00:00Hi, my name is Brandon Dennehy. I am a short drama executive in the United States.
00:05At Pocket FM, you used to work there and you let the U.S. accountant sing and produce a massive
00:10amount of microdramas and audience series over 10,000 hours. So what was your team strategy
00:16behind that? How did you make the accountant work for the U.S. market? A little bit before
00:23the pandemic, I'd been working in Hollywood for over a decade and I kind of saw the cracks in
00:28the industry coming. It was already very hard to get anything made in this business.
00:33Even if you've worked with every major studio or you've worked with HBO or been on major,
00:38major shows, it's still very difficult to just keep working. And it became obvious that it was
00:44only going to get harder as time went on because it was going to contract. And then the pandemic hit,
00:49killed all of my projects and my overall, in my development deal by pure serendipity.
00:55Finally, Pocket FM reached out because they were looking to expand into the U.S. And so I met with
00:59their founders and their CEO. I really loved their Netflix of audio pitch because they were an audio
01:04company exclusively at that time. And so I joined and I joined them to some executives, development
01:10executives, creative executives to build it like a TV studio has where we work with Hollywood writers
01:17to create new series, put them in the app. Very quickly, that all changed. And we got under the hood
01:22and sort of saw what Pocket FM was, which was anybody that works in short dramas would recognize
01:28it. We would license Chinese web fiction and then localize it for the U.S. market and then produce it
01:34as an audio series. And so very quickly, what I did was build teams of writers, train them on how
01:41to
01:42localize the content, train them initially on what is the content, because the Chinese content coming over
01:47at that point was Google translated, essentially, and showing Americans for the first time,
01:53a poorly translated Chinese web novel, their brains don't understand what they're looking at,
01:57because it's just not what they, there's nothing seen before. Training teams of people how to
02:01localize Chinese web fiction, commissioning teams on what to look for and what not to look for with
02:06licensing content. Like, guys, stop licensing the historical fiction because the Chinese historical
02:11fiction and the U.S. audience are just, we're just not, we're not going to localize that,
02:16not on any sort of timeline that makes sense to publish. And, and basically training teams of
02:22creatives to make shows for the U.S. audience that originated in China. Probably about a year into
02:29that process, real shorts became a thing. Pocket FM became very aware of real shorts. And so we then
02:35started a live action team as well. So we started doing vertical drama, short drama, whatever you
02:41want to call it, content in the same model that we were doing the audio series content, which,
02:46as it turns out, is the same model that goes short and drama box and real short, and everybody else
02:51is
02:51doing their content. They're getting content from, largely they're getting content from China,
02:56licensing it, and then localizing it for the U.S. audience. And that's both a blessing and a curse
03:03in the sense that it's, it's much easier to get stuff and, you know, adapt it and put into your
03:09app very quickly. And then you can turn around successful shows that way. But it also sort of
03:16limits the type of shows they can make in terms of their genres or the types of characters that are
03:21in
03:21their shows or that kind of stuff. So Pocket FM was very much, you know, analogous to my time in
03:28short drama now, which is finding creatives, training them on what the stuff is, how to
03:32understand it, how to adapt it, how to produce it, and how to turn it around very quickly.
03:38This business is all about speed.
03:39Some Chinese company, they have some heat shot dramas, and they dubbed into English.
03:45And then if the results are good, they will localize it. That's one strategy. The other strategy,
03:52I heard some, some company that just have headquartered in the U.S. So they hire local
03:58people. So they produce original scripts. So what's your comments on those strategies?
04:04Yeah, it's, again, it comes down to sort of the company's business model and what their
04:09capital, you know, what their available capital is, a certain thing. If you've got Chinese content,
04:15and you've got money to market, and your content is validated, and you want to localize it and put
04:20into the U.S., however you want to test it, whether that's dubbing it and putting it in an app
04:24and
04:24seeing if it does well, or it's just localizing it and then getting an ad creative out and testing
04:29those, however you want to validate it locally, then you should do that. You should go for that
04:34because that model has been proven to work. And until it doesn't work, you know, you shouldn't
04:40not do it. But that's where the challenge comes in for some of these companies is they've been doing
04:45that and it's been working, but then they have to ask themselves a question like,
04:49do we reallocate some of our costs and take a shot on originals, meaning we bring in people that
04:55are more familiar with the market and other genres and stuff like that, who can create shows locally,
05:01but maybe don't have as much short drama experience. So maybe they don't really what they
05:06make won't be as effective. Do we do we spend all of our money on it? You know, we've seen
05:12been
05:12working or do we take some of our money and put it on to a bigger risk? And that's the
05:16question a lot of
05:16the apps are trying to balance and you're seeing real short had first mover advantage in the States,
05:22but it also had some local talent from day one. And because of that, you're seeing them be able to
05:28execute some more diversity in genre, some more original ideas. Then you've got other apps that
05:34are basically functioning like startups, and they have to spend their dollars much more carefully.
05:39And so they have to weigh the risk of do we spend on a new original on this writer that
05:46we really
05:46believe in with the story that we really believe in? Or do we take that money and spend it on
05:50licensing
05:50and localizing for other titles from China that have really good validation numbers in China,
05:56and that we feel we could probably get at least one good ad out of and then one of those
06:00shows will
06:01be a big hit for us. So that's the double edged sword to trying to figure out right now.
06:05you
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