Indie Producer Perspective: Nacelle’s Brian Volk-Weiss

Brian Volk-Weiss, CEO of The Nacelle Company, shared with FAST Festival viewers how his indie has developed a multiplatform ecosystem for its content, including rolling out the popular Comedy Dynamics FAST channel curated from its library of stand-up performances.

Nacelle has built a unique model for going directly to consumers with its multi-genre offering. Volk-Weiss discussed the company’s positioning and the importance of its FAST channel presence in a session that you can view here.

“I didn’t go to business school,” Volk-Weiss quipped. “Fifteen years ago, when we started doing this, there was this belief that you outsource and offshore everything. I believed everything being under one roof was the way to go because you can walk from office to office over a 10-minute period and pretty much be within the entire company’s toolbox of what we can do. We made a library of stand-up specials. Once we had enough, we started distributing our own library. Then we started distributing other people’s libraries. It started off with stand-up comedy. Then it went into movies. Then it went into documentaries. And now, for all intents and purposes, we distribute anything and everything. And we do everything under one roof.”

With its stable of stand-up performances, the venture rolled out the Comedy Dynamics FAST channel. “We’ve been making this library for about 15 years. And it’s not just stuff that we make. We’ve bought libraries. We’ve licensed libraries. We have over 2,000 hours of content that we can put on our various channels. We have the best independent library out there. If you’re not on Netflix, there’s no way to see or hear a Tom Segura or a Tiffany Haddish or an Ali Wong special without us. Zarna Garg just had a special come out on Hulu. There are only two places you can watch her stand-up: Hulu or Comedy Dynamics. So we had a library, everybody was doing FAST channels, why wouldn’t we? We started with one, then we had two, and now we have three.”

On the approach to curation, Volk-Weiss said, “We don’t tell the audience what should make them laugh. We look at the data, and then we do two things. One, we see what they like. We get data every day, every week, every month, every quarter, depending on the partner. We just go with who’s doing great. It’s that simple. That’s about 67 percent of the curation. The other piece is that we hope that we have earned the audience’s trust. If they trusted us on the other stuff, then they will trust us on somebody they’ve never heard about. So we give them what they want, and that’s a huge percentage of it, but then we also give them stuff we think they might like to try and get them as new fans of that content.”

As for the approach to finding audiences, the company has been tapping into its mailing list and social footprint. “If you add that all up, it’s over 7 million opt-in individual people. We have the means to send messages, content, ads, commercials—one button will send it to all of those places. That’s the game changer for us. We’re able to monetize the library the way we are because of our PR and marketing and the size of these lists.”

The Nacelle Company is also deploying a unique approach to animated content, building The NacelleVerse, a library of classic animated properties along with consumer products. “So much of what we do is based on nostalgia. We started buying copyrights and trademarks from cartoons and toy lines, primarily from the 80s and 90s. We took all of these and we smushed them together. We hired writers who wrote new scripts. And then we started talking to some of the biggest celebrities in the world. The first one we did was RoboForce and we attached The Rock. That came out on Tubi in April. Now we’re working on Biker Mice from Mars. We attached Ryan Reynolds and Maximum Effort. That’s going to come out next year. Every year, we’re going to put out at least one cartoon. RoboForce was six episodes. From now on, we’re doing eight episodes. The idea is to build this universe. We also make the toys. We do comic books with Oni Press. We’re creating this independent shared universe.”

On identifying retro properties that still have fandoms attached, Volk-Weiss said: “We look at YouTube numbers. We look on eBay at prices, so you can tell what’s hot and not based on what the prices are and also what the availability is. And we’re constantly getting emails and DMs. We listen to what the fans want and give it to them.”

The company’s decision to keep control of its output across multiple platforms is the main reason it has been able to navigate the challenges of the ecosystem today. “It’s the only reason we’re all still here and growing. We have more employees today than we did in January. Our output this year will beat last year, and last year is the most we ever made. The reason we can do this is because we have this library that took us a decade and a half to build, finance and produce. Now we have three channels, which means we have money coming in from three sources. We only do work for hire for Disney. Every single other thing we do now, we self-finance. That is a very lucky thing to be able to do at this time in Hollywood history.”

The overall strategy for the year ahead will see the company “doing more of what we have been doing, which is entertaining people the way they want to be entertained. At the same time, we’re also trying to surprise people. You can’t just give people what they want. You’ve got to keep upping the game. You have to surprise them. You have to keep it fun. The third leg of the stool is the economics. We know it’s tough times, so we want people to be able to watch our content for free on YouTube or Amazon or Roku or Tubi, and for our toys or other things that we produce [to be at] competitive prices. Like our content, they’re designed to be cost-effective.”