Microdrama, and the Quibi question.
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The setup
There is a category doing billions of dollars a year that most agency principals could not define if a client asked them to. It has a name, a shape, an audience, a cost structure and a set of working genres, and almost none of that vocabulary has made it into the average new-business conversation in the United States.
So, definitions first, because the argument depends on them.
A microdrama is a serialized narrative shot vertically for a phone. Episodes run 60 to 90 seconds. A full series adds up to roughly an hour to 90 minutes of finished content, which means a season is measured in dozens of episodes rather than eight or 10. It is consumed inside a dedicated app, free for a stretch and then behind a paywall. Every episode ends on a hook engineered to push the viewer into the next one. The dominant platforms are Chinese, the dominant genre is romance, and the dominant American brand response so far has been a one-off stunt.
Kyle O'Brien opened by naming the failure directly, and the last clause is the one worth writing down.
"American brands remain trapped in a cycle of lazy experimentation, pouring generic branded content into imported hyper-niche soap opera templates. The format hasn't been expanded; it's just being rented."
Renting a format means you get the novelty and none of the asset. The next 40 minutes were two people who are building in the space explaining what owning it would look like, what it costs, and where the argument between them has not been settled.
Who was on stage, and why they're worth listening to
Part One — What the format is, and why it is not Quibi
Tommy came to microdrama from the outside, watching the Chinese market compound and then land in the US and Europe.
"I saw the boom in China and where it was coming to the U.S. and in Europe."
His diagnosis of what arrived is the practical starting point for any agency thinking about the space, because it explains why the existing catalogue feels wrong to American eyes.
"It's very, the stories are being translated from what's working in China directly, just translated to English in the American market."
Translated, not adapted. That distinction is the entire commercial opening, and it is what VeYou is built to exploit. Tommy's stated ambition is a premium tier of the format, positioned against HBO rather than against daytime television, and he is precise that this does not mean spending more.
"That doesn't mean we're scaling up the budget. We're just going to pay attention to the stories a little more, the production value."
The mechanics he described are what "paying attention" means at this price point. A series shoots in five to eight days. Locations are limited to the point of a single house standing in for everything. Backgrounds and effects are handled with AI rather than build and travel.
"You shoot these between five and eight days. It's fast. You're shooting 20-plus pages a day, limited locations."
That page count is the number to sit with. A conventional television drama covers five to eight pages a day. This format covers 20 or more. Everything else about how the work gets made follows from that single constraint.
Matt had traveled the other way, out of the entertainment business and back into advertising six months before this session, and he was clear about what he came back for.
"I love a deadline, a budget, and a problem. And those don't exist. There are lots of problems, but there are no budgets or deadlines in Hollywood."
Hear that as a competitive claim rather than a joke. A fixed number and a fixed date are the two things an agency producer takes for granted, they are the two things this format cannot be made without, and they are the two things the studio system is worst at supplying.
And the structural difference from advertising, which Tommy drew himself, is the reason the format behaves the way it does.
"Every 60 to 90 seconds, you're driving the user to go to the next episode. And with marketing, you got to get the user hooked on a 30-second commercial and get them to go buy."
One is engineered for retention. The other is engineered for conversion. A brand that walks into microdrama with a conversion brief will make something the format spits out.
Then someone from the floor said the word everyone was waiting for. The Quibi comparison is the first objection any CMO will raise, and it was put to the panel plainly: Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman raised a fortune, made expensive short-form content for phones, and the thing died in six months. Does that stench still cling to the category?
Tommy's answer was generous and unsentimental.
"I think genius idea, probably wrong time."
Then he moved to the arithmetic. Quibi shot at feature budgets. VeYou shoots a full series for a figure Tommy put in the low hundreds of thousands, and shoots vertical as the primary frame rather than as a downscale of something else.
Matt's read on Quibi is sharper, and it is the version to repeat to a nervous client, because it locates the failure in strategy rather than in the format.
"When Quibi came out, they were very adamant about the fact that they were competing with Netflix, HBO. They wanted to be qualified as that. They didn't build any of the scale, but they spent as much. They spent every dime they had on trying to make the content at that level."
