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- 2020 is pushing the media industry to adapt even more quickly to secular shifts that had been rocking the business.
- The coronavirus pandemic has hastened long-term industry trends, like cord-cutting; further exposed weaknesses, like digital media's over-reliance on advertising revenue; and forced media giants to confront the once unthinkable, such as what the pay-TV industry looks without live sports.
- Business Insider asked 10 media CEOs, ranging from the chief executives at ViacomCBS and Vice Media to the influencer-marketing agency Mediakix, to describe how the coronavirus pandemic is changing their businesses, industries, and the world.
- This feature is part of a series based on conversations with more than 200 CEOs on how business will be transformed by the coronavirus. To read more, click here.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
2020 is pushing the media industry to adapt even more quickly to secular shifts that had been rocking the business.
Since mid-March, the coronavirus pandemic has hastened long-term industry-shaking trends, like cord-cutting; further exposed weaknesses, like digital media's over-reliance on advertising revenue; and forced media giants to confront the once unthinkable, such as what the pay-TV industry looks without live sports, and how to run a movie studio when theaters are closed.
In April, Business Insider asked 10 media CEOs, including the chief executives at ViacomCBS, Vice, Bloomberg, and Barstool Sports, to describe how their businesses, industries, and the world, have changed because of the coronavirus. Their insights address everything from remote work to changes in consumer consumption, the softening advertising market, and making global enterprises more nimble.
"The long-term economic impacts of coronavirus remain unclear, but it's already forcing both the private and public sectors to seriously re-evaluate how to make our supply chain more resilient and responsive to global shocks of this nature," Bob Bakish, CEO of ViacomCBS, told us, as the entertainment industry grapples with production shutdowns.
In pockets of the media industry, business is seemingly booming as consumers spend more time at home and watch more video.
Streaming-video viewership is climbing. Platforms from Netflix to burgeoning free, ad-supported streaming-TV services like Pluto TV are rushing to get in on the lift. People are also spending more time on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, which is a boon to content creators.
But companies and influencers are also trying to figure out how to capitalize on that boost in consumption, amid a softening ad market and looming economic uncertainty.
Read the responses, edited and condensed for clarity, from the CEOs of Barstool Sports, BEN, Bloomberg Media Group, Complex Networks, Mediakix, Pearson, Pluto TV, Pocket.Watch, ViacomCBS, VICE Media Group:
Ashley Rodriguez, Áine Cain, Lucia Moses, Amanda Perelli, and Matt Turner contributed to this story.
Instagram as a live platform is something that you will see last, past coronavirus. We would formerly go live on Barstool, and Periscope would be our first syndication. Now we're going live Instagram first. It feels very intuitive. It feels very organic.
Visual platforms are winning. Every trend that you're seeing is originating on TikTok. We grew 500,000 followers on TikTok in a week, which is just staggering. So we're really looking for talent that are going to succeed on TikTok first and foremost. That's a change.
If you look at sports media, local sports media is in trouble, mostly because their business, their revenue, is solely dependent on advertising. It's going to be a really tough time for local sports media, especially if sports don't come back for a while.
The coverage of global sports and nontraditional sports is going to increase a lot. You're going to see a bunch of rights picked up.
And there's going to be a really big move to personality. Right now there are very few news headlines and no sports to talk about. The vast majority of sports media does play-by-play coverage or sports analysis. People aren't looking for 10-times-over sports analysis. What they are looking for is personality.
The entertainment ecosystem is changing rapidly in light of the current climate. More people than ever are at home binging content across their devices, yet the industry is facing production freezes and delays in content creation. In response, we've seen late-night hosts take to YouTube, musicians livestream concerts on Twitch, and the overall convergence of traditional celebrity and social media. This period will undoubtedly cement the importance of digital strategies in entertainment moving forward.
At BEN, we've seen a massive uptick in branded content and influencer marketing. There is immense opportunity for entertainment to be a source of light and joy in these trying times, and brands are helping empower creators to make those moments as impactful as possible. For those in the entertainment industry, now is the time to invest, not hesitate. It means investing heavily in digital strategies, technologies that enable remote production, and flexible work solutions.
Beyond the entertainment ecosystem, this period is reshaping our understanding of "connectivity." Even with digital communication at our fingertips, it's easy to feel isolated. More than ever, it's important to take a beat to interact, check in, and support those in your life — whether they're your employees, friends, or industry peers. We will come out of this stronger and more resilient.
