What Did YOU Do Last Week, FAST Marketers?

How To Solve FAST's $12.5 Billion Discoverability Crisis

Hey, FAST Channel 'Marketers'... serious question: If you got an email asking you to list out what YOU did last week to make your content more discoverable, what would you say?

What are you doing to ensure that your channels earn their fair share of the $12.5 billion market Wall Street predicts FAST will be by 2027? (S&P Global Market Intelligence)

If you cut a promo, made less than 40 social media assets, spent more than 10 seconds thinking about a rebrand or wasted another hour contemplating spending what’s left of your budget buying the rotator ad on your platform partner's home screen, you may need to rethink priorities.

The only thing you should be thinking about is 1) Helping audiences discover your content, 2) getting audiences to set an intention to watch it and 3) driving tune-in. That is your job.

Because as good as your content is/was, and as much distribution you’ve been able to lock down, that fact of the matter is, in the FAST ecosystem, marketing is the critical pathway to profitability.

Let's start with the half hour the average viewer wastes hunting for something to watch (Nielsen). That's 30 minutes they're not watching your channel or consuming your ads.

That's not just lost time—it's lost revenue. And that, my dear marketer, is on you.

As media cartographer Evan Shapiro bluntly puts it: "FAST revenue ain't gonna hit $12B from launching new FAST channels. It'll come from marketing the ones we already have."

Here's the good news—your marketing ancestors have already figured out the formula. The mediums, asset types and deliverables may have changed. But the 'formula' that network marketing executives have followed for decades, still holds.

The 80-15-5 Rule: TV's Marketing Secret

Back when broadcast TV and cable reigned supreme, most majors followed an unwritten formula for marketing their shows. It wasn't taught in business schools or published in trade journals, but it was practiced by the greats and discussed at length at our annual PromaxBDA conferences, when I was the organization’s CEO:

80% of marketing assets should be quick-hit, low-lift awareness assets, driving discoverability: on-air promos, bumpers, promotional lower thirds, billboards and print ads.

15% were designed to drive deeper engagement that reinforced intent: extended previews, appearances on late night and a focus on press and publicity

5% were high-production conversion drivers: premiere spectaculars, stunts and lead-in programming

"Platforms evolve, but marketing fundamentals don't," says Mike Benson, President and CMO of CBS and former head of marketing at Amazon Studios."What I've observed is that this model aligns with a simple truth about human behavior that remains constant even as technology transforms: awareness requires repetition, interest requires storytelling, and action requires impact. Therefore, approximately 80% of your assets should drive awareness/discoverability, 15% should build deeper engagement, and 5% should focus on driving real-time tune-in."

The New 80-15-5: Reinvented for the Algorithm Age

Fast forward to today, and while the ratio remains surprisingly constant, the marketing asset types have completely transformed to meet the demands of an algorithm-driven world:

80% of marketing assets now focus on digital discoverability: social media clips, memes, polls, quizzes, trivia, quote cards, and conversation-starting threads. These are the high-volume, algorithm-feeding assets that ensure your content appears in feeds where audiences actually spend their time.

15% shift to building deeper engagement through influencer integrations, compilation reels showcasing themes or characters, social-first stunts, and experiential events that create FOMO. These assets bridge the gap between awareness and action.

5% have evolved from traditional tune-in spots to in-platform conversion tools: optimized thumbnails that increase click-through rates, rotator ads that capture browsing viewers, strategic banner placements, and the critical work of optimizing for recommendation algorithms that can make or break discoverability within streaming platforms.

The core principles haven't changed—awareness still precedes interest, which precedes action—but the execution has been completely reimagined for a world where algorithms, not program guides, determine whether content gets discovered.

Marketing to Viewers vs. Marketing to Algorithms

When it comes to awareness and discoverability, the core ratios remain the same. But marketers now face a challenge their predecessors never imagined: they're no longer marketing only to humans.

In the olden days (like, 10 years ago), ‘organic’ marketing meant running hundreds of promos on owned and operated air. Run a LOST promo enough times to enough eyeballs against enough prime time shows- and you’d drive your next hit.

