A warning up top, before we dig in here: This article contains usage of the word “snackable” in contexts where it is not being applied to anything that has been fried, battered, or flavor-blasted; we apologize to anyone who’s been rendered snackability intolerant by years of modern TV marketing speak.
Anyway, Disney+ is gearing up to get snackable as hell, with Deadline reporting that the streaming service will soon be incorporating a heavy slathering of vertical videos into its digital offerings in order to better colonize our brains. The issue, apparently, being that while people do subscribe to the service—at roughly 200 million subscribers, it’s the fourth-biggest streaming service on the planet, competing only with Netflix, Prime Video, and Disney’s own Hotstar platform in India for the honor—they aren’t logging into it every single day, as part of their regular routines, in order to mindlessly scroll through crap.
Sorry, no, we meant to say, they aren’t enjoying vertical videos that are “are really great as daily habits, snackable, short, bite-sized experiences,” according to EVP of product management Erin Teague, who did not go on to just straight-up say “You know, like TikTok, or YouTube Shorts.” The push was presented at CES this week as an enticement to advertisers, who would presumably be very excited to do a little snacking of their own on the brains of legions of people flicking through video after video, potentially pulled from categories like “original short-form programming, repurposed social clips, refashioned scenes from longer-form episodic or feature titles, or a combination.”
All of this, Disney would like you to know, is really just about meeting people “where they are. This is what Gen Z and Gen Alpha are expecting. They are not necessarily thinking about sitting down, watching a long-form, two-and-a-half hour piece of content on their phones.” And, sure, it feels worth noting that the social media platforms this move is presumably meant to mimic are social media platforms—with built-in audiences of millions of content creators churning out all that snackable content for their fellow subscribers to consume, as opposed to, say, one company trying to generate the same effect via chopping and screwing its own limited pool of material to better appeal to our attention-deprived minds. But, on the other hand… Okay, actually, we can’t think of a good “on the other hand” here. But, then, we’re not big, exciting Disney marketing brains, pushing forward into bold new definitions of the once-innocuous word “snack.”
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