Ownership, control, margins: the brand playbook for microseries is still taking shape

Brands are increasingly creating their own or incorporating into existing ones, from jewelry brand Alexis Bittar’s Bittarverse mockumentary featuring fashion icons like Law Roach and Michasel Kors, to SharkNinja products sitting inside the hit comedy microseries Brooklyn Coffee Shop. 

The buy-in is there, but with inconsistent ROI and a variety of ways to activate in the space, the future of the microseries is unclear. To get some clarity, Digiday spoke with a brand building their own microseries, a creative agency pitching them to brands, a comedy creator, and three creator economy executives about the future of the microseries, the questions they’re raising, and who’s winning when the deals are signed.

First, brands have to decide exactly how they want to enter this world – do they latch onto an existing, successful microseries (either on free platforms like TikTok and YouTube or paywalled ones like ReelShort and Drama Box), or do they look to hire smaller creators to make their own branded series to build awareness on popular social channels? 

“The cost to get involved with the microdramas that we’re making with TikTok are probably higher than they’re spending on making their own,” said Ian Schafer, co-founder and president of branded entertainment studio Ensemble, which sits under actor Issa Rae’s Hoorae media company. “But what they’re hoping for is what we’re guaranteeing, which is distribution.”

But for smaller creators and studios, brand integration is a lower-risk investment. Harley Block, CEO and co-founder at brand strategy company IF7, pointed to comedy microseries, Secondhand Exchange, and how the entry point is much more accessible cost-wise as it’s still growing its audience. 

“You can’t buy credibility or content integrity,” he said. “I think doing it from the ground up as a brand, the deck is stacked against you. It doesn’t mean it can’t be done. I guarantee you, there are brands that can do it, but do you want the built-in credibility or not?”

For creative agency Dayna’s House, however, they’ve pitched building microseries from the ground up in nearly every recent meeting with brands, according to founder Dayna Carney. Nuuly, the fashion rental company, was the first one to bite. The agency helped build a microseries about dating in New York City, starring actor Wally Baram and featuring creator Milky Tran as director. The videos have racked up millions of views on TikTok and tens of thousands on YouTube in just two months, and Carney said the cost was low. 

Photographer and creative director Cris Molina, who recently worked with Floridian resort SkyBeach on a microseries set on the property said that microseries “can cost a master brand a quarter of what they spend with us on traditional advertising.”

Adam Wescott, CEO and co-founder of Home Game Studios said that the budget on average is around $200,000 per series’ season, and with the number of episodes decreasing on average (from around 70-90 one-minute episodes to 40-50), so there’s more money to work with on a per-minute average per episode. Despite this, Wescott said there’s not a “huge margin” for producers and creators, but it does often give them, crucially, ownership. 

The big questions

As brands and creators are navigating the microseries waters, a few questions repeatedly rise to the top about ROI, which is still uncertain; ownership, which varies; and where the genre goes from here.

For Schafer, Ensemble guarantees a certain floor for each brand it works with, and thanks to their partnership with TikTok (which just announced a second co-production partnership with Tanya Cohen’s Made By Us studio), can hand-wave away production costs when they ask. “We’re delivering them the media value for every dollar that they spend,” he said. “We’ve already greenlit microdramas for a season two that haven’t launched yet because our testing says that they’re going to do so well.” 

But that kind of guarantee isn’t common across the microseries space. Nuuly’s series is all about brand storytelling and building a world in which the fashion rental company is “a character,” according to Carney. 

“There is no call to action,” she said. 

So ROI is wiggly, but what about ownership?

In the case of microseries built explicitly for a brand (like Nuuly) creators don’t own the IP and can’t capitalize off of its success doing spin-offs or utilizing the character created for the series in other work. 

“In these very early stages, creators sign away ownership of this concept and this content,” said Carney. “But is there an expiry date? Is there a license to use it? Does it return back to, you know, the director or the hero talent? How will that work?”

The goal in many cases is for IP ownership to stay with studios and creators, but if it doesn’t, Wescott says there are higher budgets and creator fees for branded entertainment to make up the difference. In the case of IP created and produced entirely by a creator or a studio like Home Game, ownership is a case-by-case basis, but ideally, creators can do whatever they want with them. Gray Fagan, a scripted creator with 5 million followers on TikTok, said he always ensures he retains ownership of his characters.

As for the future of the microseries, it’s unclear. Wescott has seen the format begin to incorporate more genres like true crime and horror, hence the shift towards the “microseries” verbiage and away from “microdramas.” 

Schafer worries that, as more brands try to wrangle the microseries (which he says is surprisingly difficult since each episode has to have a beginning, middle, and cliffhanger, done several dozen times), they’ll increasingly rely on rehashing old tropes or generative AI to better guarantee success. 

“Any time there’s an exciting new format, tech, celebrity that audiences flock to, brands have 100 meetings about it,” said Schafer. “I love the experimentation that’s happening, but I do sometimes question the strategy of saying ‘This is something that’s hot. We should make our own.’ One of the reasons why it’s hot is because the brands aren’t making their own.”