Netflix, Disney and Terrible Ads

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1:26Hello and welcome to another edition of The Rest is Entertainment. Me, Marina High. And me, Richard Osmond. Hi, Marina. Hello, Richard. How are you? I'm all right. I'm not bad. You're working very hard at the moment, aren't you? I'm trying to, Richard. I'm trying to. I don't mean this exact second. Oh, my God, you're really... Wow. This looks like an effort. No, I'm just settling in for a good old chat with you. But no, in general, I have been slightly around the clock, but it will ease down soon-ish. Exactly, but lots of filming at the moment. Yes, there's a lot of filming at the moment. But also lots of stories that currently are embargoed about things that are happening while you're filming.

1:57But we will be able to just sort of eke out into the podcast over the next 12 months or so. You really want me to tell you the things that happen at Leavesden. Yes, I will get there in due course, I'm sure. In due course. What are we going to talk about today? Firstly, we're going to talk about Netflix and how it has a certain image. And actually the reality of it has become slightly different, which I think it's quite interesting. And look at the top three Netflix shows of last week and what they tell us about the future of the streamers. We're going to talk about the Disney board battle, which was won by the chief executive.

2:27And now we start the succession battle for the chief executive of the Disney Corporation, which is huge and quite fun. So that's Netflix and Disney. Can you have an amuse-bouche in the middle? Yes. A finger bowl in the middle. I think we need a finger bowl between those two. A little sorbet. We're going to talk about that conservative advert about Britain being the second most powerful country in the world with all the different kind of images and what have you. and what that means about political advertising and whether it's deliberate or not. So lots and lots of discussion around that. Should we start with Netflix?

2:57I think there's an image with Netflix. Here's a company with very, very deep pockets, and they're going to make their money by getting creative people, giving them freedom, giving them money, letting them make what they want. And that worked incredibly well for them. Lots and lots of people went to work at Netflix. They produced some amazing work along the way. but the top three this week I think tells a story about where Netflix is going next and by the way not necessarily a worse place just I think an interesting place Okay, hit me up on the top three of last week So number one is The Gentleman I've got a huge number of views none of them positive Really?

3:32It's a horror show Oh you think? He has nothing to say, Guy Ritchie about absolutely anything and I thought it was appalling Well he's got stuff to say about what would happen if you had a cannabis farm at your stately home God And he's even said that before in a film that was bad. Anyway, people love it, but you can't trust people, can you, Richard? People, well, you know, listen, that's where you and I differ. Yeah. Because I do and you don't. I mean, if you look at many of the worst parts of the 20th century, I think you can't trust people is a perfectly reasonable assumption. Oh, I thought you were about to blame Guy Ritchie for all the worst parts of the 20th century.

4:04If he could go back in a time machine, I'm sure he would make them worse. Only the later bit of the 20th century. Now, it's hard to overestimate what a huge hit that is for Netflix. Massive. It's been number one for four weeks and it's been absolutely huge. Huge in the UK, huge worldwide. It's obviously got a brand behind it, Guy Ritchie. It's very broad. Let no one say it's the work of one of the great auteurs of our time. At number three in the Netflix charts is The Three-Body Problem, which is this huge show by the makers of Game of Thrones based on a Chinese novel. And Netflix has spent a lot of money.

4:40This is absolutely classic old school. this is what we think Netflix do. They make these big sort of showpiece series that are complicated, interesting, difficult, don't necessarily have to have big stars in them. It should have ticked, well, I mean, it obviously is doing well for them, but it should have ticked a lot of boxes because it has got that global feel. So what they really want is people in all territories, subscribers in all territories to be watching this. And I mean, it does certainly cover a lot of territory. It does. But the interesting thing is it's not doing that well. For the money they spent on it, being number three...

