion of the 80s, we were watching cartoons—that were essentially toy ads—and then watching commercials for more toys and junk food.

How many channels are on cable these days?

I wouldn’t know, because I’m a 🥑dirtbag Xennial 🥑 that only subscribes to Hulu, Amazon Prime, and Netflix.



That centralized media ship has long since capsized.



Media fragmentation greatly impacts the production of cartoons, as cartoons are—traditionally—heavily dependent upon advertising and toy sales. If children don’t know about the toys—because they are watching dozens of different shows spread across hundreds of networks at times that cannot be predicted due to on-demand cable or commercial-free streaming—then demand for toys will plummet. Abysmal toy sales equates to advertiser panic, which means less money spent on advertising which drives the production of cartoons in the first place. Advertisers no longer have that predictable-and-captive audience of millions of children. Again, food and toys ads are what buy air time for cartoons, because cartoons are still seen as for children.



Additionally, the shift to online sales equates to less “point-of-sale” dollars that come from consumers either making impulse buys, or simply seeing an elaborate display in the toy store that let’s them know about a new product.



The above image is a Ben10 display that I worked on for CN’s toy store. They wanted to push the remaining SW Clone Wars toys while drawing attention to new Ben10 content. See? People came for the toys, and got an ad for another show at the same time. I’m pretty sure this store doesn’t exist anymore.

Given all of the above, how is Voltron: Legendary Defender going to make money for DreamWorks?



Short-term: it already has (e.g. the new deal for Fast & Furious), but what about the long-term?



Voltron: Legendary Defender is part of a big push to test the viability of on-demand commercial-free media streaming as a business model for original programming. They—WEP, DreamWorks, Netflix, and others who profit from related merch sales—need to find a new sweet spot for cartoons in a crowded-and-fragmented media landscape via a distribution platform that is inherently less driven by advertising dollars. They need to turn a profit for investors and the traditional models do not apply. They are figuring it out as they go along and it’s working, it’s just not obvious to those of us who are used to traditional advertising.



VLD is not the first of these shows to test the market, it’s one of a quite a few original programming that has appeared in the past few years on streaming services like Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, and Netflix. What makes VLD unique is that it is both a reboot of an old-but-valuable IP that is original and ambitious in scope, and one that has a built-in demographic ready-and-able to spend money. Like Transformers—which has seen great revitalization over the past 10 years since IDW has been hitting home runs with their comic series—Voltron has a benefit that new cartoons don’t: recognizable long-lived IP that isn’t Disney, Hanna-Barbara, or Warner Bros. This acts as its own form of advertising through brand recognition, because those of us who grew up watching these shows are willing to spend our disposable income on them as adults. Given that, it was more risky for Cartoon Network to air Adventure Time, or Nickelodeon to air ATLA than it is for DreamWorks to produce VLD for Netflix. But VLD still needs to sell toys, comics, merch, and Netflix subscriptions.



There aren’t too many 7-10 year olds who are getting their parents to buy all the different lion sets.

On paper, VLD was set up to be marketed to the Y-7 demographic (roughly boys aged 7-10), but in reality, it has wide appeal across age cohorts. I doubt the execs expected just how wide that appeal would be, but I suspect that the show-runners did and that’s why the show is written to appeal to more than young boys. The release of the first two seasons were reflective of trying to figure out what would be successful on Netflix. The seasons were far shorter than the cartoons of the 80s, and they were released all at once for the “binge watcher” which is the norm for most Netflix subscribers. This meant that a lot of time would pass between seasons, and—while it can take months to binge through a long-running cable series released on Netflix—one can binge through 12 episodes of VLD within a weekend.



And then one has to wait for the next season, and still be interested in watching it when there is so much other content out there vying for attention. Did I mention this is the golden age of anime? I would have killed to have had the access to all the anime that is available today when I was 20. I don’t have time to watch it all, and neither do you.

Loss of viewer interest due to long wait times between seasons, and distraction by other shows, is a risk that DreamWorks can’t take.



In the 80s, the cartoons were the ads. And then we had more ads during commercial breaks. Every afternoon. Every Saturday morning. A season could last for more than 60 episodes. That meant our attention was continuously captured. That doesn’t happen in the Netflix model.



With season 3, we saw a pivot in strategy and—while I think needing to re-work episodes to accommodate executive meddling regarding Shiro had something to do with that—it had more to do with DreamWorks discovering who was engaging the most with the show: a surprise demographic. Splitting the seasons was a great pivot and it means that DreamWorks has an understanding of this surprise demographic.



Who is this demographic? Here’s some hints:

It isn’t 7-10 year olds who are on Twitter right now, eyes glued to Voltron’s account, waiting for the season 6 trailer to drop.

It isn’t 7-10 year olds getting into month-long discourse wars over shipping online.

It isn’t 7-10 year olds who are excitedly following every single Voltron, VA, storyboard artist, show-runner, and intern accounts across multiple social media platforms.

INTERNS. Following. Interns.

Never in my life have I known the name of a story-board artist on a cartoon that I watching.



This is happening despite the fragmented media landscape and despite DreamWorks apparently doing very little in the way of advertising and marketing.

