When it comes to digital media, Matthew Segal has seen — and been through — it all.
Segal is the co-founder of ATTN:, the video-focused digital media company that specializes in fun-yet-informative content on a wide range of topics, from social issues and finance to politics and personal health.
ATTN: celebrated its 10th anniversary this year, but in the world of online media, the Los Angeles-based company may as well be celebrating its 100th birthday, considering the changes to the industry Segal and his team have seen. Whether it’s the widespread “pivot to video” movement that hit outlets in the late 2010s or the rise of TikTok and Instagram as key platforms for reaching millennial and Gen Z viewers, ATTN: has found a way to not only survive, but thrive.
Across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X, ATTN: has racked up 8.2 million followers. ATTN:’s expertise in social video that is “entertainment that informs,” as the company’s motto puts it, led Candle Media to acquiring the business for $100 million in 2022.
Co-CEO Segal, who was 29 when he co-founded ATTN: alongside Jarrett Moreno, said the key to his outlet’s success has been staying nimble.
“If you are too tethered to one platform, it’s way too high of a risk factor,” Segal told TheWrap as part of our Office With a View Q&A series.
Among the other topics covered in Segal’s conversation include ATTN:’s “secret sauce” to social video, why it is imperative to teach viewers about the rise in anti-Semitism after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks and if he’d work with the Trump administration on creating content, as he’s done with both President Obama and Biden.
In the 10 years of ATTN:, what changes in digital media have thrown you?
The first big Facebook algorithms change, where they sort of deprioritize news and information, that one was pretty big. That was around 2017 — that put some digital media companies out of business, because they just couldn’t get the traffic.
Then the advent of TikTok was a huge change, in that it actually helped our business, because it was exclusively a short form video platform. There were no articles and no print or text-based material, so we were competing against fewer mediums on it.
And now the whole regulatory environment towards Tiktok, which is super interesting, could be another seismic shift if it’s banned. Although we don’t know how exactly the Trump administration will try to intervene, and if they can. Obviously [the TikTok ban, which is set to go into effect in January] is through congressional passage at the moment and in the courts.
Those are pretty big macro, political and technology shifts that have very much challenged our business in the last 10 years. I would add, COVID, you know — not uniquely to us — shifted everything into remote production. That was a big challenge, but also a huge opportunity that helped our business, because we didn’t rely on as many physical productions that were in-person. We were able to use our great post-production skills to use that to our advantage, and our animation skills, which took off during COVID. This is a fun question, by the way, [because] I haven’t really thought this through.
Maybe being nimble is something that’s instinctual to you — like a basketball player knowing when to cut to the basket. Can you explain to me how you know, as co-CEO, when you need to change something?
I don’t want to sound the least bit self assured, because — this is more of an entrepreneur question — you have got to stay totally on your toes, and you’ve got to read the tea leaves well and sort of see where things are going. And you’ve also got to sort of factor in the right hybrid of risk mitigation versus opportunism and steer for all of them.
I think some founders in the media space have become very precious over their mission and their idea, and they have an [issue] pivoting … Pivoting is a naturally good thing for business leaders to do, to sort of stay with where not only the economy is, but where there’s sort of opportunism — while not totally abandoning their values, of course.
The most rigid thing about ATTN: has been sort of our purpose-driven values and our very social-impact and -driven DNA, which has been a consistent through line of the last decade. But what we’ve been not precious in the least bit about is where we’re programming, on what platform, how we’re pursuing productions, who we consider the right partners and the right creators who we leverage for different moments in time.
We’ve seen the rise of influencers over the last decade who have become a lot more powerful. Traditional celebrity has been supplanted. I think when we were really reaching hundreds of millions of views every month, we were in that sort of Facebook heyday where social video was really about programming for discoverability and feeds. Now it shifted toward a lot more intentional viewing.
Is there a secret sauce to getting people to watch longer videos — and if there is, what is it?
Yes, there is a secret sauce to getting people to watch. I don’t always get it right, by the way, but there is definitely a secret sauce.
I think some of the things we’ve done right have been tried-and-true norms for a very long time in marketing and storytelling. Which is a good, attention-grabbing hook [and] something that offers a value proposition or an emotional resonance to the viewer — whether that’s laughter, enjoyment, happiness, utilitarianism. We try not to traffic in anger. Anger is an emotion that grabs a lot of people, but we’ve made an intentional, sort of moral and political decision that we’re not going to engage in that.
