CANNES — Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman are hoping to be on the cusp of the next frontier of storytelling.
The Hollywood mogul and Silicon Valley exec saw a gap in the marketplace for a new approach to storytelling, something in between the immersive quality of movies and the episodic, advertising-driven content of television.
“People’s consumption habits are rapidly changing today and its disrupting our industry that is without precedent and that creates all sorts of opportunities,” said Katzenberg, who spoke on the mainstage at Cannes Lions with Whitman on Wednesday morning.
He continued: “If you take HBO, Netflix, Amazon and Hulu, less than ten percent of their viewing is on this device [mobile phone] and a small percent of that is between 7 in the morning and 7 in the night. It’s just not where we watch long-form content and that’s where this opportunity exists for us to do something really new and differentiated.”
The former Dreamworks boss tapped Whitman, the former Chief Executive Officer of Hewlett Packard, to create Quibi, a short-form video platform that will be mobile-only.
Quibi, which stands for “quick bites” will launch on April 6th next year, and it will feature premium content from some of Hollywood’s best creators from Steven Spielberg and Paul Feig to Steven Soderbergh and Sam Raimi.
The shows will be under 10 minutes each and are meant to be watched in “snackable” bits and will cost $4.99 with ads and $7.99 without ads.
“We think the best analogy for you to understand what these long-form stories are told in ten-minute chapters is ‘The Da Vinci Code’ in another medium,” Whitman said, referring to Dan Brown’s novel.
“You probably know ‘The Da Vinci Code’ is 464 pages and 105 chapters, each chapter is five pages long. Dan Brown said, ‘Listen, I don’t think my readers have 35 to 45 minutes of reading time anymore, so if you’ve got five minutes, I want you to read one chapter. If you’ve got ten minutes, I want you to read two chapters. If you’ve got an hour, you keep on reading.’ What we would argue is, there’s nothing lesser about ‘The Da Vinci Code,'” she said. “It’s a fantastic story in its complexity, in its romance and battles, and all kinds of things, but it is a new way to tell those stories.”
Whitman said to ad execs and media types in the packed auditorium that Quibi is doing the “same thing” in a different format.
“The TV industry has been doing this since the 1950s,” Katzenberg added. “Every single episode of television on broadcast today is 42 minutes 30 seconds long … with five ad breaks and the first ad break comes at eight-and-a-half minutes.”
Although there has been a fair share of naysayers, who are quick to note that consumers don’t watch premium content this way, the duo has already managed to raise $1 billion for Quibi, with Hollywood’s eight major studios investing.
The execs also revealed that Quibi will launch with six big sponsors, which includes Wal-Mart, Procter & Gamble, Pepsico, Google, ABInBEv and Progressive.
Part of the draw for them is access to Quibi’s platform, which will provide data insights on Millennial and Gen-Z consumer watching habits. True to Quibi’s mission, advertisers will also run short-form commercials in between shows.
“We are looking for a new media supply chain,” P&G Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard said, after joining the duo on stage towards the end of the talk.
“What I think we’re going to get so much out of this is that hard to reach Gen Z and Millennial audience that is decreasingly watching TV, if at all,” Pritchard said. “We are going to be able to reach an audience in a very engaging way… there’s high expectations because this has to be like other media. It has to perform.”