And the payoff, which is the part that ends the objection.
"Here we are a few years later, and everyone they said they were competing with has announced that they have a vertical platform. Netflix, Paramount, Peacock, everybody's announced it. You try to go compete with them at what they were doing versus making something that was so good they wanted to compete with you. They didn't play their own game."
Quibi is not evidence that vertical fails. Quibi is evidence that a vertical platform priced like a horizontal studio fails. Every incumbent Quibi named as a rival has since built the thing Quibi was mocked for building.
Part Two — Where the brand sits
Matt's opening move was to describe the two fears he has to clear before any conversation with a client gets interesting. The first is brand safety, and it is well founded, because the imported catalogue is exactly as strange as its reputation.
"They're so scared because the Chinese platforms have been delivering these salacious, strange, weird things that they just can't get too close to."
He then gave the sample set, which is funnier and more damning than any summary.
"My husband is a werewolf billionaire, or, is he my step brother? And you're like, what are we doing here? How can a brand possibly feel safe about investing in this?"
Matt's counter to that is a production rule he attributes to Tommy: no series that opens with a character waking up in bed wondering how they got there. That single line does more brand-safety work than a page of guidelines, because it excludes roughly three quarters of the existing catalogue by construction.
The second fear is subtler and more expensive, and it is the one indie agencies should sit with, because it describes work several of them have already sold.
"You're watching a lot of brands like Crocs and Dr Pepper, where they are very quickly executing a microdrama, and when you watch them, you realize that what they're doing is that classic advertising trap of it's the novelty of the thing. It's the 'we did it first' moment, and there's no longevity to it."
Those are two real, competent brands who moved fast and got a press cycle. Matt's point is that a press cycle is what they bought. The alternative he sells is ownership of an entertainment property, and the operative distinction is structural.
"We're bringing full brand partners who are a major player in the stories that we're telling, and it's not always product placement. I like to say we're making them a character in the story."
Which produces the line to use on a client who thinks they are buying a piece of content.
"You're not just buying something that'll run once and make you famous. You are buying into something that, if we do it right, has longevity with an audience that you really want and want to be with."
The economics are where this stops being a creative argument. Kyle put the CFO question to Matt directly: how do you justify moving money out of predictable programmatic and into a single vertical series? Matt's answer, delivered with a shrug about his own creative-department credentials, is the most portable thing in the session.
"This is coming from a creative guy, but would you rather spend 3 million or 500,000?"
He then made the substitution explicit.
"Don't spend $3 million on a 30-second commercial. Take a third of that and make three movies with us."
The risk framing that follows is the part a finance team will engage with.
"The cost is so low for experimentation. This is such a minor risk compared to most things they're spending on, and the upside of it is brilliant. The audience is one of the hardest audiences to get, and get them to pay attention."
The deal structure is the second half of the value. Kyle described the partnership's economic thesis as a land grab: the brand underwrites the series, takes sole advertiser status, and gets rights to the raw footage. In Hollywood, handing a client unrestricted access to production footage would be laughed out of the room. Tommy's reasoning for the concession is unbothered.
"If the brand's paying for it, they should have access to the media and the footage."
Matt described what an agency does with that footage, and this is where the model earns its keep for an independent shop rather than for the platform.
"Sometimes it's a promotion for the film brought to you by. Sometimes it's a brand integration that serves both as a trailer for the film and a spot for the brand. Sometimes we're taking the footage in certain scenes and putting them together in a way that becomes a full-on commercial for a specific product."
VeYou also frames for horizontal on most series, using the same discipline as a feature shooting for IMAX: one hero frame, one secondary. Tommy's account is that the incremental cost of the second format is small against the value of having both.
"We do it like we do in traditional film, where if I'm doing an IMAX movie, my directors are framing for IMAX. Our hero frame will be vertical, but we'll frame for horizontal."
So the client's asset library from one shoot is a vertical series, a horizontal cut for connected TV, and an hour-plus of usable footage for social and paid. That is the pitch.
