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Hi, I'm Justin Crossley and welcome to this week's Telecast. On this week's show, my guest is our Mel Chapman, CEO of Social First Publisher and channel operator John Gore Creation. And Adam Jacobs, creative director of German International Content distributor and channel owner, Quince Studios. As we hear more about their businesses and preview next week's Telecast Digital Content Forum, Adam and Mel, welcome to the show.
Thank you, that was very energetic. I'm going to level up for the next 20 minutes, that was great. That's the energy gone though. You said the benchmark, no, I'm stepping up, I've put my batch rate, ready to go.
It's 10 o'clock now and I have a coffee so I should be ready. That's right, come on guys, step it up. Thank you for coming on the show, really excited to be able to chat to you guys who are leading some really exciting businesses that are really challenging the status quo in many ways within the content industry. We've got to talk a little bit more about that in detail.
But Mel, let's start with you. What I always like to do is go into people's backgrounds a little bit and get a bit of an idea of career journey because it's not really the sort of thing that you often talk about in business. You get to do business together with somebody but sometimes you don't know their background how they've got to where they've got to, which often can be really interesting. Correct me if I'm wrong, you come from more of a traditional publishing industry background.
Is that right? Not really, not really. Okay, I've got it wrong. Well, I did do a journalism degree, so that might be where that's where that's come from.
But actually, I'm probably going to disappoint with it not being a tremendously interesting story. So I was the first employee at Jungle Creations when we launched the business around nine years ago. So I've actually spent a lot of time with in jungle launching the business building, the business and kind of taking on various different roles in jungle during that tenure to where I am today. I did take a short sabbatical lab bible for a period of time early on in that journey, which is kind of a broadly similar design to the publishing side of the jungle business.
I worked in Azadir before that for a bit and a cocktail bar, which is more traditional. And I did a couple of bits of work experience at magazine and food magazine. So there was that element there. But yeah, when I joined Jungle, I was still at university.
So it was meant to be kind of a part-time work experience job. And then the founder, Jamie, asked me to join full time. So I had to get my university's permission to finish my dissertation in a week and then leave a university early to join Jungle, which I think looking back feels like it was a decision I can validate. During that time at Jungle, we grew from kind of the two or three of us in the room to the 140 people business we are now.
And I held roles such as Head of Social, Head of Content, Chief Content and Brand Officer, Co-CEO and then more recently, CEO. Your career is actually so far within junglers, obviously spanned the length of the business essentially. You must have seen an awful lot of change within the digital first sector over those nine years. That's a long time to be with one business within the digital first sector.
And there's so many changes we've seen when it comes to algorithms and new platforms and advertising coming into this sector. What's your experience of those nine years? Now you look back across those nine years. What do you think the biggest challenges have been for a digital first business?
Obviously, you've seen massive growth and developed lots of channels, which we'll talk about in a second. But what have been the biggest challenges do you think over the last few years of you running the business? How long have we got for this part? I mean, it's definitely been a period of lots of change.
I think lots of working it out. Where we sit junglers of business, it's quite what you would call a new space, really kind of social publishing, social first publishing, social monetization and so on and so forth. Way back when we were just single Facebook channel and a website and we were sending people from our Facebook page to our websites and monetize them by our articles. I guess fast forward to now where 145 million followers now cross all of the social platforms with multiple websites.
Also, we dip into FastTV a little bit. We come into the real world. We've got products from some of our media brands and so on. Of course, I think algorithms have been the biggest challenge for us as a business and navigating the constant change that happens there.
But actually, I think it's what's enabled us to build a really exciting business, a really agile business, a business that wants to innovate a lot of business that wants to disrupt and think of doing what's not been done before. We hold ourselves to a space for what's next and that's what we really want to embody within the energy of our business. I think if it was a smooth ride, frankly, we would never have been pushed to think like that and behave like that. And now I think it's unlocking that as our secret source on some of the interesting ventures we've built across jungle over that time.
Yeah, well, we'll come and talk about those consumer brands and moving into the real world, FMCG space and all of that, which is really fascinating. But just come back to that. I think one of the things about social first businesses that completely amazes me on a daily basis is that once you find that Facebook or Insta or Google changes the algorithm, overnight, you can see a really well performing channel, just lose all your traffic or a massive part of it. The ability to pivot and to work out what that new algorithm is and to build up your audience again, that's got to be a huge lesson for the rest of the sort of linear TV industry where things work on a much slower basis.
How'd you do with that? Come in one morning and find that there's been a really significant change in Google's algorithm for YouTube content, for example. How'd you go about sitting down and going, right, you know, what's the new secret source? Yeah, I mean, I know there's a lot of horror stories out there in our space about businesses that have come in and felt that rollercoaster dipping to the bottom overnight.