Another sort of best practice for attention-grabbing video and for watch time is something we’ve done internally called a “Boring Pass,” where we actually have teams of people screen videos, and we’ve had them actually raise their hand where they get bored in the video, and then we amend it. Some of this is just building a culture that is focused on keeping people’s attention, and I think we’ve done a really good job of that.
When it comes to the “Boring Pass,” have you noticed in the last few years if you’ve had to move up the meat of your stories, just to accommodate for people’s attention spans?
The sugar and and allure should always go in front. And then the stuff that’s necessary — the vegetables, if you will — that you have to package into the substance. Really, the question is, like, how do we make this substance more intuitively interesting and entertaining? Is it by using an analogy? Is it by using a different kind of messenger, like a celebrity or sugary messenger? Is it by using song or dance or something that’s more inherently fun and entertaining to get the substance across?
I’m happy to trick people into being informed. Not in like, a disingenuous and deceptive way. But if I can beg, steal and borrow any mechanism to get people more civically involved and engaged, I think that’s generally a good thing.
When it comes to lessons you’re trying to get across, what are some of the issues heading into next year that are top of mind?
My two issues that I’m super focused on heading into 2025 is the continued rise of antisemitism and digital literacy. Antisemitism is more straightforward. Since Oct. 7, but even well before, we’ve seen this precipitous rise in antisemitism, both in tropes and in speech online, and in sort of misinformation flowing with respect to Israel and the Jewish people. And I think I’ve tried as someone who has a strong ethos here, in both my personal Jewish identity but also just viewing antisemitism as a canary in the coal mine for other forms of hate. [We’re] trying to think through how we take such an age-old societal disease and come up with new ways to help showcase it from the standpoint of how it actually manifests itself in today’s modern society.
On the Israel side of this, some of that is deeply dense and historically long-form material that we have to then think through what is the more pithy way of getting this across? And that remains a challenge, but it’s something that we’ve done with different public figures. It’s something that we’ve done with creators. It’s something that we’ve tried to do with great infographics and analogies, and it’s something that we’ve tried to do with gravitas from people that are seen as centrist and credible and not contentious in who they are. The messengers matter there.
Digital literacy, to me, is the new frontier of civics. You have to, obviously, teach the Bill of Rights, how the Constitution works, the branches of government, and how they all put checks on each other to achieve better results for the people. But at the same time, I’m very much of the view that the “New Civics” is teens logging on a scrolling, whether that’s Tiktok or Instagram, and having no clue whether they’re watching something actually credible. And so I’m working on trying to shape a curriculum here with experts in academia, and then building a really big public service, messaging, creative campaign to get mass audiences to start to think about this stuff and reckon with it in a pretty severe and engaging way.
It’s hard to even find stories that aren’t slanting anymore and that don’t anger people. How do you thread that needle, where you’re trying to inform on a really touchy subject, but still get the point across?
The short answer is, it’s not easy. If it was easy, you wouldn’t see as much antisemitism. Our general approach has tried to be how do we first cool the temperature and show that, generally speaking, the case for not demonizing the entire country of Israel happens to be that the country is a liberal democracy with liberal values that engages in freedom of expression, sexual liberation, freedom of opinion, pluralism — things that we as Americans hold dear. And showing that there’s actually sort of an increasing linkage between anti-Israel, antisemitism and anti-Americanism — that’s been one approach that we’ve been recently testing and sort of taking on that has shown some degree of credibility and resonating.
ATTN: has worked with President Obama and President Biden in the past. What do you say if President-elect Trump came to you and said, “Hey, can we work together on something?”
I think we’d consider it, and especially we’d consider it on the basis of what topic and issue it’s centering on. There’s certain topics the incoming Trump administration has already sent signals that it wants to [cover] that have been themes and topics that we’ve programmed on many times over again. One such issue is nutrition. We’ve done a lot on nutrition standards. We’ve done a lot on school lunches. We’ve done a lot on the standards of FDA regulation here versus in Europe. These are things that Trump has said that he wants to look into … We don’t view ourselves as partisan. We don’t view ourselves as tribal, period. In fact, I’ve tried my best to build a culture that fights against tribalism. I think it’s generally dangerous.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
