Top Marketers on How Creators, TikTok, Spotify and Pinterest Help Fuel Fandom

The era of AI and social media platforms has blown open the marketing playbook for bringing audiences to entertainment and experiences. That was the sentiment shared by six top marketers who spoke Thursday at Variety‘s Entertainment and Technology Summit in Los Angeles.

The subject of the creator economy and its impact on selling everything from soap to soap operas was a dominant theme of the day. And it was center stage in the panel with executives from Archrival, TikTok, Spotify, Pinterest, AMC Global Media and Lionsgate, which was moderated by Dea Lawrence, Variety‘s publisher and co-president.

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Entertainment marketers once closely guarded their marketing materials and spooned out their campaigns with tactical precision on timing and platforms. Social media and social video in particular require studios and creatives to allow their fans to offer their takes on their favorite properties. It’s particularly prevalent on TikTok, of course.

“That participatory culture of co-creation is so unique to us, and that’s why [TikTok] participants are very engaged in creating,” said Dawn Yang, global head of entertainment for TikTok. “We have over 12 million TV and film posts that are posted by our users every day now, and that just gives you the perspective how much content there is around just stories that they love and want to share with everyone.”

Briana McElroy, global head of digital marketing for Lionsgate, reinforced Yang’s point by sharing her own experience.

“We actually hire fans to make our TikTok content for Lionsgate brand. If you consume it, you’ll know it — it’s called edits on TikTok,” McElroy said. “That’s wildly popular, and it’s really a lot of kids — 17 year olds, 18 year olds, 15 year olds — it’s their way of expressing their love for a person or a movie or a musician. They create these incredible visual pieces. The temptation is to try to replicate that on our end. But we thought, why do that? If we’re talking about authenticity, the best way to do it is to let the fans themselves do it. So on TikTok, that piece of advertising is incredible.”

Ben Harms, chief growth officer at youth culture marketing agency Archrival, offered a strong point of view on what it takes to win today and in the future.

“The brands that are going to win over the next 10 years are the ones that understand how to truly add value into consumers’ lives,” Harms said. He pointed to Spotify as a prime example. “While we have so much data and we’ve optimized and engineered everything, there is this sense that we’ve sort of lost the magic of the world in a lot of ways. And what we find that’s working for brands today is when they’re building ecosystems of experiences and human connection that go far beyond attention and just getting noise out there to really building meaningful connections with consumers.”

Sara Pollack, global head of consumer marketing for Pinterest, also reinforced that today’s fans often want to craft elaborate tributes and nods to favorite personalities and titles. On the Pinterest platform, fans hunt for inspiration for expressing their love.

“It’s like they’re coming to Pinterest to figure out how to turn that fandom into real world moments and experiences that they share with others that feel rich and fulfilling,” Pollack said. She cited a recent brand partnership that Pinterest struck with Warner Bros. to promote the theatrical release of “Practical Magic 2.”

“We saw that there’s a ton of Gen Z sourcing happening for really like specific things like herbal apothecaries, crystal meanings, tarot readings. This is all really adjacent to the film,” Pollack said. “So for Gen-Zers who maybe didn’t see the first [film], but clearly would be an immediate fan of the second, given what they’re already looking for — that was an opportunity for us to come together and actually build a real world pop-up experience where people could come and get tarot card readings. They could custom make candles. They could figure out how to create their own brew of tea. And that means that from every moment forward, it’s an actual connection to to the film and to Pinterest that goes beyond just an impression or a share or a like.”

Jenny Haggard, global head of thought leadership at Spotify, added her perspective that marketers too often use “Gen Z” as a broad brush. Spotify has made a point of understanding this cohort with an annual report that studies the consumption habits of the demo defined as ages 14-29 — which is a pretty broad range of life stages, Haggard observed.

“The first mistake we see marketers make is they treat Gen Z as one group,” she said. “I don’t know about you, but I was a very different person from when I was a teeny bopper dancing to NSYNC in my bedroom than when I was 29 and young professional working and living in New York. What we’ve learned is that life stage is a better predictor of behavior than birth year, and so I think we as marketers need to stop doing that.”

Haggard also made a strong stand that the conventional wisdom that teens and young adults don’t have the patience to watch long-form content.

“As an industry, it’s now common practice to make ads that are six seconds long,” she said. “I went into our dashboards and found that a third of older Gen Zs on Spotify are streaming 100% of two-hour-long podcast episodes. So what that tells me is that Gen Z isn’t allergic to long-form content; they’re allergic to shitty content. We all know this. James Cameron would be out of a job if people didn’t like long form content. To me, it’s about creating better content. That is our responsibility as marketers.”

Kim Granito, chief marketing officer for AMC Global Media, echoed Haggard comments that the new world order puts pressure on marketers to be as creative as fans.

“It’s our job as marketers to make sure that we are creating on ramps for them to find and experience [entertainment] exactly where they want to,” Granito said. “There are fans of ‘The Walking Dead’ has been around for 15 years. There are people that show up for every single spinoff series, but don’t necessarily post about it or do things, and there are other fans that dress up as Negan every year at Comic Con and bring their families and friends along. The passion and love that they have for that IP is the same. It’s expressed differently. So I think it’s our job as marketers to create as broad a pathway and is layered, choose-your-own-adventure journey for them to make it their own.”

(Pictured: Variety‘s Dea Lawrence, TikTok’s Dawn Yang, Lionsgate’s Briana McElroy, Spotify’s Jenny Haggard, AMC Global Media’s Kim Granito, Archrival’s Ben Harms and Pinterest’s Sara Pollack)