The Secret Industry That Makes Movies Go Viral

0:04This episode of The Town is presented by HBO Max. For your awards consideration, Max presents Hacks, the Emmy award-winning series starring Gene Smart and Hannah Einbinder. In the aftermath of mistaken news reports that Debra passed away, she and Ava returned to Las Vegas determined to secure Debra's legacy as a comedian. Don't miss the series Variety is calling one of TV's best comedies ever. Hacks is streaming on HBO Max. Watch now. This episode is brought to you by FX's Love Story, John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bissett. The critically acclaimed series explores the undeniable chemistry, whirlwind courtship, and high-profile marriage of one of the most iconic couples of the 20th century.

0:45With Sarah Pidgeon and Paul Anthony Kelly leading a cast including Naomi Watts, Constance Zimmer, Alessandro Nivola, and Grace Gummer. Called A Stunning Portrait of Love by Variety, Love Story is Emmy-eligible in all limited series categories. Now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney Plus for bundle subscribers. It is Thursday, June 18th. By now, most people in Hollywood are familiar with the tactics of digital marketers. The unseen hands that help movie trailers go viral, or TV shows build buzz, or a celebrity rehabilitate his own image by trashing his ex-wife online. But even savvy insiders probably aren't aware of the extent to which this so-called culture of clipping has taken over the dominant social platforms, and how much of a business this manipulation of online sentiment has become.

1:34If you're not familiar with clipping, that's when someone hires a company to turn a trailer or a song or an interview into attention-grabbing clips, which are then posted over and over by normal-looking accounts designed specifically to make it look like real people are talking about this stuff. One of these companies had 65 ,000 dummy accounts, posting about 50 ,000 videos a day across TikTok, X, YouTube, Instagram, all the others. If the clips are good enough or the text accompanying them interesting enough, the algorithms then go to work and push this stuff to more and more users. And all of a sudden, a trend is born.

2:10It's called trend simulation, one professional clipper told New York Magazine. Quote, everything on the internet is fake, end quote. I'll admit, Clipping worked on me last year with the rock band Geese, which all of a sudden was everywhere in my feeds and got me to check out the band. And it turns out that was thanks to a company called Chaotic Good Projects, which was hired to do exactly that. And I know from my own reporting that Clipping has become a powerful tool for the Hollywood studios. But how powerful? And how can regular people spot this stuff? That's what we're going to talk about today with Lane Brown.

2:43He's a features writer at New York Magazine who just wrote that big story on Clipping called The Feed is Fake. Today, it's the business of clipping what's real and fake online and how Hollywood benefits from the quiet manipulation of the public discourse. From The Ringer and Puck, I'm Matt Bellany and this is The Town.

3:03All right, we are here with Lane Brown, who is a features writer at New York Magazine and the author of a recent article that I very much enjoyed called The Feed is Fake. Welcome, Lane. Thank you very much for having me, man. All right. This is a fascinating topic. And you went into the entire culture of clipping and the culture of internet, social media, opinion manipulation. But I want to focus on the Hollywood aspect of this because we are a Hollywood business podcast. And you wrote, this is your words, on social media, popular opinion is being formed, measured, and manipulated all at once.

3:42And every signal the platforms produce, a trending song, a backlash, a talking point, the feeling that, quote, everybody is suddenly talking about the same thing, can now be fabricated by unseen actors with hidden agendas. So how exactly is Hollywood benefiting from this trend? Well, right now, if you're a studio and you're wondering why other movie trailers are going viral, but yours aren't, this is probably the answer. Studios are really like everybody. Basically, this is happening pretty much across every category. I spent a few weeks in Discord servers where this is happening. I saw, you know, music, video games, sports to, of course, movies and TV.

4:24and uh yeah it's more or less almost any trailer you can imagine is sort of being run through this uh through this sort of digestive system and uh posted like this it's like it it works it's this is the way now to get your content in front of big audiences so give us some examples like in the story you cited stuff you came across for the michael jackson movie michael and for all mankind on Apple TV Plus, the Netflix show Night Agent. Like, how do I, Joe Blow consumer on social media, identify fake or kind of studio-hyped clipping content? Or the whole point is I think that you can't. I know, but that's my point.

