Gino Guzzardo on Disney’s Short-Form Slate

Gino Guzzardo, VP for multiplatform content at Disney Branded Television, offered up some valuable perspectives on producing compelling short-form content as day two of the TV Kids Summer Festival wrapped today.

Guzzardo and his team have been making an array of short-form content at Disney Branded Television for use on YouTube as well as its own platforms. You can watch the session here.

The multiplatform team features the expertise of both seasoned pros and up-and-coming talent, Guzzardo said, “who have the sensibility of YouTube and TikTok. It’s been amazing to see this dynamic of these two worlds coming together. And you can see it in the work.”

Short-form videos “as a unit of storytelling are amazingly portable. A single short, when done right, can go on all those places and thrive there organically. Shorts for us have just been this incredibly efficient and portable way to get the characters out there.”

Plus, Guzzardo said, shorts are in Disney’s DNA. “Go back to a place and time when Mickey Mouse did not exist. Charming character, new technology, with animation. How is [Walt Disney] going to get it out there? He used shorts as a vehicle to bring Mickey to the biggest platform around, which was movie theaters. What we do now is a lot more complex with all these different platforms and different competition, and there’s a lot out there, but it’s essentially the same approach. We are using shorts to bring our characters out into the world, win over fans and then bring them back.”

At the heart of multiplatform’s content strategy is an emphasis on “recurring, proven anthology formats. We like to find a hook or a premise or a conceit that will immediately grab the audience and carry them through. Ideally, you hook the audience, and then you deliver on that promise. The anthology formats also allow us to release on a recurring cadence, so we’re always on. We don’t like to let more than a month go by between releasing an episode of that format. We’re always engaging the viewer. We look at season breaks and push through. If a show has aired, if the show has sunset, if it’s a show that’s maybe three, four years old or longer, but they’re still fans, those are characters that we want to bring back out and keep them always on for viewers who find them on Disney+ and from their perspective, those characters are just as vibrant and relevant today as they were when the show first came out.”

The slate includes Chibi Tiny Tales, which has notched up more than 100 episodes since originating as shorts for Big Hero 6. “It was taking a familiar character, but subverts them in a way. You see the thumbnail, and it’ll raise a question in your mind. I started thinking there was a format where we could focus on all of our shows and even movies, any Disney story, as a chibi. The variety helps keep the audience’s attention. The subversion of the familiar. Once we have that established, we start looking at where else we can go with this. I started thinking about where these chibis live. Why are they chibis? They’re Disney scientists who have taken all of the Disney stories, props, scripts and everything that’s out there, and they’ve crammed them into this mashup machine. And then the mashup machine compresses them down to this tiny little bean of a planet. And then they use their microscopes to look in. Those are the stories we get to tell. That’s the Chibiverse, which is a seven-minute series that we do. We package them into three for every half hour to be part of our long-form slate. I didn’t know we were going there when we started with Big Hero 6, but it evolved and by looking at the the metrics and watching them constantly and seeing what the audience wants and what they’re responding to we found something that works and evolved it and optimized it. It’s a very flexible, not very precious process.”

The short-form slate allows the team to “lean into a character that the audience likes. The long-form series could take a while to produce. If we start seeing that one character is really popping or there’s interest in a character’s backstory that wasn’t answered in the canon of the series, we have an opportunity to answer those questions and we’re able to get the short out even further.”

The shorts do serve as a funnel to help drive traffic to Disney’s other platforms. “On YouTube, we have 1.1 billion lifetime views. There are a lot of eyeballs there. It equates to, in 2024, 25 million views a month, 800,000 to 900,000 views a day. That’s the billboard. You want to be up there. It is that big funnel that we are pulling viewers in from, much like Walt with Mickey. Where are future fans? In movie theaters, so let’s get Mickey shorts in front of them. Our future fans and current fans are on YouTube, TikTok and all those places. Let’s get our characters in front of them there.”

Shorts also air as interstitials on the linear channels, which then helps to drive traffic back to Disney’s channels on YouTube.

Guzzardo offered up advice for how content owners should be thinking about the short-form space. “I would suggest that they find what they should retain and hold on dearly to—what sensibilities, what traditional parts of storytelling can they not give up? And then what do they need to jettison immediately? My recommendation for what that is is preciousness—getting it exactly right. I believe in developing out loud. If we’ve made this the best we can with the information that we have at this moment, get it out there. There will be more insights that way. Use YouTube and TikTok as your incubation labs. Use it as your focus group. If you get some qualitative data, great. You’re gonna get quant for sure. What’s the click-through rate of this character? What’s the audience retention rate? Are they dropping off halfway through or right at the beginning? Are they watching all the way through? And then use that information. Become very familiar with the CMS on YouTube or whatever platform you’re distributing on and use the native analytics tools for those platforms to understand what your audience is interested in and what they’re not and then take that data back into your writers room, the next short of that format or a new format that it might inspire.”

There’s much in traditional storytelling techniques that should be retained, he said. “They might need to be compressed. I’m a fan of Buster Keaton. He still has lessons that teach me today on where your eye is going across the screen. It’s very well designed, and the beats are paced out nicely. Something will happen over here that connects to there. You watch him as a live-action cartoon going across the screen. He holds your attention. He’s hooked you with the kinetic potential of a moment. And then you have to lean in. His instincts apply to today. So find what you’ve learned through a lot of challenges over the years and hold onto those storytelling tools. But maybe you don’t need an exterior shot that is pulling us into a scene. Maybe just get right into it and you hook us.”

Hooking an audience member also begins before they’ve hit play, Guzzardo explained. “I try to hook a viewer in their mind before they’ve even clicked on your video. Once they tap on it, then you have to deliver on that promise, otherwise they’ll jump off and then the algorithm will pay attention—the click-through rate was high but the retention’s low, they’re not delivering on whatever they promised the viewer that got them to click. And then we won’t get recommended to more people. So find that hook that is baked into the conceit and then deliver on it to hold a viewer the whole time. If you follow that process over and over again, over the years, you can’t help but perform better because you’re using the audience to tell you how to optimize.”

When Guzzardo started in the business, Flash was being used as a medium for storytelling; that technology is now defunct. “It’s important to remember: we’re on shifting tectonic plates in this industry. You could build whole production pipelines and vendor ecosystems on Flash and then within a year it disappears and you have to shift into something else. I get excited when I think about how many different things I’ve had to do and change into over the years to entertain kids and families. It keeps me on my toes. I don’t get complacent. Up-and-coming folks just starting their careers should take heart in that because it’s a real opportunity.”

Constant evolution is paramount, Guzzardo said as the session wrapped. “Under the leadership of Ayo Davis, we are not only following what Walt originally started with getting our characters out there, but she coaches and advises us to keep it fresh and to evolve the strategy. It’s not build it, set it and forget it. We have to always be on our toes and evolve where we’re going and where the audience is going.”