This will be a challenging year across most industries, with the media industry in particular facing an existential crisis.
We are investing into this difficult moment with a particular focus on the digital-subscription opportunity and our new global social-video/OTT brand, Bloomberg QuickTake. We are also investing heavily in virtual events where we see tremendous potential. We believe they will prove to be a powerful complement to our large live events business when it becomes safe to convene in person again.
As for the world, this pandemic has showed that even though we are more globally connected than ever, the fractured state of today's geopolitics is exposing the weakness of our multilateral institutions and efforts at global coordination.
For us at Bloomberg Media, this means running our global organization in a way that allows for even more flexibility to respond to the needs of our people locally. For the world at large, we are seeing some concerning trends, such as countries putting up walls which, once erected, will be hard to dismantle. For now, we will continue to invest in connecting the world with our trusted content, data, and analytics.
As for myself, I am thinking hard about embracing more purpose and intention in my professional and personal life. This is a moment to press pause and ask the more foundational questions. For all the suffering and pain caused by COVID-19, this crisis has surfaced the great depths of humanity and empathy that exist within all of us. As a leader, I hope that embracing and championing these universal, positive values will become more central to everything I do.
Whether it's COVID-19 or the 2008 recession or any other catastrophic event, you have to remember that 95% of the things that happen are out of most of our control, which means you have to maximize and crush the 5% you do control.
One massive difference this time around is how the pandemic is influencing people's media and purchasing habits. In 2008 or 2001, audiences didn't have access to the overwhelming amount of content they do now, and e-commerce was just a fraction of what it is today. So what you have now is an impacted population that is global, has more attention to spend, and instant access to even more media and more shopping resources than ever before.
From a media-content perspective, we believe that we will continue to see significantly more and more demand for more original IP that is not news or reaction-based, more premium serialized content that has a unique voice and perspective. We're already seeing that demand from all of our constituents — audiences, distributors and, even more important, from brand partners and advertisers.
If anything, it's going to force us, and the industry, to even further prioritize rapid innovation and problem solving, which hopefully has positive lasting effects on how we all do business: how we create content, engage audiences, the types of stories we tell, improvements in cross-team collaboration, how we work with our partners and the solutions we engineer for supporting their businesses. We are already starting to see the potential to improve how work is done.
Last summer, we tried an experiment where our team of 50 employees worked four days from home and one day in the office. It worked out great, and so we were well set up for when COVID hit and we couldn't be in the office. We just shifted to a five-day workweek from home, instead of four.
The way we work hasn't changed too much, but our industry has definitely been affected. Across the board, ad spend — whether it's TV, print, or influencer marketing — has definitely dropped.
What happened with influencer marketing is, we saw a lot of brands pause and want to see what was happening, because they didn't want to feel tone deaf with their messaging. We've also seen advertisers in categories that are doing extremely well pause advertising because they don't need it, like some food-delivery services.
Now, we are starting to see advertisers get back in the game and start spending again. Content consumption on influencer channels has exploded, so without a doubt that's another impact on the industry with views and engagement across the board.
Hundreds of millions of students around the world are facing the most significant disruption to education in modern history, and this pandemic is pushing many families into full-time at-home learning for the first time. It's been a sudden and bumpy shift for some, but it's also been a clear turning point in the wide scale acceptance of digital learning. In fact, 88% of Americans now say that the pandemic will make online learning commonplace, even more than when we asked just a month ago.
This means education systems will need the ability to move seamlessly between in person and online classrooms and figure out the right balance between the two. Until a vaccine is found, periodic closures of schools and universities may make this a necessity. But longer term, some students, especially young adult and adult learners, will find the flexibility of online learning is better suited for them. While it hasn't always been easy, this moment of experimentation is actually our chance to improve virtual learning and make it more accessible for all. Making learning more widely available is a shift that ultimately can help millions of people make meaningful progress to a better life.
While we all look forward to working together in the same offices again sometime soon, I think we will see continued remote-work success over time. And I suspect we will attract top tier employees who are looking to help us further our mission of entertaining the planet regardless of where they may live.
Increasingly, consumers are creating their own bundles of streaming-TV apps rather than getting all their TV content from one monolithic provider.
As people increasingly stay home pre- and post-lockdown, the appeal for free streaming TV will continue to spike. We saw significant double-digit increases in viewers and engagement since the pandemic was announced, and we expect that the appeal of free streaming TV will only increase as people are cooped up at home and budget conscious.
