- What is Quibi? Starting on Wednesday at the Consumer Electronics Show, the soon-to-launch mobile-streaming service will try to make itself a household name among its target audience of 25- to 35-year-olds.
- Quibi will spend most of its marketing budget on digital and social-media advertising, to target millennials where they are already spending time on their smartphones.
- It plans to release a new original movie or series every Monday, and debut installments of other titles throughout each week.
- Quibi also inked deals with T-Mobile and Google to promote the platform.
- Quibi CEO Meg Whitman and founder Jeffrey Katzenberg explained the marketing strategy to Business Insider.
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What is Quibi? It's a reasonable question that many people outside of media and tech circles today might ask themselves when encountering the soon-to-launch mobile-streaming platform from veteran Hollywood executive, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and former HP Enterprise CEO, Meg Whitman.
Starting this week, Quibi is beginning its quest to make itself a household name among its target audience of 25- to 35-year-olds.
The company is introducing a new kind of streaming service that offers 10-minute installments - or "quibis," short for "quick bites" - of programming made for smartphones for $8 per month, or $5 with ads.
Marketing for the platform, which debuts on April 6, will kick off on Wednesday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada, where the company will unveil some of its plans on stage, Katzenberg, the company's founder and chairman, and Whitman, the CEO, told Business Insider in a phone interview ahead of the event.
"13 years ago this week, Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone," Katzenberg said. "And so here's an opportunity to really bring a new evolution, or revolution, to what it is to watch video on that device."
Quibi is launching at one of the most competitive times for streaming-video services, with legacy-media brands like Disney, WarnerMedia, and NBCUniversal pushing to upend established streamers like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.
And Quibi is doing so without any major entertainment franchises competitors like Disney Plus has, or the brand recognition of an HBO Max.
While Katzenberg has managed to attract Hollywood elite, like Steven Spielberg, Guillermo del Toro, and Sam Raimi, to make shows and movies for Quibi, it is not the only streaming service banking on big names.
Apple paraded stars like Spielberg, Jennifer Aniston, and Oprah Winfrey on stage when it announced in March its plans for its streaming service, Apple TV Plus. But the initial slate of Apple shows that debuted in November, including a drama loaded with heavy hitters, "The Morning Show," has yet to match the buzz generated by recent shows from Disney Plus and Netflix.
Quibi will spend most of its marketing budget on digital and social media
Like Netflix and Disney Plus before it, Quibi plans to use social media and digital marketing to advertise its service to millennials, where they're already spending time on smartphones. Most of Quibi's ad buys will be on digital.
"You fish for where the fish are," Katzenberg said. "The social-media platforms today, which is where people are in fact are spending a good deal of time, is where the biggest focus of our marketing will be. And that's where we'll be spending most of our money."
Quibi has laid the groundwork for its social push with self-effacing humor on Twitter that pokes fun at its own name.
The name on Quibi's official Twitter account is now, "WTFisQuibi." The account has posted comically offbeat guesses as to what the Quibi name could mean, including "that moment when the toilet just keeps running and you have to jiggle the handle to make it stop."
Quibi wants to make Mondays an event
Quibi is also trying to turn Mondays into an event day on the streaming service.
Every Monday, the platform plans to premiere either a new movie that will be told in chapters, or a new series, Katzenberg said. The new titles will be promoted heavily within the app, as well as through digital and social media.
"Mondays are our day," Katzenberg said. "Every week, at the top of the week, we will be marketing, promoting, and offering to our customers in a very high-profile way, and a highly marketed way, new premium content."
Monday's releases will be in addition to the installments of ongoing movies and series that will be released throughout the week, as well as Quibi's 25 "daily essentials," or news, sports, or other informational shows, which will come out every weekday.
Each day, Quibi said it plans to release:
- One installment of a movie
- Five episodes of episodic, unscripted series and documentaries
- 25 episodes of "daily essentials" programming
The service will launch with about 50 to 60 original shows, Whitman said. In its first year, Quibi said it will roll out 175 new shows, and a total of 8,500 bites of content.
Quibi is partnering with Google and T-Mobile to promote the service
Quibi also has deals with T-Mobile and Google to promote the streaming service.
T-Mobile will offer Quibi to its 83 million customers, as was reported in October.
Quibi also has a broad relationship with Google. It includes a promotional partnership in the Play Store, where Android users download apps, and may include digital-advertising buys to the promote the service, Rob Post, Quibi's chief technology officer, said.
Google is also helping power the advertising that's delivered in the Quibi app, among other infrastructure and services it is providing to the company. "What it allows us to do is focus on the things that are really differentiating," Post said of the Google partnership.
T-Mobile's incoming CEO Mike Sievert and Google's Tariq Shaukat, president of industry product and solutions at Google Cloud, are both taking the stage with Quibi execs at the CES unveil on Wednesday.
Quibi doesn't see itself as a Netflix rival
While Katzenberg and Whitman are gearing up to introduce Quibi to the world, they said they don't view the platform as a direct competitor to other streaming platforms.
The Quibi execs say they're vying for people's time at different moments during the day than other streaming services. Quibi is hoping to attract users between the hours of 7 a.m. and 7 p.m., when they're on the move, and perhaps reading the news, browsing social media, or doing other things on their smartphones. One rule at Quibi is that all installments must be 10 minutes or less, to fit into people's days.
"We're competing for people's time during those in-between moments during the day," Whitman said.
Whitman said Quibi's chief selling points will be:
- New storytelling designed for smartphones, such as complete stories that can be told in 10 minutes or less, or shows that are only available at certain times of day. Spielberg's "After Dark" series, for example, will only be available after sunset.
- Short-form videos for on-the-go viewing.
- A "premium viewing experience" on mobile that allows users to shift seamlessly between portrait and landscape mode, based on the way the user is holding the phone. The feature is called "turnstyle," and is being shown at CES.
But Quibi still has to compete against Netflix, Disney Plus, and others for a share of the money that people spend on subscriptions each month.
A survey by entertainment research firm Magid recently found that people in the US are willing to spend around $40 per month on subscriptions, across about four services.
"From the standpoint of people's certainly subscription money and time - yes, in a macro sense, maybe we are in the same larger sea," Katzenberg said. "But we, as a use case, couldn't be more different and therefore really are not competing with them directly."
"What is Quibi? It's that moment when the toilet just keeps running and you have to jiggle the handle to make it stop." - Said no one ever. Or did they? pic.twitter.com/wPJuOV9VWL
- WTFisQuibi (@Quibi) December 21, 2019