While striking movie and television writers have maintained that they’ll be out on the picket lines for as long as it takes to get a fair deal, Scott Galloway, a professor of Marketing at NYU’s Stern School of Business, told L.A. Morning News the guild picked the wrong time to strike.
“I say, their timing is just terrible,” he said. “They're dealing with several dynamics. One, the industry in a weird way was kind of looking for a multilateral pause in spending as they had all chased Netflix into this unsustainable spend level. And so a multilateral pause on content creation that brings down spend in a weird way is sort of what the studios are looking for. So, quite frankly, they just don't have a lot of leverage. And the other party they're negotiating against, have seen their profit margins drop substantially so distinctive whether you think they deserve more money and obviously the right to organize, they just don't have a lot of leverage here.”
Galloway, who also co-hosts the podcast "Pivot,” added that while the SAG-AFTRA strike does add some leverage, it all boils down to the consumers and shareholders.
“At the end of the day, consumers and shareholders sort of dictate who has leverage,” he said. And I think I would challenge you to find anybody who's canceled their Netflix subscription because they see a dramatic decline or erosion in content we all have. Content queues that could sort of last 6, 12, 18 months. So, there just isn't a lot of pressure on the studios to solve this problem…”
When it comes to who loses in the strike, Galloway said that’s going to be end up being the late-night TV shows.
“I don't think late-night TV ever recovers from this because I think the strike is gonna be long enough and those charts shows will be dark enough that consumers will establish different patterns and find other things to do for the 60 or 90 minutes before they go to sleep,” he said. “But the timing here is terrible, distinctive… the morality distinct of the pay and what you think is fair. The unions have gone on strike at the absolute worst moment at their lowest point of leverage.”
The late-night shows were the first productions to shut down after the writers’ strike kicked off in May.
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