But in today's digital ecosystem, where 80% of discoverability and decisions about what to watch happen on Social Media, FAST channels must first satisfy the demands of the algorithms before those algos will feed your message to humans.

This represents an inversion of the marketing model:

Old World: Create content for humans → Air it where humans will see it → Hope they watch

New World: Create large volumes of engaging content algorithms will appreciate → Satisfy algorithmic requirements → Get rewarded with reach to the right humans → Generate human engagement → Receive further algorithmic rewards

The numbers don't lie. Channels that post at least three times daily on each social platform see double the engagement of those that don't (Pixability). Video content generates nearly 50% more views when distributed across multiple platforms.

The Volume Imperative: Feeding the Discovery Beast

This reality creates a brutal math problem for FAST marketers—the algorithm economy demands a volume of social assets that traditional marketing teams simply aren’t built to produce. The fact is, it's mathematically impossible to feed today's algorithms using yesterday's production methods—which is why these types of assets are so ripe for automation.

Typical social media assets cost roughly $400-$600 per post (WebFX) if you’re using an in-house team, and can easily double when using an agency. Clearly, this model is financially unattainable for most FAST channels who need 3-7 daily posts -per platform- required for optimal algorithmic visibility.

What's particularly jarring for creative marketing veterans is the diminished importance of perfectionism. A technically flawless, creatively brilliant social post that took eight hours to create delivers roughly the same algorithmic value as an asset created in minutes. Teams that obsess over pixel-perfect quality while failing to maintain volume are essentially invisible in social feeds, regardless of their creative excellence.

The teams that will thrive are those that leverage automation for their lower-lift Tier 1 assets while focusing their limited creative resources on higher-impact Tier 2 Storytelling. Without this technological augmentation, marketing teams will continue to burn out trying to manually solve what is fundamentally a scale problem—creative perfectionists fighting a volume war with inadequate weapons.

"Entertainment marketing has traditionally relied on short-term, high-impact campaigns, investing heavily in "premium" promotional content and large paid media buys for visibility for new titles," explains Little Dot Studios’ CRO, Wayne Davison. "However, algorithm-driven platforms have reshaped the landscape, and leadership are demanding greater scale and impact at a lower cost. Marketers who are embracing this with always-on content strategies, leveraging social video, organic audience development, and high volumes of lower-lift assets are getting there - but it is a fundamental shift from legacy behaviours."

Content Libraries: The FAST Gold Mine

For FAST channels, library content isn't just filler—it's the economic engine. While these classic shows and movies make up over 70% of what viewers actually watch, they receive minimal marketing support. The opportunity is staggering: FAST channels with optimized social presence see 45% higher ad completion rates and can command CPMs up to $25 (versus the baseline $5), potentially doubling revenue with the same content.

The key is shifting resources toward high-volume social content—clips, memes, trivia, and quotes—that feed algorithms and drive discovery, while supporting this with targeted in-platform assets. One FAST executive revealed that simply optimizing thumbnails based on viewer demographics increased watch time by 32%. These aren't minor improvements; they're the difference between a profitable FAST channel and one that disappears in the endless streaming scroll.

The math is simple: library content + social discovery = dramatically higher revenue. For FAST channels operating on thin margins, this isn't just a marketing strategy—it's survival.

Claiming Your Piece of the $12.5 Billion Pie

As FAST channels race toward their projected $12.5 billion future, the winners won't be those with the biggest content libraries or most advanced tech stacks—they'll be the ones that solve the fundamental discovery challenge.

The irony is delicious: in an industry obsessed with technological innovation, success may ultimately depend on resurrecting marketing principles from the analog era. The 80-15-5 rule, a quiet constant through decades of media disruption, may be the secret weapon FAST channels need to transform technological possibility into financial reality.

For FAST executives, the formula for success is becoming clear: Feed the algorithm, engage the audience, and optimize the platform—in that order, and in roughly 80-15-5 proportion. It's old-school TV wisdom perfectly adapted for the streaming age.

Because in the end, it doesn't matter how good your content is if no one can find it.