Scaled Creator Education & Building Playbooks: Global Enablement for Platforms and Media Brands

Education isn’t just part of my work with entertainment and media companies; it’s a long-standing personal passion. I’ve taught at universities and founded a college self-help company that ultimately exited to Red Ventures.

Creator education at scale is a different beast than creator support or creator marketing. At Twitch I helped run programs that touched thousands of creators globally in personal and localized webinars and IRL at conferences. I’ve also done versions of this for Instagram, Disney, and inside the creator teams at Defy and Sony. Scaled education crosses Product, PMM, content, ops and data science; it’s complex. Done well, it compounds product adoption and creator outcomes. Done poorly, it’s a PDF nobody reads. 

Creator education programs spanning live, vertical and VOD

I’ve worked on many of the largest scaled education playbooks in the creator economy, including core programs for Twitch, Instagram, YouTube and Disney.

Twitch Creator Curriculum

My team at Twitch launched and developed the Twitch Creator Curriculum, a 5-part webinar series spanning channel growth strategies, stream engagement, community-building, improving monetization and leveraging brand. This comprehensive advanced streaming course was >250 slides and 8 hours of content. We presented it live at TwitchCon and globally through webinars in 6 different languages with complete localization. The project went from concept to complete GTM in 6 months in 2021.

YouTube Creator Playbook

I contributed several case studies that were published in the YouTube Next Lab Creator Playbook and the YouTube Playbook for Media Companies. I worked hand-in-hand with the internal YouTube audience development team to run multiple experiments across hundreds of YouTube videos to prove which optimizations worked at scale.

Instagram Vertical Video Playbook

Instagram Reels is now a $50B product for Meta which makes it easy to forget that Instagram used to be just for photos. In 2018, when Instagram was just launching video, they commissioned me to make their 5-part playbook for creators. Video was new to their creators and our goal was to improve adoption. I worked tightly with internal Instagram PM and PMM to marry it with the vertical video GTM and measure the program. The playbook covered content strategy, shooting vertical video, editing, growth and publishing/analytics. Our course was delivered as a hybrid of video and help articles on the web and Instagram official social channels. Later, it became the front page hero content on Instagram for Creators when Instagram folded IGTV into Reels.

Instagram Video for Disney

In 2019, Disney commissioned me to make their internal playbook for vertical video on Instagram. This internal best practices presentation covered emerging vertical video features and advanced discovery and analysis strategies. Disney’s multiplatform team used the information to re-cut existing content for vertical and build a muscle for premium original vertical content.

What I’ve learned building playbooks

There are two areas I’ve learned are crucial to playbook success: 1) the importance of being right 2) the outsized leverage of communication.

Scaled education has to be right

You have to be right. False positives destroy outcomes. The worst thing you can do is take a tactic or strategy that has negative impact and scale it out to many users. Even a neutral strategy scaled out to creators means you’re wasting time that could be spent on other higher-leverage work. A playbook is inherently a group of actions that influence an outcome. There needs to be proof that action works.

At Amazon, we had a leadership principle which was “leaders are right, a lot”¹. Living up to this principle meant constantly questioning your beliefs and sourcing diverse inputs on your case. You have a “farm for dissent” as they say at Netflix. You have to seek out research and cases that counter your claims in education because pressure-testing improves its impact.

All of this is why at least 25% of the time my team spent on creator education at Twitch was focused on maintaining already-published education. On the way to publishing our first draft of the core curriculum, we published hundreds of internal reports and case studies that studied growth mechanics.

Communication has leverage

Having great information, even life-changing information, doesn’t count as education unless you’re effective at getting it into the audiences’ heads. In fact, more than getting it into their heads, we’d like them to make use of the knowledge.

The simplest example of this is the traditional PDF playbook. If you email a PDF to your customer, what are the chances they read it? (and if that customer is a creator, what are the chances they even check email?!²)

If you’re lucky enough to have a creator’s 100% attention, presenting a physical slide… does your slide actually concisely communicate what you want it to communicate?

At the start of a new education project, decide on the communication strategy and work backward from that. I like to break it down into form and distribution. Form is the medium (video, lecture, workshop, knowledge base). Distribution is the channel you’re using to reach the customer (email, web, notification, product). Both influence the impact of your communication.

For creators, a theme that constantly comes up is whether they authentically trust the advice. You’re always battling with this as a corporation speaking to creators. This is why I use so many case studies. In one program, where my team had to influence celebrity-level streamers who are outrageously time and attention constrained, the most effective strategy was a deep-dive that featured one of their most-known peers taking the action.

I’m also a big believer in “just-in-time learning” — instead of dumping a 2 hour webinar or 25-page guideline on someone’s plate, provide it when the user most needs it. Drip it according to a creator’s expected progression or build it right into the product.³ Not only does this reduce cognitive load on your audience but research shows that 70% of what we learn comes from hands-on experience, so why not embed your education there?

1. Leaders are right, a lot. They have strong judgment and good instincts. They seek diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs. ↩︎
2. I was once hanging out with an Instagram talent with >1M followers and asked her if she read the prep doc I emailed her. Over her shoulder, I inadvertently saw her navigate to her email on her iPhone. Her email app was in an app folder labeled “Trash.” ↩︎
3. This is similar to progressive disclosure in UX, where we only surface information as it’s needed instead of creating a big FTUE. ↩︎