5:05I want to be savvy about this, and I feel like I'm being gamed. I think everybody should try to join these clipping servers and take a look at what these campaigns are so they can know why this stuff is sort of junking up their feeds right now. It's really tricky to tell what is fake and what's real. And you mentioned the Michael Jackson movie, which is a really interesting case. So it's not just clips of the trailer from the Michael Jackson movie that are being clipped and posted. What was really sort of interesting about that one was it's handheld videos. Whoever was paying for this campaign was asking people to post this handheld video of somebody shooting the billboard for the Michael Jackson movie.

5:46And so they want it to look like, you know, just basically some random nut is out on a walk and sees this billboard and gets so excited by it that he needs to shoot it with his phone and then post it to TikTok. And so that sort of looks real. The production values are as terrible as anything else on your TikTok feed. And so it really, you know, they've gotten very savvy and they know how to make something look like it's just, you know, normal, regular, everyday garden variety enthusiasm from regular people. And that's Lionsgate paying one of these agencies to do the campaign for them. What is the ecosystem of these agencies?

6:19Like how many of them are there? What is, you know, what are the money involved? Like give us the economic breakdown. Well, the first, it's tricky because it's the studio's marketing departments that usually hire like outside marketing departments. And then these other outside marketing departments then hire the clipping shops. And so then the clipping shops go into the Discord service and hire, you know, freelance regular people to actually do the work. And so, you know, between the clips and the studio, you have, you know, four layers of plausible deniability. Right. Oh, we don't know. It just went viral.

6:50We have no idea how Barbenheimer happened. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so, yeah, when I went around asking about these campaigns, you know, the studios either didn't write me back or they had to take a week to sort of investigate this. And then they came back sheepishly and said, you know, OK, yes, that was us. But, you know, this is really still pretty new. And so it's the companies that are doing this, the actual clipping shops, they seem tiny, but they're growing. I talked to a few of them. There's this company, Spade Clipping. There is, or at least was, Floodify that was working until recently.

7:24Floodify. I love that name. It literally says what it does. It literally floods you with garbage. Yep, and yeah, that's what they do. But yeah, no, and I have heard, and I can't mention any names, But a couple of people that I talked to in the story, they told me that talent agencies are now basically bringing this in-house. And so they may not necessarily be, you know, contracting out to people to do it on Discord. They might actually have a, you know, a broom closet someplace with a thousand phones where they're, you know, posting their own trailers. So it's... Oh, God, they're probably getting the mailroom people to do it.

7:59Exactly, exactly. No, but that's interesting, though, because, you know, the talent agencies often complain when the studio marketing campaign is either not as robust as they want or doesn't focus on their client, focuses on someone else. So you can essentially take matters into your own hand. And if you are the third lead in a movie that's coming out, you could hire one of these agencies to flood the zone about your client and make sure that the focus is on your client, even if the studio has determined that your client shouldn't be the focus of the campaign. Right. So the Andrea Riceboro strategy just got a lot more interesting.

8:40Exactly. Andrea Riceboro could have done this. Now, it's very different in the Oscar context because you're marketing to 10 ,000 members of the Academy, and she did that brilliantly with her campaign a couple years ago. But this is sort of a glorified version of this. It's highly specialized and, I think, pretty effective viral marketing. Give us some of the costs involved. Like you go into it in the story of like what a, you know, campaign to boost awareness for a band or for a TV show might cost. That's kind of one of the things that is most interesting about this is this is basically the cheapest form of advertising that has ever existed.

9:20So on a cost per mil basis, which is what it costs to get a thousand views, it costs a dollar to get a thousand views on running one of those campaigns. And so if you buy a real ad on TikTok or Instagram, that can cost$10 per thousand views. And so this is a fraction of that. And then the bonus you get with this is nobody knows that it's advertising. It looks like a real thing. And so therefore, people will trust it more than they will a thing that's sponsored on it. Well, and if it's good, then you get it into the algorithm that then feeds it out to everybody and they start sharing it on their own.

9:56and most people don't share ads on their own. But if it's a woman doing a funny dance in front of the Michael Jackson movie during a screening, that's something that you might share with your friends. And if it's studio marketing, that's the home run. Right. And so the budgets for a lot of these campaigns are, it's, you know, they'll say, we're going to pay$5 ,000 and then stop. And then, you know, even if these clips are still circulating and attracting more, you know, getting more and more views, that's free, you know, free views for them. And so, yes, if one of these goes super viral, you get a really pretty spectacular deal on it.