Honestly, I don't think that's really how it happens. I think the platforms do tend to put out a lot of signals and a lot of communication about their direction of travel, what they're prioritizing, what they want to see, what they want to see, what they don't want to see. We've built a system called Jungle IQ where we're interpreting tremendous amount of data on a daily basis across all of the views that we're garnering. And you can see these trend lines and these patterns start to emerge.
And I think it's about not just kind of sitting on that making hay when the sun's shining on one way of working and being ignorant to that not lasting forever and trying new things all the time. You know, we look at kind of best test rest strategies, what's working really now, what do we need to start testing new things on based on what we're seeing, what do we need to kind of stop doing. So I think kind of anticipating the change always because it is the only constant helps you prepare your business for that. And just as I said before about making hay with the sun shines, don't expect it to last forever.
Like, because it does great, but don't build your business around it lasting forever. Don't build a load of headcount around it lasting forever. And yeah, just just anticipate it basically. And I suppose that's all about multi-channel strategy making sure your brand and your content is where viewers and users want it across multiple channels, whether it's TikTok, whether it's Snap or Facebook or YouTube.
It's about playing across all of those platforms. I think to some extent it's multi-channel strategy, but I actually don't think that's enough. I think across your whole business, it's what happens outside of these channels. So, you know, we've got Jungle Media, which is that publishing media owner brand owner part of business, but we also have the Wild by Jungle, which is our social influencer agency.
And that leverages the core competencies of being a publisher, understanding communities online, understanding great content and how to capture eyeballs and engage people to drive to action and actually launching a slightly separate but very, very kind of complementary part of our business that's talking to clients directly about how you help them with their journey on that. And most of the time, for a lot of guys, it's not about trying to make money from these platforms. It's about building communities, building audiences and driving marketing messages, which means they're not at risk to the same kind of perils of platform changes when it's largely based on monetization that you are from a publisher. So, multi-channel probably isn't enough.
It's definitely you have to do it. But beyond that, what else can you do with your business competencies to actually broaden that diversification? And it's also about understanding the data, isn't it? Everything that you've talked about when it comes to just listening to the platforms, what they're planning to do with the direction of travel, but also looking at the data that you've got in front of you is crucial, right?
Is crucial for a business like yours, it's making smart decisions on the data that's available to you? Yeah, absolutely. I think kind of us blending that art and science, not for going creativity, which I think people always going to understand people best numbers aren't. So, people are going to know what people want to watch and so on and absolutely honoring that as a business, but also complementing it with data, trend, pattern lines, because obviously that's just going to give you an insight to what your audience is going to watch.
And then what we're able to do beyond that is leverage that in that commercial side of our business to support brands in various categories that operate in the same ones that are media brands to enable to share and unlock that data and those insights for them on their own journeys as well. Now, before we move on to Adam, I saw a piece that was really fascinating on management today recently, which was about you basically discussing your ADHD diagnosis and how that was feeding into you in your role as CEO and how you're learning to lead with it. Does it a little bit about that? Yeah, no, absolutely.
So I was diagnosed around a year ago now, actually, and I didn't really have much understanding of what it was or what it meant before or how that was manifesting. And it's obviously something that I've had all of my life and now that I understand it more, I can kind of understand what I felt was ingrained personality traits. Often I felt what kind of my own weaknesses that actually was just a part of my brain working differently to other people's. I think the biggest thing was having some sympathy for myself and the fact that I'm forgiving myself a little bit and the power of that to kind of just unlock peace of mind, which gives you space to just focus your energy on other things is paramount.
But beyond that, how does that translate into the way that I run our business, the way that I run my teams, the culture of your business, and what do I need to understand that actually, this isn't best position for you. I'm not a good person for me to look at this. Someone around me and my team who can manage a kind of task like this better than me and not beating myself up for it. And also realizing that a lot of the things I think have got John Walts where it is today and that we just spoke about agility, appetite for change, appetite to kind of come up with new ideas and move quickly.
I think a lot of that has been driven by that way of thinking and actually that's a strength for not a weakness. So it's about kind of positioning my energy in areas that I could have a positive impact rather than trying to do everything and beating myself up about the things that just naturally I'm not as good at as someone else would be. Right. So in a sense, it's actually helped you delegate and help you address the situation and say, OK, this is what I'm really good at.
I'm doubling down on this. But actually, I might need somebody to step up in this particular area because they're good at it and entrust them with more responsibility. Is that how it's played out over the last year or so? Yeah, I definitely think that's one part of it.
