Sundance speakers discuss how to tackle, market the massive amount of content in the streaming age

PARK CITY — Media production has increased nearly across the board by "a factor of seven" over the past few decades, according to author Derek Thompson.

There are seven times more books, films and scripted TV shows than there were in the 1980s, Thompson, a writer at The Atlantic magazine and author of “Hit Makers: How to Succeed in an Age of Distraction,” said Saturday in a panel at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City.

There’s a Japanese word that describes that mass of content: Tsundoku. It means a large tower of unread books, according to Thompson.

“I think that today we all live in the shadow of a multi-media tsundoku,” Thompson said. “We all have this mountain of movies that we want to see that we haven’t. … There’s this sense of anxiety about the sheer amount of stuff that is out there.”

Thompson spoke at the Sundance panel titled “Hit Making in the Age of Streaming.”

The panel also featured Dan Cogan, founder of production company Impact Partners; Dolly Turner, board member of the Blackhouse Foundation; and Franklin Leonard, founder of the Blacklist.

Thompson asked the panelists how to best advertise and market to millennials, a generation that has become experts at ignoring advertising.

“There’s so much distraction, so much abundance of advertising for new content, that I think a lot of millennials just sort of tune it out,” Thompson said.

Publicists and marketers sometimes favor larger, national media outlets, and mistakenly forget about the smaller publications, Turner said. She said she grew up reading her local newspapers, which had a big impact for her.

“Local media outlets actually can have a big difference,” she said.

Netflix has developed unique marketing strategies that are radically different than anyone else in the business, Cogan said, because every user’s homepage on the site is different.

“Their marketing is mostly about how they are placing you on their platform,” he said. “It’s constantly changing based on what you watch.”

Thompson also discussed the phenomenon of vertical integration, where companies own multiple stages of the production of their product. He talked about Disney’s upcoming streaming service Disney+, which is set to debut later this year and is seen as a rival to Netflix and other streaming services.

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Disney+ could potentially allow the company to stop releasing its own movies in theaters, and give itself control of movies from development all the way up to when consumers see them, Thompson said. That would mean the company would cut out a third-party distributor.

Thompson speculated that more companies will follow in the footsteps of Disney and Netflix.

“You’re going to have a lot of ‘flix-es' out there,” he said.

Leonard said that’s inevitable, but it’s not an issue. Filmmakers will still be able to develop their own identities and express themselves within that framework, he said. If filmmakers continue doing that, they’ll still be able to demand the prices they deserve in that marketplace, he said.

That’s a principle that has already been reflected in real life at Sundance this year.

On Saturday, Amazon shelled out $13 million for the Mindy Kaling-penned comedy “Late Night.” It’s one of the biggest deals to ever come out of Sundance, outpacing the $12 million Netflix paid for “Mudbound” in 2017, according to Variety.

Related:

Sundance panelists issue challenge to Hollywood: Work with more women

The percentage of dramatic film submissions made by women selected at Sundance went from 17 percent in 2009 to 37 percent in 2018, according to the study. That’s still less than the percent of festival submissions that were made by white men.

For filmmakers to continue pulling huge deals like those in the streaming age, they will need to keep marketing and selling their work throughout all stages of production, and even after that, Cogan said.

“Everything is your job, and you have to build that identity over time,” he said. “The key is knowing the film you’re making and what its value in the marketplace is.”

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