Hollywood's Gen Z War: Win By Any Memes (Or Get Roasted Trying)
Inside the fight as studios and streamers struggle to match viral hits built off its own TV & movies: 'Nothing top-down ever works in the internet age'
Matthew Frank previously covered the YouTuber caught in the Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni saga, online gamblers betting on your movie and how Deadpool & Wolverine won Gen Z through piracy. Abby Barr is The Ankler’s social media and audience development strategist.
This Ankler Feature is a 17-minute read.
Trung Phan, a newsletter writer with an AI startup, can do a better job marketing Hollywood product online than studios.
On X, where he posts memes, business analyses and stories about the making of movies and TV shows (among other topics), Phan has more than 705,000 followers. In the last 10 days of December alone, he had three entertainment-related posts rack up more than two million views. One shared how Lindsay Lohan’s Irish Wish on Netflix epitomizes how movies are being designed for streaming; another riffed on the Home Alone house being for sale for $5.3 million; and the third, tellingly, broke down the power of Timothée Chalamet appearing on Theo Von’s podcast during his A Complete Unknown press tour.
Dubbing the moment “a great encapsulation of the media landscape,” Phan laid out how Chalamet scored exponentially more attention and pickup for the Von appearance than he did Stephen Colbert’s Late Show. Why? Phan concluded: “Spontaneous, permissionless and no gatekeepers.”
Phan’s own success can be chalked up to those same principles, the opposite of how any digital content gets made at an entertainment company: rounds of edits from internal and external stakeholders that water down what was originally interesting about it. It’s gatekeepers and begging for permission all the way down.
“In the vicious fight for attention, they’re losing,” Phan says of Hollywood.
Consider the data: Netflix boasts an impressive “two hours of viewing per member per day,” according to co-CEO Ted Sarandos on the company’s last earnings call, but YouTube bests it month after month on living-room viewing alone according to the Nielsen Gauge. TikTok users spend an average of 2.48 hours per day on the app. Instagrammers: 2.46 hours daily.
The numbers are even more stark when you focus on younger audiences. Gen Z-ers watch three hours of video content on YouTube and TikTok every day, while spending just more than an hour on streaming and traditional media platforms. The 13-24 demographic spends just 32 percent of its media time watching TV and movies, compared with 59 percent for those over 35.
The cruelest irony? Much of that time spent is . . . people trading, remixing and communicating via Hollywood content.
Over the last two years, the industry has seen user-generated initiatives turn Minions: The Rise of Gru (#Gentleminions), Barbie and Oppenheimer (#Barbenheimer), Suits and Bridgerton into phenomena. Yet Hollywood’s takeaway seems to be either, “Let’s hope that happens again!” or “Let’s awkwardly try to engineer our own!” (Witness the recent #Glicked trend that wasn’t.)
As Phan tells us, “Nothing top-down ever works in the internet age. People sniff it up.” Or as Loren Schwartz, a longtime marketing executive who most recently served as CMO of Sony Entertainment’s streaming and TV division, says, “If it feels like advertising, it’s going to fail.”
Social media may dominate the culture, but Hollywood still speaks social like a foreigner rather than a native.
We talked to about a dozen experts — veterans of Netflix and Sony as well as social media and Gen Z marketers — to decipher what the entertainment industry is and isn’t doing right right now and how to compete.
You’ll learn about:
Why recent “social” launches from Netflix and Tubi were dead on arrival
How A24 recently nailed meme culture
The bot armies employed by studio marketing teams
The one thing a Gen Z marketer believes is holding Hollywood back
The Hollywood professions dubbed “archaic” in their understanding of the internet
What entertainment marketers can learn from Joe Rogan’s pod strategy
One particularly controversial social subculture worth your time
How the internet’s “clip channels” profit from Hollywood IP