How do emerging filmmakers get paid? It’s not news to any of you that the financial upside of shorts is limited. While the licensing of short films has expanded in recent years due to the rise of streaming platforms and digital buyers, it is still a very small market that services only a tiny percentage of the thousands of short films made each year. In light of this, we have recommended that short filmmakers don’t prioritize monetizing their work, as surveys show that even the most successful shorts usually don’t recover their production costs. The great hope in shorts is that “exposure” will allow creators to climb a ladder of professional advancement in the traditional industry—join a writers room, sell a pitch, or secure work-for-hire gigs.

This lackluster state of affairs is in contrast to the nascent “creator economy” which is booming. There are tons of venture-funded startups catering to the needs of this creative class. Coming largely from a Silicon Valley perspective rather than that of Hollywood, you have social platforms currying creator favor via advertising rev-shares and creator funds, membership managers like Patreon and OnlyFans monetizing superfans directly, and marketplaces for the selling of sponsored posts popping up by the dozen. This is all becoming big business, estimated by some analysts to hit $100B this year—a number which nearly equals the entirety of the Global Film Industry.

Largely, these creators are personalities first and foremost though, people who have cultivated big audiences. Where is this entrepreneurial energy for creatives whose brand is primarily about, y’know, their work? For creators that are more at home in cinemas than on TikTok, a new company wants to provide access to a market more lucrative than either Film or the Creator Economy—Commercial Production.

What Is It?

From Sugar23, the company behind projects like 13 Reasons Why, Maniac, The Knick, Dickinson, and Spotlight, comes X4Y.com, a two-sided marketplace for creators and brands that wants to match-make. The core proposition is for a curated community of filmmakers to produce brand-agnostic “spec” content that can be retrofitted to a diversity of brands and then have companies buy them to adapt to their own campaigns.

If it works to plan, the idea could be very disruptive to the current advertising model and highly rewarding to the filmmaking community. Rather than having hand-picked directors pitch ideas in a closed process, a wider swath of creators can make work they want to make, with less compromise, and access a pool of brand buyers. Algorithmic and manual curation will allow the cream to rise on the platform, exposing it to dozens of potential clients. Brands achieve cost savings by cutting out middlemen, get to tap a wider pool of ideas, and proceed, confident in the ultimate execution, since they see something close to the finished result rather than simply a script, treatment, or mood board.

Disclosure: Sugar23 is an investor in S/W. In talking with their team, we found the idea of X4Y exciting and newsworthy for our community of short film creators. We are not being compensated for this coverage and have strived to deliver our honest impressions on its potential, but also, its challenges.

What We Like About It

X4Y envisions the potential for real money to a filmmaking community that has been starved for options on that account. By side-stepping gatekeepers and facilitating direct connections between brands and creators, it also offers increased access to these opportunities for diverse filmmakers at varying stages of their careers.

It is not unusual for filmmakers focused on cinema to work in the commercial space. The divide between the two communities is real, but also fluid. In the years that I worked as Lead Curator for Vimeo, I interacted with a lot of directors on both sides and it was something of an inside joke that while every successful commercial filmmaker wanted to get into Sundance, every Sundance filmmaker we knew wanted to break into commercials.

Yet getting commercial work is an uphill climb. A director is usually many steps removed from the client. In the traditional model, the brand first goes through an agency, the agency invites production companies in, then the production companies each select directors to pitch, so before all that, you probably have to land on a roster first. It’s a hierarchical system that lacks the serendipity of discovery that we see in the creative film spaces like film festivals or the internet.

X4Y disintermediates this process, bringing together the work of individual creatives and exposing it directly to the brands. And because the work is a completed spec, creators get the freedom to execute and sell their ideas, rather than what a brand approves or notes to death.

The tricky thing about creating a market of course is getting both sides. Creators won’t produce without companies buying, and companies won’t show up if talent isn’t there. X4Y is cognizant of this but believes that the value proposition for brands is undeniable, so, according to Dan Sorgen, an industry veteran at places like Saatchi & Saatchi and X4Y’s VP, Creative, the company is taking a talent-first approach. What that means in practice is:

• The X4Y platform is currently free to approved creators
• Users set their own prices
• Creators receive 100% of the proceeds of the sale. (X4Y monetizes via a sales fee brands pay + charging them a subscription fee to access the platform)
• Once sold, creators can leverage that into bundled services – like adapting the piece to the brand specifically, in post-production.
• No non-compete—the platform is a marketplace, but also an exposure mechanism—brands can discover and commission any creator for new work directly.

But, do brands really want to buy commercials off the shelf?

Questions We Have

Like all disruptive ideas, there are a couple of key bets that need to be borne out for the model to be successful, one on each side of the brand/creator equation, and are probably the first questions that come to your mind.

First is the viability of the idea, “Ready-to-Brand”. It is X4Y’s main innovation, so it is worthwhile to examine it more closely. As X4Y describes it,

The functioning of the marketplace hinges on this idea—each piece of spec needs to be broadly suitable to multiple buyers to maximize its chances to sell. It’s what distinguishes the idea from other companies that have explored crowdsourcing creativity like Fiver, Talenthouse, or Tongal. Instead of being a network of creators responding to a brief, it is a marketplace of created work, ready-to-buy. X4Y suggests creators target at least an entire category of brand, and ideally, a spec would appeal across categories.

But, do brands really want to buy commercials off the shelf?

