How Vice Spent 2020 Trying to Find a Voice in Vertical Video

“One of the missing pieces was power-producing natively for mobile,” Cory Haik, Vice’s chief digital officer, told TV editor Jason Lynch at Adweek’s Elevate: Publishing virtual summit Tuesday. “I call these stories, and I think we all call these stories—these sort of mixed-media, vertical-video, text-on-screen at times. What we know is that audiences are consuming them en masse, and Vice had not quite set up a team or a production system by which to produce these at scale.”  

Haik, the former publisher of Mic who joined Vice in May 2019, aimed to change that, working with an internal “innovation team” to crack the code. (Disclosure: This editor previously worked at Mic and overlapped with Haik for a period of less than a year prior to Mic’s 2018 shutdown.)

“What Vice hadn’t quite set up was anything aimed specifically at mobile formats … so we put together a plan to build this into a formal third output at Vice and give it a seat at the table,” Haik said.

The last 10 months have thrown just about every industry into uncharted territory, but it’s also cemented the importance of the medium. Vertical video has only become more important for publishers and content creators of all stripes since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has driven a surge in mobile video consumption on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Not all of the efforts in the space have been successful: Mobile video start-up Quibi maintained that “quick bites” of high-production value programming was the future of Hollywood; it wasn’t for them, and the startup officially shut down this month.

At Vice, teams are finding that original programming often requires a different production approach. “We’re not looking for an anchor behind a desk or a host necessarily fronting something in the same way,” Haik said. “We’re looking for the subject of that video to talk directly to the person that’s holding that phone in their hand … it’s a very different way to approach storytelling than a classical producer going out in the field.”

That approach extends to Vice’s other programming that is distributed on emerging platforms. Even documentaries filmed for a traditional broadcast may need substantial work.

“They’re taking some of that content that we’re producing for the likes of YouTube and doing what we call sweating it across some of our platforms,” Haik said.”So [they’re] not just re-cutting it, but you know, giving a new opening or a new sequencing that’s built for mobile consumption.”