Choice And Control Key To Reaching 'Plurals' Generation: CN's Miller

Kids generally want their content when they want it, where they want it. As you noted, it's not about changing habits—they're born into it. This is the only world they know: any piece of glass they touch and they can get an instant on. So how do we make sure we're meeting their expectations, that we're creating immersive worlds? It really informs the way we connect our content from platform to platform and make sure that the content's anywhere and everywhere they want it.

Super excited about feature sets, different platforms, speed of technology—all the things that matter underneath the skin. By that I mean daily habits and expectations are part of it. Our audience, kids, fans—they want to be able to watch everything without buffering. They want to know that it's going to be on different platforms. They want to know if they're on a car ride with their parents that they can get a snackable piece of content that they can play games. Looking at the new platforms, new technology, what features are available starts to inform us in our product roadmap about what else we can be doing to meet those demands. And to see it in the abundance that it is around here is pretty impressive.

I think for us, I look at it a couple ways. I look at it from a pure programming standpoint and then almost how we buy for our platforms rather than how people are buying for us. I think Donna and her team do an amazing job of looking after that and making sure that we're offering products and an ability for total consumption. I think Cartoon is a great candidate for that. When you look at our VOD platform, our video mobile app, as well as on air at any given time, we see a plus-plus multiplier. So it really does offer an opportunity to buy premium content across everywhere our audience or our fans are. And we see extremely high engagement across those platforms—time spent viewing—and we're able to look at that every day so that we can see where the trends are, what shows are performing. I think that data helps inform and create better sales products and helps pinpoint some highly desirable programming across our networks.

Yeah, for us we have some great shows coming. We have Ben 10, which has been a global success for us—a reimagined version of that. We were able to launch it with a Hero Time app at the end of the year as a first entree into the market to reintroduce Ben to new fans as well as fans that loved him the first time around, connecting that into content and storytelling across multiple platforms, across digital, across linear—all that's rolling out right now. We also have Magiswords, which was a great show that I was telling about earlier that started as 15-second content on CN Anything, and then we were able to bring that to linear, gaming, and then connect it all through an app called MIM Mobile, where you hold it up and it collects it off the TV—every time there's a sword that pops up, you're able to move around and tie that vertical together. Again, it gives a really deep, robust, immersive fan experience. And I think creating that from the start—so multiplatform by design—is really what we're doing. We're doing it in our marketing, we're doing it in our content creation, and I think that creates great unique opportunities for Donna and her team to sell it that way as well.

It's very perceptive. I don't know that everybody always realizes it—it's like having a crystal ball. Everyone talks about Millennials. Well, we were serving Millennials 25 years ago, so we're serving plurals, otherwise known as Generation Z now. And some of the things we see: one is they're mobile natives. If Millennials were digital natives, they expect their device in their pocket, in any screen, to run video at any point in time. They have the capacity for choice and control in a way that maybe Millennials didn't. Millennials were like, 'Give me a list, tell me the top 10.' The generation that's coming up behind it has great command of all the choices and they want to mix and match on their own. If you give them your content and you let them experience your brand and participate, they will evangelize for you. They are your greatest asset in building fans. I think that is one of the critical pieces, as well as visual—they're very visual. When you start to look at the statistics and they start to tell you how much of the consumption on devices will be video as we go out to 2020, it's because everything is highly visual. That's how they communicate—whether it's emojis, bit emojis, video, live streaming themselves—all of that is very different than the texting generation, that rapid-fire thumb activity that we've had, and that's changing too. And then there's definitely some themes across the board as it relates to content and what their expectations are of the people that are serving them. And I only hope that we can meet it on a regular basis.