Recently, BrandTrends, an international market research and consulting agency, released a brand awareness survey report. The results show that the key to brand popularity is the trend from content as king to distribution and communication platforms.
It is reported that this survey is about the world's most popular entertainment brands, conducted in 42 countries and regions around the world. Seven of the top 20 brands that respondents actively mentioned (i.e. without shortlist prompts) were not traditional entertainment brands but streaming platforms.
In addition, the findings revealed a surprising point that the diversity of well-known brands is decreasing. As of May 2022, the number of well-known brands familiar to consumers has decreased by 5%, and they come from entertainment content distribution platforms, especially in developed countries, indicating that the trend of brand popularity is becoming more and more concentrated in the head. Especially since the outbreak of the epidemic, several quarterly and annual reports of overseas toy markets have shown that the sales growth and market share of big-name toys have increased significantly.
BrandTrends CEO Philippe Guinaudeau pointed out: "This is undoubtedly good news for streaming platforms, because they are fiercely competing for subscribers. However, things may not be that simple."
A wide variety of streaming media services provide consumers with huge choices. The most common features offered by streaming are video-on-demand and streaming TV, well-known platforms are: Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, Hulu, Paramount+, Peacock, Amazon (Amazon Prime Video) and YouTube (YouTube). However, there are also platforms that offer verticals, such as Apple Music, YouTube Music and Spotify that focus on music streaming services, while Twitch offers live video games. "These latter featured streaming platforms are showing increasing popularity in our monitoring," Guinaudeau added.

The above changes have greatly increased the threshold for content creators, especially those with "small production capacity". Because in the past two years, consumers have consumed entertainment content more frequently than in the past, covering a wider range. Therefore, their tastes have become more discerning, and some entertainment content subscriptions will be cancelled, making it more difficult to create innovative content.
Therefore, media companies with diversified businesses or third-party partnerships, such as some media companies with digital assets (such as NFTs), will continue to seek growth points, provide consumers with new services, drive membership growth, and increase D2C ( direct-to-consumer) revenue model, expanding customer relationships. Keep in mind that consumers are spending less and less time in front of the TV, and are increasingly turning their attention to other devices, or even switching between multiple devices. This adds to the problem of competing for consumer attention.
In the era of entertainment, now is the era of unprecedented melee, and the traditional pattern is being broken and reshaped.