10:32And it's supposed to be illegal, right? I mean, there is an FTC rule that you have to identify advertising on these platforms. Yet, when you called the platforms, they didn't seem to be enforcing it that much. It's yeah, the platforms, you know, they all sent me these statements about, you know, platforms and you know we we do our best and whenever we see any of this stuff we'll we'll you know we'll take it down and then you know i got this statement from youtube and then hours later this uh clipping campaign for the google io conference uh is posted in one of these discord servers and so it's you know google is obviously youtube's parent company and so the platforms themselves are basically doing this uh you know doing this themselves and so they don't seem to be super incentivized to, uh, to shut it down.

11:19And the government, I mean, God knows the government's not going to do this. Government's not going to do this because I mean, Trump's FTC presumably is not going to, you know, get on this because I think Trump himself is probably benefiting from this, uh, strategy as well. And so, uh, yeah, this is, it's illegal in the way that like jaywalking is illegal, which is, you know, not very illegal. Right. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about the difference between a narrative campaign and a clipping campaign because clipping obviously is, getting the clips out there, making sure people are seeing the videos on TikTok and elsewhere.

11:51But narrative campaigns are more interesting to me because there's an editorial component of there. There are evil geniuses out there who can craft a tweet that looks like it would be coming from a real 12-year-old suburban kid that is like, oh, this is interesting, or can't wait to see this, or something, some version of that that can craft the narrative. And we saw this when, you know, the whole Baldoni versus Blake Lively, where that group was trying to craft an image of her as being, you know, the villain in that fight. And we saw it during the Johnny Depp, Amber Heard situation where there were bots out there.

12:31I'm less interested in the bots. I'm more interested in how you craft a narrative through a narrative campaign on social media and how the studios can do this to better sell their product. So I got into this kind of in music, which is, you know, the people I talked to, they were able to speak better to that. But somebody gave the example of when a band of theirs appears on Saturday Night Live, they might post, you know, a thousand times in 10 minutes after they're done performing. This is the best performance of the year on Saturday Night Live. And I think, you know, for movies and TV, I think, you know, they'll basically, they the comment sections to post, you know, this trailer looks fantastic or, you know, I can't wait to see this.

13:17It's, yeah, it's really interesting. There is an extra editorial component to it that is sort of a little bit scary. But the comments are one thing. I'm talking about stuff that goes viral on platforms like Twitter X and TikTok and YouTube, where it's literally people are like, holy shit. And it's like a clip where it feels real, you know, and sometimes. The narrative campaigns will push both sides of something controversial just in order to stoke the conversation and get people interested in the topic. And that's kind of interesting as well. Sure. Yeah. So I spoke to a couple of companies that claim to be able to detect this kind of thing.

13:59And they found that, you know, in a couple of big recent controversies, Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl, where there was this fight over a, you know, Spanish speaking artist performing at the Super Bowl and the Sidney Sweeney American Eagle jeans thing, they found that it was pretty much the exact same accounts that were amplifying both sides of the argument in some cases. And so it looks like somebody just basically wanted to make these things the loudest argument in America for a week just to get attention for whatever the product was. So if you're American Eagle and all of a sudden the media is reaching out to you for comment on your controversial Sydney Sweeney jeans campaign, you have created that controversy via your clipping and narrative services, allegedly.

14:41Right. So, well, yeah, some, you know, one part of this is they want to fool regular people on social media. And so that's, that's one part of it. Another part of it is they want to fool people like us, journalists, uh, who, you know, look at our social media feeds when we're trying to figure out what to, uh, what to write about. And we think, okay, this is something that everyone is talking about right now. And so I better weigh in. And so we kind of basically amplified this, this fake, uh, sort of astroturfed, uh, conversation and, uh, you know, turn it into something that's, that's almost real.

15:08they got me they got me last year on geese like i was like what is geese and why is everybody talking about geese so i listened yeah i want to clarify lane that these posts these like viral posts the quote retweets on twitter with a funny caption on it these are being created by human beings or are these being created by like some algorithm some ai bot some kind of computer program or is it like they hire human beings to come up with shit to post across all these platforms So some of it, I think primarily the stuff that works the best right now, I think is human made. And so like use the night agent as an example.

