BuzzFeed's Video Lead Explains How to Build a Creative Workplace
When it comes to online video and branded video success, BuzzFeed is in a class by itself. That tireless wellspring of quizzes, listicles, and GIF-filled stories, BuzzFeed makes videos that get shared by resonating with the viewer's own sense of identity. And it makes branded videos that get viewed over and over because they're just so clever.
To find out how success has changed the video-creation process at BuzzFeed, we spoke to Ze Frank, president of BuzzFeed Motion Pictures, after his company's 2016 newfront in New York City. Great videos only happen when you have great people with experience and vision, he said, such as Quinta Brunson and Ashley Perez, two staff members who presented new projects at the newfront.
"A lot of this is just the story of scale," Frank said. "As things get bigger, they have to encompass more and more, so part of it is all of a sudden having people like Quinta, people like Ashley, Kelsey [Darragh] is another woman who's not here at this event, having enough experience within the system we've created to really become super functional, to actually produce massive things that take a couple months to shoot and put together."
The other key to BuzzFeed's success is knowing how to exploit the current multi-platform online environment. BuzzFeed doesn't just show content on its own site—it relies on dozens of partner platforms for distribution.
"The second would be that what we're learning about how we can coordinate the resources that we've built. We have 7 billion views a month, but they're all over the place—they're on like 30 platforms and they're in different content verticals, and they spike and then they go down. Coordination of all that becomes incredibly important when you're trying to launch new things or trying to expose certain groups of people to new content," Frank said.
According to data from Tubular Labs, BuzzFeed got 4.2 billion video views in April across 94 publishers.
As BuzzFeed grows in new areas and opens new offices, Frank has seen creators work together to create fascinating new projects. They're using available resources in ways that surprise him.
"Watching these new areas of interest emerge in novel ways that are reliant on all these cross-connections, that's something that I don't know whether I totally expected," Frank said. "It's very sort of non-traditional, but I think that's kind of the point. The creative people that we hire who are so embedded in the system and understand how to use the resources that are available to us, they seem to be finding the hacks for how to grow their point of view quickly."
As BuzzFeed and its video output continues to grow, Frank has had to transition employees to new areas while keeping creating his team creative. It's been a learning process for him, as well.
"I do think that modern management is different, in that you really have to try to figure out how to separate out the crazy experimentalists from the people who are going to manage the complexity over time," Frank says. "In a lot of traditional organizations, the crazy creator, the experimentalist, winds up managing, and you just don't get the best of them anymore and their energy is sort of mismatched to the stability part. In terms of behind-the-scenes, that's been one of the most interesting parts of what we do. For two years, I re-orged my organization from top to bottom every quarter. That meant people didn't know who they were going to report to next quarter, and partly it was just because we did not have a framework for how we were going to maintain the amount of experimentalism that we needed while simultaneously capitalizing on what we learned, so it was this constant shifting around. Even when a new opportunity like Facebook Live comes along, all right, what do you do—spin up a whole new division and hire people just for that? No, you have to shift people around. So it took us a long time to get to what we feel is a really good flexible internal architecture."
By channeling creative people, adapting to scale, and staying flexible it its organization, BuzzFeed Motion Pictures has provided a model of success for others to emulate. To grow and harness creativity in your own online video work, take a note from Ze.
Troy Dreier's article first appeared on OnlineVideo.net