5:15It's also not very good. Sorry, another one, but honestly, I can't... Once I hear people saying science is broken, I feel like this is even worse than when Denise Richards played a nuclear physicist in... Which was that one, the Bond one? The world was not enough. Yeah, but then she became a nuclear physicist in real life, didn't she? Because it piqued her interest. Yeah, piqued her interest. Yeah, science is broken. Is that not the trailer line? It actually is broken, though, if you think about it. So three-body problem, 200 million. Great. And it's, you know, whatever one thinks about it. I think that's the most expensive thing they've ever made.

5:47I think it's 20 million an episode, and that is a lot for them. And it is not really conquering the world. It's doing perfectly well. Lots of publicity. We're talking about it. Lots of people talking about it. But, you know, it's not top of the charts. Number two in the Netflix charts is Cleaning Up. Do you know Cleaning Up? No. Exactly. So Cleaning Up is a six-year-old ITV drama starring Sheridan Smith about a cleaner at an office in the city. And, you know, it's very good, by the way, produced by Jane Featherstone, who only does brilliant work. It would have cost Netflix 40 grand to buy it. You know, ITV already made it.

6:22A few people watched it, but, you know, it was well-reviewed, but then disappears. Now, Netflix buy it, and it's the second biggest show in the country. It is a bigger show than Three Body Problem. That's extraordinary. So much of their stuff now is people licensing their old content back. Normally, though, they want there to be a lot of it. Yes. They want there to be a certain amount of seasons of it because people really want volume on Netflix. Well, that's what happens. So in America, the suits phenomenon, they started showing suits and it became the biggest... Well, Sex and the City's about to come.

6:51You know, it's really weird. They've got more publicity for Sex and the City, an old show that we know all about. Everyone knows all about it. The amount of sort of think pieces of people saying, oh, will this new generation be ready for this show? Will they find its attitudes dated? Or will they be shocked by it? Or all of these things. Because, you know, it's amazing that you can sort of, rather as Suits did, suddenly start, almost nearly dominate the cultural conversation with a not very good show. I'm talking about Suits in my view. But with a not very good show that you'd think everyone had already seen because it was old.

7:22That's the fascinating thing. And, you know, all creatives and writers and directors like to imagine that they are sort of in the vanguard of culture and they're the sort of people everyone's waiting on. And the truth is, Netflix, and you write from the beginning, 15 % of Netflix US's viewing was The American Office. 15%. It is a terrific show. See, that is a terrific show. That is a good show. Finally, we found one. Yeah, lots of good shows. The ones we were talking about. But can I just pick up on something you said earlier? They have got plenty of money. In fact, they're going to spend $17 billion on content this year, one way or another, making stuff or buying it in or whatever it is.

7:56But the reason that it seemed as though they were doing more stuff before was because this was the streaming wars, which, as we've discussed on the podcast before, Netflix won. But that's what they were going for. They were paying for scale. They are the first global TV channel. This has never been really tried before. They're like a sort of universal adapter for things. The chief content officer is this woman. She is some kind of monster, but I'm slightly fascinated by her. She's called Bella Bajaria. And she sort of travels between all the territories. She's one of these absolute sort of energiser bunny, people who don't really seem to sleep.

8:26And she coined this sort of really pretty dreadful phrase, which was, well, I know, Lots of creatives I know are like, oh, that's a real shudder. She said it should be the gourmet cheeseburger, a Netflix show, which means that it's very commercial and it's kind of mainstream, but it has sort of premium elements to it. And so that's what she did. But she now says that when people say to her, as they used to always say to the old network executives or companies like HBO, you know, what makes a Netflix show? She feels they're making a category mistake because the whole point to her is you do not want to have a definitive type of show because you need to cater first of all you're in all these territories you need to cater to every different kind of mood and time of the day and all of these type of things so instead of having a really sort of definitive house style they want all this stuff because in the streaming era the measure of how well your platform is doing is how regularly do people come onto the platform and how long do they stay how engaged are they and it seems quite simple but it's amazing how many people will say oh no but this was very deeply watched It's like none of this matters, OK?