15:45And so there are one of the videos that I think went semi viral was it was like a caption where it was like when the when the girl you're hooking up with says she wants to have a talk. And then the night agent is like driving his car off a bridge, I think is the clip from the show. So it's like that. And so that seems to be, you know, human made. But I think more and more. They can do better. They can do better than that. But now there are all kinds of ways to clip and post via AI too. And so that feels like that's, you know, I think this is a brand new thing that's changing all the time. And people are finding new and more efficient ways to do it.

16:20And so it feels like AI is now kind of going to be a big part of this. It's also, I think that the demise of the monoculture really feeds this. I mean, you get into this in your story, but when nobody knows what is popular anymore and the media landscape is so fractured, we all have our own little bubbles. We are constantly looking for what is popular. And into that void comes these manipulators who can provide the appearance of popularity. And that matters. It arguably matters more than popularity itself now. Yeah, it's like you can give people FOMO if you can create this illusion that everybody is watching a particular show or listening to a particular band.

17:07And so the appearance of popularity is basically your best marketer. And so you can sometimes turn that into actual popularity or at least something that looks like actual popularity. Yeah, it's tricky. But nobody has any idea what's popular. The metrics, every streaming service, everybody used to sort of use the same scoreboard and pay attention to the same stats. Now everybody has their own scoreboard and only shows the stats that flatter them the most. And so in that, yeah, it's really hard to get a sense of what other people are actually watching. And this basically gives studios a way to sort of manufacture the illusion that something is popular.

17:45And so that's pretty valuable. This podcast is brought to you by Landman. As oil rises from the earth, so do the secrets. Billy Bob Thornton, Demi Moore, and Sam Elliott star in the explosive second season of Landman. One of the best TV shows of the year raves the rap. This season is better than ever, says Esquire. From Taylor Sheridan, Landman continues its run as a cultural phenomenon. For your Emmy consideration in all categories, now streaming on Paramount+. This episode is brought to you by Netflix, presenting Beef from creator, writer, and director Lee Sung-jin. The new installment of the eight-time Emmy-winning anthology series features powerhouse performances from Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, Charles Melton, Kaylee Spaney, and legendary Korean actors Yoon Ye-jung and Song Kang-ho.

18:34Esquire raves its hands down the best TV show of the year, and IGN hails it a masterpiece. Lee Sung-jin's series remains an untouchable force. beef for your Emmy Awards consideration. It's interesting though, because we're making it sound like it's kind of easy to do this. And I, and I have talked with studio marketers about how it's actually pretty difficult to have something go viral and feel organic. And it gets to the question of why we haven't had a Barbenheimer moment since then. It's been a few years now and there hasn't, you know, there's been successful viral campaigns and there's been a lot of movies that have hit because of the social promotion and reaction, but nothing that has reached that level yet.

19:21And so first of all, do you believe that Barbenheimer was manufactured by the studios? And if you do believe that, why hasn't it happened since? It's tough to tell. I would say, you know, probably the reason it hasn't happened since is because this stuff doesn't always translate necessarily into real world, you know, engagement. The, you know, in music right now, there are all these bands who are going to cancel tours because nobody's buying tickets. And, you know, they thought based on their online reaction that they were a lot more popular than they actually were. And it turns out Post Malone or the Pussycat Dolls, not that popular.

19:56And so, you know, it may just be that this will help you sort of cut through on social media, but that does not necessarily mean that people are going to buy movie tickets. So you can generate all the reaction you want, but it's not a butts in seats moment necessarily. Yeah, exactly. And then there's something like the clavicular phenomenon where this dude has all of a sudden broken through and is everywhere and is getting a New York Times profile based essentially on effective clipping. Yeah, it's a strange world we live in. it's you know exposure is different than popularity and i think the clavicular front i'm on is sort of a perfect example of just you know he's showing up in people's feeds they didn't ask for this uh and then you get the uh yeah it's like you get the media who's sees this weird person doing this stupid thing and says we've got to get in on this and uh and then it becomes smashing his face look smaxing look smaxing with a hammer yeah uh so yeah uh And yeah, this is how screwed up our media ecosystem is now.

