Brief:
- Haribo debuted a channel on Instagram's IGTV streaming video app to show original series starring its gummy bear candy. The Chewy Channel features stop-motion animated shows whose entire seasons can be "micro-binged" in five minutes, per an announcement shared with Mobile Marketer.
- The channel premiered with workplace comedy "Bearly Corporate," followed by Western series "Goldbear Gulch," magic castle fantasy "Sour Sorcerers" and haunted museum thriller "Investigation Goldbears." The channel showed "Beary Scary Stories Part 2" on Oct. 28, in time for Halloween. Haribo will air a new series every month, according to the announcement.
- Haribo's creative agency Barkley developed the Chewy Channel to showcase the playful elements of its Goldbear gummy bears. "We wanted to build on the creativity that is inherent to Haribo to build must-see content worth following," Katy Hornaday, executive creative director at Barkley, said in the announcement.
Insight:
By creating its own channel on IGTV, Haribo aims to reach fans who rely on their smartphones for video entertainment. The series serve as native advertising, featuring the candies as central characters in a variety of plots and settings that mimic popular genres of TV shows.
Filming the shows in a vertical format and capping their length at just a few seconds boosts the likelihood that people will watch Haribo's series in brief periods of downtime throughout the day. The video strategy aligns well with the mobile viewership habits of younger consumers. About four out of five (81%) Gen Zers said putting on a mobile video while doing other things keeps them entertained, per a study by entertainment company Whistle.
The number of people who watch videos on their mobile phones will swell 6% a year to 2.72 billion people in 2023 from 2.16 billion this year, researcher eMarketer estimated in September. U.S. adults spend about 40% of their daily digital video viewing time on mobile devices, reaching about 40 minutes a day, the researcher said in a separate report.
However, it's unclear how effective a series on IGTV will be, considering Instagram has struggled to get consumers to adopt the platform — despite Instagram's 1 billion-strong user base.