My hope is the world will learn from and benefit from this awful pandemic. People should become more mindful and conscious of the mistakes of the past so that we can work together to build a better future. We cannot continue to let partisanship divide us, keep failing to invest in the health care of our people, and continue to destroy the planet and its irreplaceable resources. I view this as our ultimate wake-up call.
Pocket.watch will continue to double down on what we do best: Create successful and highly sought-after global kids franchises. Our diverse revenue model puts us in a great position to take advantage of growth areas like content licensing and OTT distribution. Fortunately, our virtual network of animators and content producers also helped us to continue production without disruption.
The COVID-19 crisis unearthed a lot of opportunity for the entertainment industry to be nimbler and better prepared for the unexpected. Companies, including Pocket.watch, that already had virtual networks and vast content libraries in place were able to swiftly react to the overwhelming increase of demand. I anticipate that for those who were caught off guard, a lot of work will go into avoiding the same fate again.
Humans are resilient, and I see an abundance of innovation to come out of the COVID-19 crisis. I believe that families and households will be more intentional and deliberate with the choices they make, from where they gather to purchasing decisions. As a company, Pocket.watch intends on meeting those priorities wherever they might be, and we remain optimistic for what is ahead.
This crisis has caused us to reexamine how we can do things better — how to make our organization more agile and resilient and ensure our employees have the resources and support they need to adapt and remain productive even in the most challenging of circumstances.
Streaming-TV consumption continues to grow rapidly, and no doubt that the coronavirus quarantine has only accelerated this momentum. But it is also important to note that people are also spending more time with traditional TV. Regardless of the distribution method, people are spending more time in front of screens and more time in front of great content. We are looking to serve that in every way we can.
Out of this remote work environment we've seen some interesting models emerge that may end up influencing the operations and strategy behind content production and distribution. When it comes to film, this crisis has forced studios, Paramount included, to significantly adjust their release schedules, and so those shifts will likely continue until the calendar is fully realigned.
Ultimately, people are going to get back to what they really missed, and for many that means enjoying live experiences like going to the movies and watching live sports. I believe there is enormous pent-up demand for that content.
The long-term economic impacts of coronavirus remain unclear, but it's already forcing both the private and public sectors to seriously reevaluate how to make our supply chain more resilient and responsive to global shocks of this nature.
I'm also hoping this will be a wake-up call for the global community to better prioritize public-health preparedness and prevention and to ensure we have the infrastructure and systems in place for a coordinated emergency response when another such crisis occurs.
COVID-19 has led to us having to make some tough decisions in recent weeks. While we've been around for 25 years and heave weathered some storms before, we've learned how to be resilient by strengthening our business through diversification. Many think still that we are a digital business, but digital revenue is less than 30% of the pie.
Nonetheless, the current situation is making us think, act, and create in ways we never thought possible. We're pushing the boundaries on unique and innovative approaches for people to engage with information, news, and entertainment while building exciting programs and connection points with our employees that will have lasting impact on our culture.
While we've seen incredible acts of solidarity, this crisis has also exposed how little the media pays attention to young people and how they are living through this. We just released the first study about the effects of COVID on this group to try and bridge the gap in knowledge.
We need investigative minds out there asking the probing questions and better representing the over 50% of the world's population who are Gen Z and millennial. To survive, more brands will need to start delivering to young audiences the voices and the stories they care about.
Driven by our millennial workforce, mental health was already a topic and area of great discussion internally and within our reporting, and now going forward I'm guessing most businesses will start putting it at the top of their priorities too. For example, we've launched a series of interactive expert-led virtual conversations for our employees called "Ask Me Anything," and last week's featured guests were two licensed therapists who specialize in trauma, loss, anxiety, and change.
We're starting to see talk of returning to the workplace, but while that might feel like a return to a state of normal, we're actually going to start questioning everything we did before. We used to joke about meetings that could have been emails, but now we'll wonder why we can't just do them in our pajamas with our pets on video conference.
There's a balance of course because some work is actually more productive and better done in person, but it will never need to be five days a week, all day every day again. We've seen successful examples of creative agencies and those responsible for creative output adapt in new ways to collaborate and create together, while apart.
Our Pulse Studio business, in just one week, developed, pitched, shot, and delivered three commercial projects for major multinational corporations. So in essence we've found out that creativity and content transcend the four walls around us. That's something I hope we all remember.
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