Comedy Central
After generating 500 million views across our own social platforms, The Kloons joined Comedy Central in 2018 to share our digital expertise with the aging television network.
With Mitch serving as Executive Producer and Creative Director, Greg as Senior Director of Production and Nik as Director of Design, we ran a team of 35 creatives, and developed and produced nearly 50 formats for the internet totaling more than 2 billion views on original social content.
Mini-Mocks
The crown jewel of our achievements was creating the series “Mini-Mocks” (750+ million views) which went on to win multiple Clio’s, Webby’s, Shorty’s, Cynopsis, AdAge and Promax awards, amassed its own audience of 800,000 followers and sold branded integrations. Our episode Brooklyn Ball Barbers (300 million views) was the second most viewed piece of content created by a television network in 2019.
Additionally, we used our social media savvy to develop several fantastic series that not only found success online, but served the goals of our corporate overlords by promoting linear priorities, featuring select talent and selling integrations.
One of the greatest highlights of our time at Comedy Central was the day a research employee declared that “we need more episodes featuring DMT.” Despite early red tape that prevented us from making content that featured drugs, we eventually found a path forward Grant Lindahl’s brilliant “Tales from the Trip.” This award-winning series features comedians, musicians and influencers sharing their harrowing and beautiful experiences with psychedelics.
Like every other media company for the past few years, we were asked to find “our Hot Ones.” After countless, derivative interview format pilots, we eventually stumbled into “Cry Battle,” a pitch from the immensely talented Jordan Mendoza. Always searching for a good-natured way to cultivate authentic vulnerability and fun, this format checked all of the boxes.
YOUR WORST FEARS CONFIRMED
Just as SNL came to prominence by parodying and satirizing popular television formats, our intention was for Comedy Central digital to do the same on social. This approach generated several our best performing series including “That’s an App?” “As Seen on CC,” and “Agree to Disagree.” The breakaway hit of the bunch is unquestionably “Your Worst Fears Confirmed,” a series pitched and created by the brilliantly funny Natasha Vaynblat and animated and co-written by the design genius Ellie Skrzat.
One of the biggest struggles for brands online is that people generally do not like brands. Though we had incredible talent on our team, the channel itself was an extension of a network and as such, we didn’t benefit from the “followability” of a personality. If you can’t beat ‘em,…pay them to join you? Thus we created the award-winning program “Under the Influencer” in which we featured YouTube Creators like Hannah Stocking, Gus Johnson and Anthony Padilla in all of our repeatable formats.