21:00I know. Craig tried it for a while. It just led to a bunch of bruising. No, but you know, it gives legitimacy when journalists like myself are looking at this and then deciding to cover it. And if the New York Times writes a profile, all of a sudden clavicular is a thing. And he's got a very aggressive publicist who's pushing that stuff out. One of the people in your story quoted said, I don't know if we've found a true viral trend in a while. All of them are going to have some sort of inauthentic behavior behind them. That is just like depressing. Everything is advertising. The scary thing to me is, okay, Justin Bieber at Coachella, Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl, the NBA Finals.

21:46it's like these things should be popular online but basically everybody's doing this and so it's sort of raised the bar and so even actually popular things have to use these strategies to cut through all of that noise. Yeah, why does Bieber need that? Bieber is a headliner at Coachella that is by definition a viral moment, especially when he gets up there and starts playing YouTube videos of himself on stage. You would think so but he really had to pour some gasoline on it to make that make that go as viral as it did. So it's, uh, it's not a guarantee if it's organic, it's not a, you know, even if it seems like it's a high visibility thing that should presumably, you know, generate its own attention, that's not guaranteed anymore.

22:28It's so odd. I mean, it's almost like you, there might be a market for people to say like, we don't do this, you know, authentic, authentic content, not fed to you via paid clipping. It's going to have to be on a different app because the algorithms are not going to promote any of that stuff, probably. It's going to get buried. I kind of feel it's the economics of it are so good. It works so well that I sort of feel like even the holdouts are going to get basically pulled in by competitive pressure. It's pretty terrifying. Lane, how prevalent do you think this is? Like how ubiquitous is this stuff?

23:00Is this every once in a while, you will see a post for the movie Obsession and think, oh, maybe this is an engineered marketing campaign. Or is this, you know, half or more of what we're seeing on the internet is fake? I have gone crazy. and now I'm seeing it everywhere, every place I look. I opened the Reddit app the other day and it's got like the posts in the Reddits that you follow or whatever. And I think there was a, somebody asked, I'm just getting into Elliot Smith and I want more artists that sound like Elliot Smith. And then you open the post and the whole comment section is this one, they're posting this one artist who sounds like Elliot Smith who just released an album last week, it turns out.

23:38And so it's clear, seemingly that that was sort of posted. This is, you know, a stealth ad. And so I just I find myself seeing that kind of thing everywhere now. It does feel pretty prevalent. If you sort of recalibrate your your skepticism, I think you will see this in more places than you might expect. And you listen to the article, Joe Lim, the former CEO of Flutify. He said that he thinks 90 percent of what you see on the Internet is advertising in disguise. Ninety. Ninety percent. That sounds high for sure. You know, he would he would probably know. Also, I was surprised that all these guys were talking.

24:12Like, was it at South by Southwest? They were just on stage, you know, disclosing their secrets to the world of what they're doing under the hood. Craig, everyone wants to brag. Everyone wants to be given credit. But there's been a pullback now where they're much harder to reach now, it sounds like. Yeah, when New York Magazine calls, you're like, oh shit, what did I say? They were doing it on stage. I mean, what did they expect? My story sort of went, you know, a tiny bit viral. And I do kind of, I get suspicious of even that. It's like, I did mention the names of some of these clipping services in the story, of course.

24:42And so I wonder if I might have had a little artificial help myself inadvertently. Well, no. Did New York Magazine pay for a clipping service to clip your piece? I am told that we don't do that. Sure, sure. Craig, where's my clipping service? Craig, does the ringer do that? I don't believe so. We got to get on that. But I guess I could look into it. I guess if everybody, if you're not doing it, you're falling behind, it sounds like. You won't believe what Matt said today. Every time I open my YouTube page, I see Matt's face or Chris Ryan. So, you know, that's the algorithm. Thank you. We appreciate you clicking on our faces.

25:20But it gets to an interesting business point because, you know, when an actor has a project coming up, especially if they are an up and coming actor, the talent team gets together and said, OK, how are we going to capitalize on this and try to raise the profile of the actor? and you hire a publicist and you try to get earned media and you try to get into the marketing campaign. But should a clipping service be part of the campaign for individual actors, filmmakers, et cetera, trying to get attention for their work? As a person who cares about the integrity of our information, I would say no. But if you're a young actor who wants to get out there, it seems like a no-brainer at this point.