There is much more to BuzzFeed than shareable listicles and quizzes, according to Ze Frank, president of the digital media company’s BuzzFeed Motion Pictures division.
“We make lots of content: we’ve made over 3,000 videos in the last two years, we make over 50 a week right now and we do a billion views a month,” said Frank in a keynote interview at the MIPTV conference in Cannes.
“The reality is that when you’re in a time that is dominated by social distribution, the stuff that spreads to you is the stuff that you’re going to define the brand by. If your friends are sharing a lot of silly stuff with you that’s how you’re going to think of BuzzFeed’s content.”
Frank’s job is to produce a broader range of content for the company’s fast-growing video business, including longer-form formats for TV and cinema as well as short-form clips for the web.
BuzzFeed’s strategy will be to use the latter to test new characters and ideas with a large online audience, in order to judge which are most suitable for extending to TV or film-length projects.
“We can do shorts to test casting: can they handle dialogue, can they handle arguments? And our scripting lab is constantly thinking about that in a character-first way, in terms of developing this stuff,” said Frank.
“The way short-form content can move in such a frictionless way around the web, that’s a fantastic way to build affinity with shows and characters. And that affinity will translate over to larger stuff.”
BuzzFeed is keeping an open mind about how and where to distribute its longer projects, including whether to charge for them.
“There are three things that can come back: one is money, one is data and one is strategic relationships. And ideally we want all three,” he said.
“We have a lot of flexibility in testing out the future of distribution itself. Everything is on the table from the idea of free to the idea of windowed exclusive to giving it to the box office and letting them keep 100% of receipts, and treating it as marketing.”
BuzzFeed may be a new media company, but it is tapping some traditional-media expertise in the form of veteran film producer Michael Shamberg, whose past projects have included Pulp Fiction and Garden State. Shamberg is acting as an advisor to BuzzFeed Motion Pictures, and joined Frank on-stage at MIPTV.
“There’s no R&D system in Hollywood: no studio makes a movie to see if they want to make a better movie,” said Shamberg. “The studios don’t have the capacity to innovate at all, because the amount of capital is so large, and they move so slowly … BuzzFeed is a big R&D lab.”
Shamberg is confident that the young internet users who watch BuzzFeed’s shorter clips will also be interested in longer shows and films from the company.
“Everyone’s watching long-form: it’s called Netflix, it’s called Hulu. Long-form narrative is already part of the DNA of the digital experience,” he said.
“Look at what Netflix did with House of Cards, which essentially branded Netflix … We’re going to migrate from what BuzzFeed does to the system that’s already there. We just need to bring something fresh to it.”
