Welcome to The Vertical Bloom, a weekly dive into the fast-growing world of microseries and vertical storytelling. Here, we unpack the platforms, creators, and deals shaping the format that’s quietly redefining what it means to make, and watch, scripted content in the mobile age.
This week, microdramas become a language-learning tool, Lime Pictures brings its soap instincts into vertical, Shorts builds a new production lane, and Content London gives the format a bigger seat at the table. Then, we head to Fast Company Innovation Festival, where Scott joined Michael Sugar and Yasmin Dastmalchi to talk about what happens when brands stop advertising around entertainment and start making it themselves.
But first…
Nothing endures but change.
The folding iPhone feels significant to me.
I’ll admit it: I’m a big fan of Apple. Their ability to blend design, form, function, and execution at an extraordinarily high level has always impressed me.
There are plenty of fair criticisms of them. They’re often not the first to do something. But they have a remarkable history of being the ones who make something feel fully realized for the first time.
And I look at this folding phone as a metaphor for the moment we’re in.
The stories we watch and the ideas we receive are being given to us in an ever-evolving shape; one that slots into the different patterns, screens, and moments of our lives.
Horizontal. Vertical. Square. Whatever comes next.
They’re all possible now.
History really does love to rhyme. And when I look at a folding Apple phone, I see the future continuing to take shape, quite literally.
But I also see a future where our need for authentic, original storytelling becomes more important than ever.
There is so much happening in AI, technology, and the industries that increasingly pervade our lives. And it seems to me that one of the most important things we can do is hold on to our humanity and seek, develop, and collaboratively invent new ways to witness it, recognize it, and remind each other of its importance.
Lately, it feels like the future is happening faster than ever. Because, in many ways, it is. The rate of change keeps accelerating.
I don’t know that it can be stopped. And maybe stopping it isn’t the point. At the end of the day, we are still at the helm. I don’t fear having the wheel ripped from us. I fear we surrender and never get it back.
Through every new shape our technology takes, evolving endlessly towards the thing it has always been, the constant we must never surrender is our humanity.
Nothing endures but change. But our imperfections aren’t bugs waiting to be fixed. They’re part of what makes us human. And our humanity is the thing worth carrying into whatever comes next.
Alright, let’s get into it.
Microdramas Are Becoming a Language-Learning Tool
COL Group and Lingopie have launched DramaRizz, a language-learning app built around one-minute vertical dramas, complete with dual-language subtitles, tap-to-translate features and scene-based flashcards. The companies are also co-producing 10 original microdramas. It’s a new use case for the format itself: the same short episodes, recurring characters and cliffhangers designed to keep viewers watching are now being used to keep them learning.
Hollyoaks Producer Lime Pictures Goes Vertical
Lime Pictures has released its first vertical drama, Revenge Is a Dish, on RoseBerry Media’s EPIS. More interesting than another legacy producer entering the space is where Lime sees the overlap: co-head of scripted Angelo Abela specifically pointed to pacey storytelling, big hooks and the ability to shoot high volumes of high-drama scenes as skills vertical shares with soaps (something we’ve talked about at length in this previous bloom). As legacy and vertical converge, some of the most transferable expertise may already exist in the corners of television built for speed and serialization.
Shorts Builds a New Production Lane
Vertical streamer Shorts has teamed with Full Moon Artists Productions on Love in the Hamptons, which is set to begin filming later this month as part of a new FMAxShorts-branded strand. This dedicated strand of content is looking like a pipeline, with a platform and producer creating a repeatable lane for original verticals rather than approaching each show as a one-off experiment.
Vertical Gets a Bigger Seat at Content London
Executives from ARTE France, Play Media and ZDF are joining Content London’s third Vertical Programming & Microdrama Summit, where they’ll discuss investment, business models and how broadcasters are responding to mobile viewing. This isn’t a new commission, but the room matters. Vertical is increasingly becoming part of the conversation inside the same international TV-market infrastructure where the rest of the industry buys, sells and strategizes around programming.
When Brands Stop Advertising and Start Making Entertainment
WATCH: From Ads to Entertainment: Why Brands Are Becoming Storytellers at Fast Company Innovation Festival. Watch the full panel here.
We talk a lot in The Vertical Bloom about convergence. Hollywood is learning from digital. Digital is borrowing from Hollywood. And increasingly, brands are finding themselves somewhere in the middle.
