Sampling Out Of Our Comfort Zone
For a while now, you can see movies & TV series cut into “parts” across TikTok and Youtube. #Movieclips has hundreds of billions of views on TikTok, for example. We covered the trend in our newsletter over the Summer, at which point it felt like this behavior was primarily an opportunity to catch young audiences up in a series without asking them to go back and watch previous seasons or original IP (ie: epic recap content from Mike’s Mic). We’ve since seen this behavior, where social audiences digest long form content across a number of clips on TikTok, become a tactic in theatrical, streaming, and even anniversary campaigns.
As 2024 gets underway, we wanted to highlight a few recent examples of how campaigns are stepping outside the industry's sampling comfort zone to achieve now a wide range of goals:
A campaign revived IP for a new generation: Even if you are the age of the characters in the recent Mean Girls movie, you weren’t even born when the original came out in 2004. Though arguably a classic at this point, to revive the IP in pop culture and lay the runway for a new generation to go see its remake in theaters, Paramount kicked off the 2024 release’s campaign by making the original film available on TikTok for a single day across 23 clips.
A S2 caught fans and new audiences up before its premiere: Ahead of the S2 premiere for Peacock’s series Killing It, the streamer’s TikTok brand handle posted S1's first 3 episodes across a number of clips.
A 25th anniversary campaign pushed audiences to library content on platform: To celebrate the 25 year anniversary of The Sopranos, and to drive viewership of the show on platform, 25 second versions of its episodes have been rolling out on TikTok.
Most commonly and historically, we think of sampling simply as a way to get in front of an audience beyond a paywall, not on platform or network. 2009’s Glee premiere, for example, famously premiered ep 1 after American Idol in May, made that episode available for free on Hulu.com for four months, then premiered the show with an ep 2 in September. We’re now seeing expanding creative opportunities with sampling that are a source of inspiration for upcoming campaigns -- beyond just reaching audiences off platform, and now for things like to market library content and even to revive a franchise in culture ahead of its reboot or adaptation.