'Quiet on Set' takes over TikTok with heat on Nickelodeon, Dan Schneider
'Quiet on Set' takes over TikTok with heat on Nickelodeon, Dan Schneider
Audiences are intrigued by the episodic documentary series
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Before I watched the Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV documentary on Max, I watched it on TikTok. Pieces of it, that is.
I mentioned that I finished the documentary in my newsletter on March 22. A few days before I picked up the TV remote, I was beginning to see posts about the series on Instagram and Twitter. I didn’t think much of it until I found myself on TikTok.
After watching one video all the way through, my algorithm caught on and continued to serve me similar content. These videos went beyond just screenclips – they included behind-the-scenes footage of child actors at the time, reactions to the commentary, and original theories.
The show’s subject matter was propagating.
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It’s pretty common for certain types of media to be “bootlegged” to TikTok. It can even be used as a marketing strategy, as we see here from the official “The Office” account. There’s the classic “Subway Surfer” approach, where a piece of content is shown split-screen with a game playing simultaneously, meant to both outsmart bootleg detection and keep impatient Gen Z audiences entertained.
Video is one of the best ways to drive online engagement right now. The caveat is that the best kind of content is organic. Every platform has an onslaught of ads nowadays, but they’re labeled as such, making it easy to click away. In the case of Quiet on Set, none of the videos I saw were sponsored – they came from genuine human interest.
#quietonset sits at 30.8K posts at the time of writing this, but the hashtag doesn’t represent the true span of the subject matter. If we look at other hashtags that could involve documentary discourse, #nickelodeon, #danschneider, and #drakebell have 1.1M, 29.4K, and 48.4K respectively. This doesn’t count misspellings of the hashtags, either.
You can see why it would be easy to go down the content rabbithole.
The best “marketing strategy” for Quiet on Set was simply a well-produced documentary. I think other companies can stand to benefit from this idea. If you want people to pay attention, make something good.
A bonus episode of “Quiet on Set” airs on April 7. You can watch it on Max.
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