Future of TV Briefing: How Hollywood is overcoming its resistance to embracing creators

By Tim Peterson

The Future of TV Briefing this week looks at how creators have not only broken into Hollywood but are getting entertainment’s establishment to bend to them.

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Creators’ big break

Let’s call it Moore’s Law of creators. From YouTube to Vine to TikTok, with each new social video platform comes a new generation of individual video creators who more quickly move closer to the epicenter of an entertainment industry that risks being the one on the outside looking in as younger viewers tune into TikTok instead of traditional TV.

A decade ago, YouTube stars were largely on the fringes of the mainstream entertainment industry. But over the past decade, they have edged in, with creators like Grace Helbig and Lilly Singh landing their own TV shows and movie stars like Will Smith turning into YouTubers. Then, in the past year, TikTokers have stepped up the shift by signing deals for streaming shows and movies in a way that signals how old and new Hollywood have finally converged.

“The real truth that no one’s saying is Hollywood’s been resistant to wanting to [embrace creators] for a really long time,” said Chris Sawtelle, head of digital ventures at Hollywood talent agency ICM Partners. However, the pandemic and its impact on the entertainment industry have forced the Hollywood establishment to embrace creators to a larger degree than ever before.

The key hits:

The pace with which TikTok stars have landed TV shows and movie roles shows how creators have become a cornerstone of the entertainment industry.
The pandemic’s impact on TV show and movie releases, as well as TikTok’s rise, has pushed traditional entertainment companies to turn to creators to attract Generation Z audiences.
However, creators are diversifying their businesses in a way that makes them less reliant on the traditional entertainment industry.

Sienna Mae Gomez’s rapid rise offers a model for how the pace of Hollywood’s embrace of creators has picked up. As she discussed in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Gomez’s TikTok following not only exploded virtually overnight but so did the entertainment industry’s interest in working with her.

“I had some of the top agencies reaching out to me within a month of blowing up. They were like, ‘Hey, we see so much potential in you.’ And at this point, I had maybe 2.5, 3 million followers, which is small compared to the other people that they’re representing,” said Gomez, who ended up signing with ICM Partners.

Leaving aside whether 3 million followers can ever actually be considered small, that 17-year-old Gomez’s audience — which has swelled to more than 22 million followers across her two TikTok accounts — likely largely consists of fellow Gen Zers suffices to explain why talent agencies were racing to sign her. Pew Research Center has considered Generation Z to be people born after 1996, which means the older members of Generation Z are reaching …read more

Source:: Digiday