I think another part is ADHD is one of many different kind of neuro divergences that will be impacted people in the workplace and actually have to ensure that junglers of business is putting the right support and frameworks and ways of working into our workflows. So I don't think it's pragmatic for any business to think this is the way this business works and everybody within this business is going to be able to apply themselves to those kind of rules of engagement. You have to have nuanced ways of working and that's about training managers. We've had a lot of training for all managers across jungle about kind of different ways of working, different ways of supporting individuals across teams.
Even things like when we do big kind of company meetings and we're inviting everybody to come along, sending an agenda beforehand for those that might find that anxiety inducing. I don't know what I'm turning up to. I need a bit of context and a bit of support around that. My priority is absolutely how can I ensure that jungle is the best workplace it can be for anybody who might have anything that could be impacting their ability or what they feel is their ability to bring their best self and their authentic self to work.
And how many people are at jungle narrowmouth? Yes, at full time it's around 140 employees. We do work a little bit with freelancers and some models like that. But that's our broad full time head count at the minute.
Do you think that post your diagnosis, your narrow or better leader, your better equipped once you receive the diagnosis, your better equipped to lead the business and take the business forward? Want to get ahead in digital first content? The drop is the go to newsletter for industry professionals delivering insider news, trends and insights straight to your inbox. Navigate the fast changing landscape of digital first production, distribution and monetization.
Sign up now for free at dropmedia.co.uk and stay informed with a drop. It's a really interesting question because I do have a broad holistic view that I would never say anybody is the complete leader. I think you have to constantly learn, you have to constantly adapt to the changing environment, changing employee base, you know, the changing psychology of different demographics, ages, etc. So I don't think it's always an ongoing thing that you focus on and put energy into.
However, I think probably also because I'm taking medication that helps manage some of what I think were negative symptoms that I was dealing with before that has enabled me to be a slightly better leader. Okay, thanks for sharing that with us, Mel. Adam, coming to you. Welcome to the show.
Great to have you on telecast. A lot of people in the UK TV industry specifically will know you from your time of discovery, which you spent a long time there, but obviously you've done lots of different production work in the meantime. Since you've now been at Quinter Studios for a couple of years, is that right? Yeah, it's just over actually.
It's gone so quickly. But it's about two and a half years now. For those who aren't aware of Quinter, tell us about what Quinter is with the background to the company and what you're offering to the market that's different because I think there are real differences in the way that you're approaching production in these changing times. Quinter is an A-vods channel operator.
So we run several documentary channels on YouTube. So our largest is called Free Documentary, which is pretty self-explanatory. You can go onto YouTube and you can watch documentaries for free. That's got just over 4 million subscribers.
And then we have several genre channels. I won't go through all of them, but for example, we have a history channel, so Free Documentary Nature, Free.Crying with just launched Free.Cation History, so it's been off from our regular history channel. And that's the main part of the business. And the majority of that content that is on all of those channels is made up of third party acquisitions.
So we have an acquisition team that goes out and generally buys an invite from TV distributors and then puts them on the channel and we monetize it that way. But what's unique about Quinter is that we also have a TV distribution business. So we very much have one foot in the digital world, probably a slightly larger foot. And then you could maybe call it a slightly smaller foot in the TV world.
And I think that's mainly just because of the climate and the environment we live in the moment where there's a lot of people in the world. And we're having a moment where there's budget freezes and no decent to have any money. But we do have that part of business and it is successful. We're also a multi-platform business.
So we're on Facebook, we're on Snap, we have a fast channel. And I was brought into Quinter, as you said, just about two and a half years ago. Now, it wasn't full-time initially, but I have been for quite some time. And this was really to kind of generate and develop Quinter's originals.
And this is something else that we've kind of tried ourselves upon and been slightly different. So we have the distribution side, then we also have our original side as well. And this is working with producers to generate content that we can put on our channel. Generally, we own the IP, but we can put it on all of our platforms.
But the great thing is we can also monetize it through TV sales because we then pitch those shows to TV broadcasters and we go to all the markets and put our Quinter's original in our catalogue. Yeah, it's a multi-game stream initiative. So for any TV producers, which I know you're talking to lots in the UK and internationally as well, we see very different announcements you're making within the international market. Because the main part of your channel business is obviously fast channel, but also Avon when it comes to YouTube and you mentioned the other platforms as well.
Does that take a different financial approach on the part of the producer? Because the producers that we know in the UK have been over the last 40 years, I suppose. The model hasn't really changed that much, has it? I mean, since obviously, international distribution for the past 20 years has proved a really vital income stream for producers.
But still the whole commissioning model and the way that the mechanics of the business works hasn't really changed that much. But forgive me if I'm wrong, but the way that you're asking producers to approach this is in a slightly different way. Tell us about that. Yeah, it is.
