“I don’t understand Love Island,” Ben Dietz says, “or maybe maybe I do understand Love Island, which is why I don’t like it or I don’t watch it or pay attention to it. But, please explain. Help bring me closer.”
“It does this great evolution of reality TV,” strategist and TikToker, Georgia Addo (aka please don't make me focus), says. “It really understand how to make your audience feel like they’re co-producing. Obviously it’s all stuff, but you have like your votes for which Islanders you want to keep and stay for challenges, who’s the most liked, and — of course — it comes on five, six days a week. You have so much time to form these intense relationships.”
“On the brand side it’s great,” she adds. “The audience is primarily women. They’re heavy buyers, they’re heavy consumers so, if you’re a Maybelline or something like that, there’s so much more incentive. Overall, Love Island is a phenomenon. I was telling my friends this, but I don’t think there’s any better content economy at the moment. You have commentators doing hundreds of thousands of views with podcasts for an hour and a half to recap an episode you could just go watch.”
“I ‘love’ — which I want to put in air quotes — I ‘love’ your analysis of it as a content economy,” Ben says. “To me, that’s what makes it interesting, not the show itself and not necessarily any of the takes or the developments. It seems emblematic of a way we consume now, which is a harbinger of what could happen going forward.”
“We’re having a super fan moment,” Ben adds, noting Brent David Freaney’s brat presentation and John Summit at Cannes, “where we bring people closer and closer and closer into the artistic process and that makes it both more engaging but also more fraught.”
“When it comes to super fans, for me,” Georgia says, “Really early in my career, right out of college, one of my first jobs was at Spotify. That was when they were developing their super fan mythology and ethos, really building these fan-first platforms…They just announced was a program where the top 1% of listeners can like get early access to tickets or pit tickets or something. That was my first intro of how important these people are.
“I always tell people like I think we live in this world where it’s co-now,” she continues. “It’s co-create, collaboration, and community, all these things of having bonds…That becomes so hard to lead. If you can’t beat em, join em.”
We continue above, meandering to more thoughts on Cannes this year, sports culture taking over, and what might happen at Taylor Swift’s wedding. Catch the full episode on YouTube and Spotify too.
Find more from HIP REPLACEMENT on YouTube, Spotify, and Instagram. Be sure to follow Ben Dietz over on SIC and Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick over on The Trend Report™ too.