You know what this is? This is fucking gold. This is a level of fan engagement with content that isn’t seen outside of Star Wars, Star Trek, and MCU. It’s also unprecedented because even 10 years ago, no one would ever have had access to anyone involved in the production of a cartoon, let alone story-board artists and interns. This means that the way that DreamWorks has to market to, and interact with this highly engaged demographic is not in the traditional way. They can’t sell us junk food and toys, even though some of us definitely buy the toys. So how do they reach fans that will spend money?



Word-of-mouth and Point-of-sale:

What DreamWorks has been doing is hitting the convention circuit hard, while staying on top of social media strategy and carefully planning releases of teasers, promo shots, and trailers. It is through social media and word-of-mouth, that they can reach the broadest audience in the age of media fragmentation for the least cost. It is the carefully timed trickle of videos combined with convention appearances of VAs and others working on the show is what works for that surprise demographic. That surprise demographic is the most engaged, and does the rest of the advertising work for them, with only the slightest bit of prompting. This highly engaged demographic maintains the hype cycle so that fans don’t get distracted by competing shows, or forget how much they are enjoying the show between seasons.



But do active social media users within the highly engaged demographic translate to a merch-buying audience?

Yes, but not in the way that is traditionally expected.

We buy merch from each other.



Fan-made content (fan-fiction, fan-art, commissions, and fan-made merch) are another form of continuous engagement, and it’s more free advertising. This feeds the beast while we wait for official merchandise to be released, which we find out about via social media and point-of-sale. This also means that DreamWorks’ strange and seemingly dismal advertising and marketing strategy really isn’t. They don’t have to go the hard and expensive advertising route—which probably wouldn’t work any due to media fragmentation—because highly engaged fans do the work for them to the extent that older teens and adults were pre-ordering digital copies of “Ready to Read” books meant for young children.

Seriously y’all. Some of us are so thirsty to find out Shiro’s fucking backstory that we’re pre-ordering books meant to help children learn to read because there might be one sentence in a paragraph that let’s us know if Sheith is canon or not. Now that’s strategy.

Returning to my cable-killing ways—we’re almost done—this is relevant!



I watch Steven Universe on Hulu, not on Cartoon Network. Without cable, how did I find out about SU? How does anyone find out about a show or toys for a show without traditional advertising? Word-of-mouth from friends online, and from point-of-sale at my comic shop.

Comic shops and book stores are some of the last physical spaces where people across demographics gather for buying media-related products. Since toy stores are dead, a comic or book store is where point-of-sale can work very well (assuming your comic shop owners know what they are doing). In my SU example, I didn’t know that there was an art book, until I saw it as part of a point-of-sale display at my comic shop.

Wow. Art books. I’ve been collecting anime art books from Japan for a long time and it kills me that cartoons have never been taken seriously enough in the US to merit the production and sale of them—until now—because new-content-focused merchandise for cartoons must be ubiquitous in order for a show to survive. Toy sales aren’t enough. This goes back to that problem of getting a cartoon produced, when cartoons are seen as childish, and there are no advertising dollars to pay for it either due to economy or due to the method of distribution.



And that is what I mean by VLD’s success determining where original cartoon programming for on-demand/streaming video services goes next.

DreamWorks doesn’t have to prove that Netflix is a viable platform for live-action programming. Live-action will remain an easier-and-cheaper sell than cartoons. DreamWorks has to prove that original cartoon programming can be distributed through Netflix (or any commercial free streaming service) and generate a profit in the form of merchandise sales that go beyond toys without being able to use traditional forms of marketing. If VLD can keep fans engaged long enough to buy comics, guide books, and so on, then that means we’ll get more cartoons like it—and those cartoons will not have pretend to be for children.



What does this mean for fans?

Well, if you’re still reading this, then you must be part of that highly engaged demographic so here’s some free advertising via word-of-mouth. If we want more shows like VLD then we must:

Buy the VLD comics by Lion Forge.

Pre-order the Hyper Phase lions online.

Pre-order the Season 1-2 DVD set on Amazon.

Yeah okay, I get it, most of y’all are probably broke, do what you can and don’t put it off. High fives to all y’all that pre-ordered the Ready to Read books.

Mostly, buy the comics, because after the series is completed, they can continue the comics with storylines that they can’t touch yet due to potential for spoilers, and possibly give more time for characters that aren’t mains. And, like the Transformers comics by IDW, there is the potential for more than one VLD comic at a time.

Want a Blade of Marmora centric comic?

Buy the comics that are out right now.

Want the century-spanning saga of Space Archeologist Lotor?

Buy the comics that are out right now.

Want more backstory on Acxa, Zethrid, Narti, and Ezor?

Buy the comics that are out right now.

That’s how those stories will get told. IDW’s Transformers comic series has proved that this is possible. Maybe we’ll get god tier lucky and there will be a follow-up animated series. But that will absolutely not happen if toy, comic, and merch sales don’t warrant the investment by DreamWorks. Again, this whole “original cartoon programming with high quality animation and great writing but sans advertising” thing is still new in the long view, and American networks do not regard cartoons as profitable as live-action programming.

Netflix is where it’s at, and we don’t need advertising campaigns to prove it.

Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.