9:32What really matters is how often they come and how long they stay and how engaged they are. So she needs to have absolutely every type of programming. So the idea of a Netflix show is a category mistake that belongs in an era which Netflix has kind of blown out of the water with their model. So this is my thesis about what's happened. So they had to get as many eyeballs as possible. And the way to do that is to try and get everyone to come and work for them and make their shows for them. And so they're throwing enormous amounts of money at these creators. and so everyone in the industry adored them.

10:02Now, because there's venture capital involved and they've won that land grab, that battle for viewers, and now venture capital wants its money back. It wants to start seeing profits. And of course, we've got interest rates for high around the world. So again, Wall Street needs its money back. So I think it's turned from the creator's channel into the viewer's channel. And that sounds like everything should be a viewer's channel, but I think there's an interesting shift, which is it threw so much money to try and get creatives to make things for it, put lots of people on exclusive deals, lots and lots of people at absurdly high rates.

10:40And now it's a channel that says, no, we want ratings, we want as many people to watch that. And they are understanding that spending£40 ,000 buying Cleaning Up with Sheridan Smith... Is that honestly how much you think they spent on that? Yeah. Jane Featherstone may say it was£60 ,000, but certainly it wasn't£200 million. And so they are viewer first now rather than creative first. And creatives don't really love that, is the truth, because they loved it when they could go to Netflix and just say, oh, can we do this? Can we do it? I've got this passion project. And Netflix would go, oh, here's$40 million.

11:14Of course you can do that, which is now not happening. So going to Netflix now, and I'm working with Netflix at the moment and enjoying it very, very much. But going to Netflix now is like going to any other channel, which is they are not going to throw their money around. they are incredibly careful about what they're commissioning so you know the guy richie stuff is very mainstream the harlan coban which is a huge hit for them very very mainstream buying things off the shelf you know a cheaper way of going mainstream as well so they've become like any other channel used to be now the interesting thing is they've hollowed out a bit of the industry because they offered so much money to so many creatives for so many years that there's a class of creative who are now what do we do um so if you're netflix of course you're making these great shows big mainstream things not as many of them as you used to but you're also going to be relying on back catalog and you're going to be relying on the likes of the bbc and channel 4 and itv to provide you with those shows but that ecosystem has been damaged by netflix and therefore there's going to be fewer and fewer of those shows anyway to buy in yeah to buy in so you sort of wonder in five years time well where are we because you're not going to be still making these huge premium shows we would have run out of those shows on the those other channels because you priced everyone out of the market.

12:25So where does that wheel turn next? I just think it's fascinating that interest rates and Wall Street have such a big impact on our culture in a way we don't really think about and how Netflix, and by the way, this is not having a go at Netflix in any way whatsoever. It's that they're in the right business. And I genuinely think they're incredibly viewer facing and they've come to the conclusion that to be viewer facing is no longer, let's just get 20 premium bits of talent and give them as much money as possible. It's let's just get some great big mainstream shows of stars that people recognise in them and do 20, 30, 40 of them.

13:01Standard procedurals, comedies, thrillers, all the things that were the bread and butter of the channels they sort of replaced. But it is a phenomenal company in the true sense of that word because it is so strange to think that barely any time ago in the great scheme of things, it was let me mail to you DVDs in the post. and to go and do what they've done is quite an extraordinary story and it's a true phenomenon. And we've never really seen a global TV channel before, so it's almost all sort of urgent territory. And it's still a fun place to work and full of good people and interesting people.

13:32It's just, it used to be a complete open door. Well, that's what everybody, you know, everybody thought that those times, the good times, the amazing times of the seven fat cows coming out of the Nile in television. Yeah, but as we've said before, Your scripted content is going to come down by about half. You say about the overall deals, the strikes provided a really good moment for people to say, yeah, no, we're not going to renew your overall deal. We've suspended your overall deal because you're on strike to writers and in some cases other types of creatives. And we will now not renew. And you might, like, they'll renew with Shonda Rhimes, who's kind of enormous, but other than that.