This week, we got to watch that convergence happen in real time.
Scott Brown joined Michael Sugar, the Academy Award-winning producer behind Spotlight and founder and CEO of Sugar23, and Yasmin Dastmalchi, President of Maybelline New York and Essie USA, onstage at the Fast Company Innovation Festival for a conversation about what happens when brands stop simply advertising around entertainment and start making it themselves.
The conversation was moderated by Grace Snelling, Staff Reporter at Fast Company, who did a fantastic job bringing three unique perspectives into the same conversation.
Michael comes from Hollywood. Yasmin sits inside one of the biggest consumer brands in the world. Scott came up through YouTube and digital before finding his way into scripted vertical.
Three different roads, one increasingly shared conversation.
A few weeks ago, we wrote about this exact challenge in The Vertical Bloom: how legacy entertainment and the creator economy can stop trying to slot one another into their existing machines and instead figure out what each side actually brings to the table.
This panel felt like that idea in practice.
Here are the top-level takeaways I’m still thinking about:
1. “I Don’t Want an Ad.”
Yasmin described one of the biggest changes in how she approaches entertainment partners very simply: she starts by telling them she doesn’t want a traditional 30-second ad campaign.
That changes the conversation immediately.
Instead of beginning with an advertising format and figuring out how to fill it, you can begin with the audience and ask what they might actually choose to watch. Maybe that’s a creator collaboration. Maybe it’s a rom-com. Maybe it’s a microdrama.
The opportunity isn’t just putting brands into new formats. It’s letting the format drive the ideas.
2. Get the Brand and the Storyteller in the Same Room Early
Michael described the traditional advertising process as layers of intermediaries: media buyers talking to ad sales teams, agencies translating briefs, creators often arriving farther downstream.
The problem is that information gets lost.
His example was DoorDash. A writer might hear “food delivery company” and build a story around ordering dinner. But DoorDash may understand its brand much more broadly.
If the storyteller gets access to that thinking earlier, we can shift from a transactional relationship to a collaborative one, which will yield much more fruitful results.
3. Collaboration Works Better When Everyone Knows What They Know
This was one of my favorite parts of the conversation.
Yasmin talked about something she has had to unlearn: the instinct to be the expert on every part of the process.
She knows her brand. She knows its values, its products and its consumer. But when she enters a room with creators and storytellers, she also has to trust that they are experts in their own right.
That sounded very familiar.
In our recent piece about the convergence of legacy and the creator economy, we made essentially the same argument from the other direction. If you bring digital-native people into the room because they have built an audience or mastered a medium, you have to give them enough room to actually apply that expertise.
Equally, they need to trust that the Brand is not only the authority on, but also the expert of the Brand’s values, voice, and target audience.
Collaboration doesn’t require everyone to know everything.
It requires everyone to know what they bring to the table, and to be curious about what others bring.
4. Brands Are Storytellers Too
Scott made the point onstage that brands already have many of the building blocks of storytelling.
They have a voice. They have values. They understand their audience.
Our job as creative people is not necessarily to bolt a product onto a story after the fact. It should be to help translate those existing qualities into entertainment.
When everyone involved is genuinely excited about the thing being made, rather than one side making the content and the other approving it, the work usually gets better.
5. The Format Is Changing Because of Audience Demand
Scott described microdramas onstage as, fundamentally, a movie on TikTok.
Not because a microdrama literally needs to live on TikTok, but because the audience behavior that TikTok helped normalize changed the grammar of entertainment.
A traditional feature can spend several minutes setting the table. A microdrama usually has to tell you almost immediately what its promise is and why you should keep watching.
We think storytelling itself IS a technology. The tools, formats and grammar evolve, in reaction to audiences evolving, in real time.
Digital is growing up.
And maybe this is what convergence actually looks like. Not Hollywood becoming digital or digital becoming Hollywood.
It’s all of us getting a little more fluent in one another’s languages, then building something none of our individual systems would have made on their own.
Thanks again to Michael, Yasmin and Grace for such a thoughtful conversation, and to Fast Company for giving us the opportunity to have it.
That’s it for this week’s Vertical Bloom.
We’re excited to keep building this into a weekly home for the ideas, experiments, and creative voices shaping vertical storytelling in real time.
We’ll be back next Thursday with more headlines, more analysis, and another look at where this medium is headed.
See you then.
Editor: Scott Brown
Writer: Franziska Harms