Vox Creative’s Explainer Studio Celebrates its Five-Year Anniversary, Expands Into Shorter, Social-First Formats

Today, Vox Creative – Vox Media’s award-winning in-house brand studio – is celebrating the fifth anniversary of its Explainer Studio, an arm born in 2017, inspired by Vox’s explainer formats.

Since its launch The Explainer Studio has created over 200 Explainer videos in partnership with over 100 industry-leading brands, blending research, reporting, insight, personality, and humanity into a unique form of storytelling that connects brands to audiences through curiosity.

The Explainer format originates from the news and policy brand Vox, which has engaged its audience’s curiosity with a multi-platform approach that has resulted in over 10 million YouTube subscribers on Vox’s channel, a hit daily podcast with Today, Explained and an Emmy-nominated series on Netflix.

In the last five years, The Explainer Studio has teamed up with advertising partners to break down some of today’s most complicated and misunderstood topics through its now well-known digestible and short-form videos. In just the last year, the team has thoughtfully explained the science behind financial scams for Zelle® – recently winning a Content Marketing Award for Best B2C Branded Content Campaign; the effect that travel has on your brain for Marriott Bonvoy; and the intricacies of data fabric with IBM.

In entering its sixth year, the Explainer Studio will expand its capabilities into new short-form, social-first formats that will allow brands to bring the Explainer content onto new platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and more. In June 2022, Vox Creative announced the Vox Creative Social Club, a new social studio that helps brands to create campaigns that leverage the loyal followings and expertise that Vox Media’s editorial brands have amassed as the #1 publisher in social video and time spent on video (Tubular Labs, March 2022).

“If the last few years have shown us anything, it’s abundantly clear that we have a cultural obsession to comprehend quickly, efficiently, and to be entertained while we effectively become smarter,” said Heather Pieske, VP of Creative Excellence at Vox Creative. “It’s why TikTok and other platforms that inform and entertain are so powerful in their ability to light up our brains with surprising information we want to share. We obsessively go down rabbit holes of endless topics because it’s fun and informative, and we’re doubling down on short-form Explainer content to provide more of this for our insatiable, smart audiences.”

“Over the last five years, The Explainer Studio has developed and honed its explainers to become a format that brands know and love. Born out of Vox and our unique insight into how to leverage the IP for our partners, we’ve recently seen the potential of how the Explainers Studio can find new life on our other beloved brands, and the platforms where they’ve grown audiences,” said Yosef Johnson, Head of Vox Creative.