14:06But my goodness, there's certain people who look back over the last five years and go, wow. I mean, essentially they were taking money. You really never had it so good. They were taking money from venture capitalists. Yeah. You know, it was just going directly into their pockets. Yeah, the next five years, I'm sort of rather looking forward to it because I love big mainstream telly and I'm excited about, you know, what Netflix does with big mainstream telly. There'll still be lots of prestige things, but there'll be fewer kind of people doing a$30 million development on a passion project. And is that a bad thing?

14:37I don't know. We'll have to wait and see. It's how the rest of the market survives. And that's really interesting. whether you know they'll obviously have to be acquisitions because people are just too small to compete with them and it how the rest of it shakes down will also determine creatively how they have to compete but it's also fascinating by the way just just just as an end piece to this that and as so often happens um in the new world we live in that billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars have been thrown at netflix to say the old model of how we make television is broken you know we need to disrupt you know we're in a whole new world now and of course five or six years down the line when they've got market dominance they're like oh actually what we want we're going to start scheduling live sports and we're going to buy you know dramas and put them out once a week and we're building an ad tier which is our biggest growing thing the free ad you know the free ad supported television which is like oh yeah okay listen it's capitalism and of course netflix is a pure television play it's not like apple or amazon where actually they're big technology companies for whom the TV bit is just a shop window.

15:37They want to sell you stuff. They are in the TV business, both of those companies, Apple and Amazon, because they want to sell you stuff. Apple technology and other forms of bundled services and Amazon the same. And so I think that is very different. And a lot of people think that someone like Apple haven't figured out their TV businesses. It's not clear really why they want to be in it. They could make that work. Yes, absolutely. But I think it's fair to say they haven't yet. But we do love slow horses. We love slow horses. We absolutely love slow horses. They must be so bored of hearing that at Apple.

16:05Yeah, I mean, it never gets old though. So let's say it again, Slow Horses is brilliant. It is. Shall we go to an advert? I think we should do. This episode is brought to you by White Claw Surge. Nice choice hitting up this podcast. No surprises. You're all about diving into tastes everyone in the room can enjoy. Just like White Claw Surge. It's for celebrating those moments when connections have been made and the night's just begun. With bold flavors and 8 % alcohol by volume, unleash the night. unleash white claw surge. Please drink responsibly. Hard seltzer with flavors. 8 % alcohol by volume.

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18:12Okay, returning from adverts to talk about bad political ads, but maybe ones that are deliberately meant to be bad. The Conservative Party have a new online ad. They've had a couple of online ads recently. We'll come back to the first one in this series, I would call it. But they had a sort of really lo-fi ad about what's great about this country. There were some England players, quite a fairly white England team that I haven't seen looking quite so white for some time. All men. All men, yeah. Spitfires, The King, strangely Christopher Nolan looking into an IMAX camera and an Aston Martin. I mean, it really honestly did look like it'd been done in sort of 10 minutes by someone who was not potentially human.

18:54Okay, I'm looking at this ad now because in some ways it's so forgettable. I see it does actually have some form of slogan. It says, Britain is the second most powerful country in the world. In the world, for some reason, has been written in massive letters, whereas the actual message, it's the second most powerful country, is very, very small. Also, second most. Second most. Don't advertise second most to anything. I mean, if it were true, it would be impressive. But even then, you never say second most on anything. And it's amateurishly put together. The sort of white cutout looks very much like anyone on YouTube.

19:24a bit like our logo. Yeah, it does. You're right. And we're very much the fourth best podcast in the Goalhanger Stable. In the Goalhanger Stable. Like just in massive letters. They'd done one that had gone viral about two weeks before, which was sort of voiced by an American and was saying that, you know, London is a sort of hellhole and that Labour are going to turn London into a... Labour run London, Sadiq Khan runs London and this is what's going to happen when they run the country. And they even included some footage of people running away from what they thought was gunfire. That was actually in Penn Station in New York.

