The media industry has spent the better part of a decade working to capture the attention of audiences whose content consumption habits have diversified to include many options beyond legacy models. It’s the screen they turn to first in pursuit of leisure, entertainment, and the small moments in between. For publishers with decades of brand equity and deeply loyal audiences, the question in relationship to the modern moment has become whether they can pursue content for the vertical screen without losing what made them what they are in the first place.
People Inc., the company behind some of the most recognized media brands in the world, including PEOPLE and InStyle, has made a deliberate investment in vertical microseries. The company is producing original episodic content designed to build the kind of recurring audience loyalty more commonly associated with traditional programming.
Leah Wyar, President of the Entertainment, Beauty & Style Group at People Inc., has been central to that effort. Brand Storytelling sat down with Wyar to understand what’s driving the investment, how legacy brands navigate the demands of a new format without compromising their identity, and what the broader media industry might learn from what People Inc. is building:
What was the moment or insight that made People Inc. decide vertical microseries weren’t just a trend to watch, but a format worth investing in?
Honestly, it was when we, ourselves, started experiencing episodic content behave like appointment viewing, on platforms that weren’t really built for that. We weren’t just watching a single video and moving on. We were coming back for the characters, the storylines, the humor. Attention was carrying over episode to episode.
That’s when something clicked for us. This wasn’t just a social video experiment. It was actually a way to build franchises: real, repeatable IP for the way people consume content today.
PEOPLE and InStyle are two of the most recognized media brands in the world, with very different identities. How do you think about which brands within the portfolio are the right fit for the microseries format, and what makes a brand “ready” for it?
The number one rule is it has to feel native to the brand. We’re not doing one-size-fits-all here.
Take InStyle: It’s a genuine fashion authority with a strong POV on style, talent, and culture. That makes it a natural home for personality-driven formats like The Intern and The Boss. The format fits because the brand has already built that world.
PEOPLE is a different animal—massive scale, deep audience trust. So the opportunity there is turning access into storytelling. The Fourth Wall came out of that thinking, and it also became a way to stress-test new formats and stretch what that editorial world could look like.
At the end of the day, what we’re looking for is a clear point of view, talent people actually want to follow, and a reason to come back. If a brand has those three things, it’s worth a creative conversation.
Audiences for vertical content skew younger and scroll fast. How do you balance the editorial integrity and brand equity that PEOPLE and InStyle have built over decades with the rawer, more spontaneous expectations of short-form vertical viewers?
We don’t see those as being in conflict. If anything, audiences today are more attuned than ever to content that feels over-produced or like it was made by a committee. They can smell inauthenticity almost instantly.
Editorial integrity hasn’t been about polish in well over a decade. It’s about having a consistent point of view and knowing what your brand stands for. That doesn’t change just because the packaging does. PEOPLE and InStyle have built decades of trust around that. The vertical format doesn’t threaten it, it just asks you to express it differently.
The microseries format is still being defined in real time. Who, internally or externally, is influencing how People Inc. thinks about what “good” looks like in this space?
Creators and audiences are doing a lot of the teaching. They’re the ones setting the bar for pacing, humor, what actually holds attention. And that moves fast; we pay close attention.
Internally, the best thinking comes from the collision of editorial, social, video, talent, and audience teams all being in the room together. No single discipline has the full picture. The strongest ideas tend to come out of that friction.
And externally, we’re watching creators who’ve figured out how to build recurring formats with real audience loyalty. Not one-hit-wonder virality, but genuine reasons to come back. That’s the north star. Less about how it looks, more about whether we actually are intentional about returning for the next one.
The research in the Microdrama Revolution white paper points to a significant shift in how audiences, particularly younger ones, are consuming narrative content. What in that data surprised you most, or confirmed something you were already seeing on the ground?
What stands out—and quite frankly, it confirmed something we were already feeling—is just how deeply short-form content has embedded itself into the in-between moments of people’s days. Commuting, second-screening, waiting in line. That’s not passive consumption, that’s habitual. And once you understand that, it changes how you think about episodic structure entirely.
The attachment piece is also real. There’s still this assumption that short-form engagement is shallow, or low intent, low loyalty. But when the storytelling actually works, people form genuine connections to characters and formats surprisingly fast.
And then the fluidity younger audiences have around “media” versus “content” versus “entertainment”—those distinctions just don’t exist for them the way they did for legacy models. They’re not switching modes, they’re just consuming. That’s both a challenge and a huge opportunity depending on how you approach it.
A year from now, what does success look like for People Inc.’s investment in this format, and what would it signal to the broader media industry if you get it right?
Success looks like franchises people actually seek out, not just content they stumble across in-feed. Recognizable formats, talent with real pull, engagement that tells you something lasting is being built. That’s the bar. We’re on our way with InStyle’s series garnering more than 51.2M views to-date, and nearly 40M for PEOPLE’s.
We’re in a fortunate position because the IP across People Inc. already has scale and trust behind it. That’s not nothing. It means we can move into entertainment quickly and with real impact, not starting from zero.
But the bigger signal, if we continue to get this right, is that it proves media companies don’t have to choose between authority and entertainment. The hybrid model is real. You can build franchises that start in social and extend well beyond it, and your legacy brand equity doesn’t have to be a liability to do it. It can actually be the thing that sets you apart.
What advice or insight would you offer to media companies and brands that are just beginning to explore this space?
Start by treating it like entertainment, not a distribution tactic. That sounds simple, but it’s where a lot of companies get it wrong: they’re thinking about the format before they’ve figured out what they actually want to say. Audiences clock that immediately.
Give yourself room to experiment. Some of the best ideas we’ve seen come from iteration, not from over-engineering the concept upfront. Be willing to learn from the first one before you’ve locked in the third.
And the thing that actually cuts through? A clear point of view. Formats get copied. Platforms keep changing. But a distinct voice, something audiences can recognize and return to: that’s what builds something real. That’s the part that’s actually hard to replicate.
—
Watch full seasons of The Intern, The Boss, and The Fourth Wall now
Catch Leah Wyar on-stage at Tribeca Film Festival with Ben Stiller & Matthew Broderick, and at Cannes Lions with Priyanka Chopra
Download The Microdrama Revolution Executive Intelligence Brief