Netflix's Dilemma: Marketing 700 New Original Series and Movies Is A Lot Harder Than Making Them
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Netflix is looking to launch over 700 TV shows and movies next year, which comes out to something like two a day. That’s likely why they’re also planning to spend $2 billion on marketing, but the question remains, will that be enough?
The Timing Issue
Netflix faces challenges that other TV networks don’t. Their release-all-episodes-at-once policy is great for binge viewers but problematic (to say the least) for marketers. While HBO gets four or five months to build up buzz for a new series like Westworld which airs (more or less) every Sunday, Netflix gets four or five days to create buzz for their new shows and there’s no “catch this week’s new episode!” promo option for them to fall back on. That means they’ll be forced to market all their shows like movies, which also have a small window to build buzz.
Buzz was once something that Netflix could once rely on almost exclusively. When its first round of original series (House of Cards, Orange Is The New Black, Narcos) came out, there was a whole lot of chatter about them, both on social media and in the mainstream press, mostly because of what I like to call “Talking Pig Syndrome”—there was so much surprise that a digital distributor like Netflix could produce a quality TV show, people found it worth commenting on. The fact that viewers could watch every episode all at once with no time constraints and no commercials made it even more buzzworthy, as audiences struggled to stay in tune with their friends and reviewers struggled to keep ahead of the crowd without giving away spoilers and everyone found those situations compelling enough to chatter about.
The Algorithm Advantage
In addition to buzz, Netflix has also relied on its storied recommendation engine to drive viewership. That’s the algorithm that analyzes your viewing history (among other data points) and decides which shows to surface on your Netflix home page on all those “Dark Comedies Featuring Dark-Haired Actors” lists. (I am often surprised at the number of people who assume those lists are just random or the same for everyone. They’re not. Netflix carefully curates them based on everything they’ve learned about you over the years.)
The algorithm is what allows them to know which audiences will be interested in mass market fare like Fuller House and which audiences will be interested in quirkier shows like BoJack Horseman.
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Shutterstock
Netflix is looking to launch over 700 TV shows and movies next year, which comes out to something like two a day. That’s likely why they’re also planning to spend $2 billion on marketing, but the question remains, will that be enough?
The Timing Issue
Netflix faces challenges that other TV networks don’t. Their release-all-episodes-at-once policy is great for binge viewers but problematic (to say the least) for marketers. While HBO gets four or five months to build up buzz for a new series like Westworld which airs (more or less) every Sunday, Netflix gets four or five days to create buzz for their new shows and there’s no “catch this week’s new episode!” promo option for them to fall back on. That means they’ll be forced to market all their shows like movies, which also have a small window to build buzz.
Buzz was once something that Netflix could once rely on almost exclusively. When its first round of original series (House of Cards, Orange Is The New Black, Narcos) came out, there was a whole lot of chatter about them, both on social media and in the mainstream press, mostly because of what I like to call “Talking Pig Syndrome”—there was so much surprise that a digital distributor like Netflix could produce a quality TV show, people found it worth commenting on. The fact that viewers could watch every episode all at once with no time constraints and no commercials made it even more buzzworthy, as audiences struggled to stay in tune with their friends and reviewers struggled to keep ahead of the crowd without giving away spoilers and everyone found those situations compelling enough to chatter about.
The Algorithm Advantage
In addition to buzz, Netflix has also relied on its storied recommendation engine to drive viewership. That’s the algorithm that analyzes your viewing history (among other data points) and decides which shows to surface on your Netflix home page on all those “Dark Comedies Featuring Dark-Haired Actors” lists. (I am often surprised at the number of people who assume those lists are just random or the same for everyone. They’re not. Netflix carefully curates them based on everything they’ve learned about you over the years.)
The algorithm is what allows them to know which audiences will be interested in mass market fare like Fuller House and which audiences will be interested in quirkier shows like BoJack Horseman.
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