And then distribution, which is where branded entertainment usually dies. Everyone in the room has made a beautiful film that went on YouTube and was seen by 400 people. Matt's argument is that brand-as-character solves the distribution problem structurally rather than through media spend.
"When the brand is the main character in the story, it doesn't matter where it runs. In fact, the more places it runs, the better. The bigger the audience is, the better."
He extended it into the metaphor that got the room.
"You don't catch a fish by dipping the rod in the water. You bait the hook and put it out in the world and bring the fish in."
Compare that to buying the ad breaks around a show, where the value collapses the moment the show moves platforms. It is the difference between owning the story and renting the pre-roll.
Measurement got the shortest answer and the best one. When Kyle asked what completion metrics an agency should track, Matt handed the mic to a member of the crowd, who reset the question rather than answering it: objectives get defined and instrumented before anything is shot, and in this space the data sits close enough to the work that attribution is easier than in most media. Her second contribution was about elasticity. Because the platform is watching character-level performance in near real time, a campaign built here does not have to commit to its own arc at the outset. A storyline can be redirected mid-flight toward whichever character the audience has adopted.
Tommy's description of the underlying instrumentation is the reason that works.
"I get a report every morning, and I can look at what's happened on the app, how many downloads, each country, who's watching what."
And the intervention that report enables, which has no analogue in television.
"The people are really watching all the way to episode twenty-one, and then we have this weird dip off. We can go in and say, we should really re-edit twenty-one to twenty-five, and then repatch it on the platform in two days."
An underperforming stretch of a series gets diagnosed on a Tuesday and replaced on a Thursday. A breakout character gets a spin-off series in six to eight weeks. Asked about branching, choose-your-own-adventure storylines, Tommy said VeYou is not there yet and is skeptical of navigating a viewer through choices, but that speed makes the question close to moot. The platform does not need the audience to pick a path when it can ship a new one.
The uncomfortable truth
Two things were true on that stage at the same time, and neither speaker resolved the tension.
Matt is selling premium entertainment IP with a brand as a character in it. Tommy is running a retention-optimized content operation with a daily dashboard. Those are compatible in the pitch and in tension in the edit bay, and the session's most honest moment was Tommy describing losing that argument to his own data.
"I will be very transparent. I did have some ambitions, like, oh, I want to do this or this and that. And as soon as our data started coming in, and I started seeing it, I went, whoa. I know the fans want more of this and this and that, but the consumer, they want. We have titles, and I'm like, romance, love, people love it. That's what they want."
That is a filmmaker with 30 years of credits saying the retention curve overruled him. Notice which side he landed on. His operating rule now separates the two businesses physically.
"This is my tech company office, and my TV and film office is across the street. And I keep them very separate."
Which produces the sharpest instruction in the session for anyone tempted to port an existing idea into the format.
"Don't start at TV and film and try to shove it into the vertical."
The second uncomfortable item is the cost structure, and it deserves to be stated rather than admired. The reason a series costs a fraction of a 30-second spot is that the conditions of production are different in kind. 20-plus pages a day. A single house playing every location. AI generating backgrounds and effects. And, on the labor question that Kyle raised directly, a default that most agency producers would need to think about before signing.
"Right now it's all non-union because that's what keeps the cost efficient. But we do have titles that we may dip into SAG and do one-offs."
Tommy noted that a SAG agreement permits mixed casts, two union performers alongside three non-union in a five-person cast, which gives a production a middle path. The candour is the point. The economics that make microdrama attractive to a CFO are the same economics that make it a different labor proposition than the commercial work sitting next to it on your production schedule. An agency putting a client into this format should be able to answer that question before a client's procurement team asks it.
The third thing nobody on stage pushed on: if a brand can buy an hour of proprietary entertainment for a fraction of a single spot, the agency fee that used to ride on production volume rides on something else. Matt's own pitch, "take a third of that and make three movies with us," is an argument for shrinking the largest line item most independent agencies mark up. The upside is real and Matt named it, upstream creative access and a new business generator. The trade is real too, and it went unexamined.
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