19:58So they then took that little bit of footage out and re-released it. It's starting to have the feel of a deliberate strategy, isn't it, Richard? Well, I think they've been quite open that it's deliberate. It's fascinating. So they, in the 2019 election, they got an Australian PR company to come and do their kind of social media strategy. And they had just won the Australian election with Scott Morrison. So, you know, they were, which was a surprising win, by the way. And one other fascinating thing, so you remember there was a time they did an advert, which was, let's get Brexit done. And it was just in black type on white, but in Comic Sans font.

20:35And as they always do, the left were sharing this left, right and centre, just saying, oh my God, this is the most hilariously bad thing I've ever seen. And of course, that's exactly what they wanted to happen. They weren't really sitting there going, let's do, what font should we use? What's this one? Oh, well, this is a fun one, Comic Sans, let's do that. what they were doing is they're going if we do this in Comic Sans this is going to be catnip to absolutely everyone it's going to be shared far and wide everyone's going to have an opinion on it everyone's going to quote tweet it so it's going to be everywhere and they did a Comic Sans one they did one in sort of Mr Blobby covers they did about ten in one day one day there was one absolutely mad day where they were just firing these things out because they knew one of them would be because let's consider the alternative the alternative is that you share a good political advert please tell me if that has ever happened in the history of humanity well here's the interesting thing So the Brexit one back in 2019, there was a very clear message in that election, which was let's get Brexit done.

21:28Right. And that was a very powerful message. They knew that people like the people they needed to vote for them, which is the 10 percent of people in the middle. They knew that was resonating with people. So their job is to get that message out and putting that in Comic Sans and the various other ways actually did exactly that. Now, Twitter is meaningless. No one ever got a single vote on Twitter. Where you win elections is Facebook. and that image was seen again and again and again and again and again and again on Facebook stripped of any of the irony, stripped of the comment, stripped of anyone caring about you know is it deliberately bad or not, just the words let's get Brexit done with the Conservative Party branding.

22:07Now that to me is effective advertising, that's using your opponent's weight against them, that's knowing that somebody is going to think you are more stupid than them, They're going to point out that you're more stupid than them. And you've won because they've done your job for you. Now, this new one this week, there is no message in there. The message in it is with a second biggest economy. The message is that Britain's great, don't talk it down. The most recent ad was them talking it down. I think that's the interesting thing because people are cottoning on now to that strategy. And I think probably they've got less good at it.

22:39if you had a single thing that was working for you, a single strapline that was working for you about this country, put that on the top of that advert. That goes viral everywhere and people are seeing that. But they didn't. The strapline is the second biggest economy. It's don't let the doomsters and naysayers. There's nothing. And so that can be shared till kingdom come. If it's too obvious, it becomes a form of contempt for the voters. And I would say that that has now tipped into it. I agree 100%. You've got the king on there. It's illegal to have the king there. You've got a Eurofighter there.

23:08you've got a ship which is made in South Korea and owned by the Italians you've got to the England men's football team in a thing about Britain and a team that's one less than the women but they know that that's going to upset people and annoy people they've got Christopher Nolan who lives in LA and this one is not affected because they don't have a message the whole point of advertising is get your message across let's get Brexit done that's the message that was resonating and they got it across In this one, they haven't. So all they're doing is cheapening our culture. All they're doing is showing they don't have a message.

23:44And I do think that that's depressing. I think that you just think, if you're going to do bad adverts, do them well. Yeah, like the old cinema adverts for your local curry house, which I love. Anything like that. Just do something super lo-fi. You know, that's the thing we've learned with click-through culture, is just tell people what the thing is. And if they like it, they'll click on it. You know, this idea that you can kind of control the narrative, it's so and you know listen there'll be people out there listening to this who were involved in it and you know what you know what the vibe is you know what the deal is they know they were kind of going this is going to over libs but you know that it's not great yeah but I guess they've been contracted and they will produce a number of adverts this year and then they'll just get out with their money and they will not be on the winning side according to literally there's a 99 % chance currently yeah see the London one sort of has some effectiveness I mean, it was awful and it was, again, embarrassing, but at least it kind of played into a message that seems to work for them a little bit, which is scaring people in London, that London's a scary place to be.