When first presented the idea, I was dubious. We’ve been inculcated over the years in the mystique of the advertising craft, the delicate art of marrying creativity to core brand values specific to the product and service. Could that magic be commoditized? I decided to test this received wisdom. With the NFL back on TV (go Seahawks!), I had an excuse to tune into primetime TV for the first time in a while and made a special note of the commercials. Under close scrutiny, I was kind of shocked by how generic the ads I saw were. I do not mean that with a negative connotation—many of the spots were excellent examples of the craft—what I mean is how generally absent a sense of deeper brand connection was. On at least half the commercials I was completely blind to what the brand or product was until the logo at the end. Try it yourself—many TV ads are simply stylish mood pieces, inspirational montages, or expertly constructed comedic skits that grab one’s attention just in time to deliver the tag at the end.

Given the advantages of buying commercials off the shelf: price, speed, the diversity of ideas, and the certainty of outcome, I could see even big advertisers tempted by X4Y’s model.

Perhaps even more interesting though is Ready-to-Brand’s potential to expand the advertiser pool. In talking to the team, X4Y does not simply want to take a slice of the sizeable TV ad market, but create a marketplace that is welcoming to thousands of smaller brands for whom big-budget video production is not currently feasible.

For these smaller companies, there is a lot of risk in producing their own ads—aside from the cost, the processes of how to source talent, take pitches, and oversee delivery, are too complicated and time-intensive for what is still an indeterminate outcome. One of the most compelling visions of the X4Y team is to help foster a democratizing boom in video “brand advertising” comparable to what FB tools and Google tools have done in “direct response“.

If X4Y’s Ready-to-Brand marketplace can recruit hundreds, even thousands of brands to the marketplace with the idea that video brand advertising can be simple, the enticement for creators to participate is that much bigger.

What is the appetite for creators to make specs?

X4Y believes that getting brands onboard is the easier part of the equation, but the second big question is on the supply side—will there be content to service it?

The existing spec community is a bit opaque to me. As a curator I’ve tracked the work of thousands of directors from afar, so I’ve seen a lot of commercial specs, and many of them are excellent. Just like short films, they primarily serve as a calling card for up-and-coming directors—something to attract attention online and to place on their director reel. In our S/W alum community, we have seen notable success stories—multi-time featured filmmaker, Joe Sill, went viral with a Tesla spec a few years back, and it kickstarted his career as an award-winning commercial director.

But there hasn’t, historically, been an expectation to sell them, nor have there been organizations or platforms to aggregate them, so it’s hard to get a handle on spec’s scope. X4Y thinks that by creating a home, they can aggregate what exists and create a community that reproduces some of the value in “exposure” that festivals or sites like ours do for shorts. I do not doubt that there will be creators who are discovered on the platform that will break through into the traditional advertising industry. But, especially due to the platform’s novel idea of “ready-to-brand”, a big component of making X4Y work will necessarily be encouraging creators to make new specs.

While the desire to break into commercial work is strong from the filmmaker community, making specs doesn’t strike me as super appealing on a deeper emotional level. There is an inherent risk borne by creators in producing them, both in cost and energy, and while the same can be said of short films and low-budget music videos, if a ready-to-brand spec doesn’t sell, you don’t get some of the soft validations like you do with festival laurels or big online play counts.

Money is a hell of a motivator though, and the potential in that regard is much clearer and more plausible to me than in shorts or music videos. X4Y doesn’t fully go live until January, but the team is onboarding filmmakers now and is already creating sales with brand clients through manual connections. If sales happen at a decent clip, I imagine there will be a lot of enthusiasm from creators, and early adopters will be poised to capitalize the most.

In talking to Sorgen about the potential hesitation from creators to produce original work for a new platform, he brought up an interesting idea—X4Y is encouraging creators to explore adapting their content. Do you have great scenes or shots you’ve produced for a short film? What about camera tests or other visual experiments? There is potential that a solid spec exists on your hard drive already, waiting to be pieced together.

S/W alum Joe Sill made a splash with his Tesla Spec a few years back, kickstarting a commercial career

Bottom Line

Asking creators to work on spec has become somewhat maligned in recent years, and we share those hesitancies. It is one of the reasons that, as a site, we have avoided promoting things like filmmaker contests. Yet, taking a clear-eyed view of things, we recognize that our own little slice of the industry—short film—largely runs on the logic of “spec”. It has its advantages in terms of freedom and risk-taking but is not equipped to provide sustainability for its community of creatives. One of our longstanding convictions though has been that the digital disruption that is transforming the economy across all industries will eventually challenge the status quo of how we source creative talent and creative work. X4Y, while tangential to shorts, is one of the most interesting ideas we’ve yet to encounter for providing material opportunity for filmmakers—by utilizing exposure in order to allow them to break into the commercial directing, but more pertinently to realize the kind of direct financial return from their work that can sustain themselves and their career.

Sugar23’s CEO, Michael Sugar sums up the vision, “I have been advocating for and in pursuit of opportunities for creators my whole career. X4Y is a new way to monetize creativity and execution. There are millions of companies that need advertising and millions of creators that are better equipped than anyone to ideate and execute. X4Y is not only a new marketplace, but it creates a new product, UNBRANDED content – commercials to which multiple brands could find connectivity, and providing solutions for both sides. We are thrilled with our ongoing partnership with SOTW, and are excited that this incredible group is being exposed to this disruptive opportunity.”

If X4Y sounds appealing to you, you can apply for free right now to become one of their approved creators. If you’re a Short of the Week alum, add a link to your S/W-featured film for guaranteed approval.