And you're absolutely right, Justin. It hasn't changed. And I think that's a real problem, if I'm honest. And I think the whole process of commissioning is in TV certainly is completely flawed.
And I say that because it takes a ridiculous amount of time to develop a project to then pitch it into a broadcaster, to wait for decision makers to make their mind up. And I think sometimes you're not always dealing with a decision maker. It goes into your pitch to a person, a commissioner maybe, or a buyer, and they have to take it internally to a round table. And then they have these commissioning rounds, which are every month.
And then you'll show Mrs. That Month. And it just takes a ridiculous amount of time. And then, you know, as most people know what happens is the percentage of shows actually get commissioned to tiny.
So all of that development work, which is usually done for nothing. I mean, the amount of shows that have just gone to the graveyard, the amount of ideas, it just seems like a complete waste of resource. And also what you find, and we've had this at Quintus, where we've had really great ideas and producers that we think, we can put that on our channel. We can put in an investment.
We're not a huge company, but we can make an investment. And so we have to go out and find pre-sale money. And even pre-sale money is low. Definitely when I was in the UK, we're like, when I was at Discovery, it's a hell of a lot less than now than what it was then.
And what you find is that even on modest budgets, and when I say like a modest budget, I'd say 50, 60,000 pounds, let's say, even then we'd struggle to raise finance, even with a decent pre-sale offer on the table, you know, that my cut off budget, we're still struggling. And the time you get to a point where you've got, you think you've raised the finance for the show. Your first part is pulled out because it's taken 12 pounds and they spent it on something else. So, the reason I'm telling you this, and it's obvious for most people anyway at the working industry, is that when I'm having to quinter, using my network and going to indies that I know and I like and I know can make really good shows and saying that we want to commission, we were having the problem of raising the finance.
So we can put in an investment, but it's probably not on the same scale as some of the bigger, you know, terrestrial players out, or digital players out there. And what we found is we did commissions in really great shows, but the whole purpose of the commissions was that we wanted to move away from this very long-winded process of trying to find free sales and going on for weeks and months and waiting for decision-makers. But also, we operate on a red share business within any producers we work with. And what we wanted to do is, not only for us to get into the black as possible, but also for our production partners, we didn't want to wait kind of four or five years before we were actually seeing a profit on the show.
And so what I've had to do in the last kind of 12 months or so is pivot. And so whilst we always will work with traditional CD indies for people like, I also started working with freelancers and this is freelancers directly. And I kind of, you know, I put callouts on on LinkedIn, we have some really good people, not just in UK and the US internationally. And it's just a different tag.
So we have commission shows that are, as you said, just internationally, so we commission show from an African Indian that's based in Kenya. We did a mystery show, which is with a Czech Republic indie. But the last two or three shows that I've commissioned and actually I've greened it something last week as well. This has been directly with freelance.
So some of this pitching idea into me, and usually it's someone who's a producer director. It might be someone who's a video-dormant who's got this really great access, this really great story. And that's kind of how we're working now to try and get shows off the ground and it has worked and it has been successful. And we put this content on the channels and it's done really, really well.
And we've taken those shows to market. And we had the team at MIPCOM, setting those shows in and we're just waiting for the feedback now. So hopefully it's positive. Wow.
So that's really interesting. And we all know that freelancers right across the TV industry have had a horrendous year. There's an enormous amount of talent out there that's not working or barely working. But your model seems to completely play into all of that amazing talent that's out there.
We've got great ideas, producers, directors, for example, who can approach this without the overheads of a normal production business and talk to you directly. You know, as an ex-discovery commissioner, the quality of content that needs to be produced to be able to sell it on, as you said, take it to market, as well as it working really well for your AVO channels. That's fascinating. So give us one example.
You mentioned one in Kenya. Can you give us another example of a show that you've commissioned from a freelancer? And what's the format of the show? How many hours?
I worked with a freelancer called Josh who approached me with an idea. And I basically did a call out to say which of them was working really well for us. We sit on our channel endeavor, poverty and homelessness is kind of struck a chord with our viewers and people kind of being in a tight situation but managing to overcome adversity. So Josh pitched me an idea which was about homelessness.
It was about very wealthy, kind of tourist-led places and where lots of money is spent and it was the flip side of that. So, for example, Las Vegas where people go for a good time and have seen the amount of money is spent, but actually half a mile down the road there's a real serious homeless and poverty problem. And he pitched this to me as a single doc. And so we then further developed it as something that could be turned into a series which we call poverty in paradise.
So, the pilot episode being shot in Las Vegas and Josh paired up with another freelancer called James and they went to Vegas for 10 days. They had this really, really good access to local Las Vegas police force. They got a lot of the homeless people to chat to them. Some are in kind of recovering addicts.
There's a guy and his son who had lost his job, he hadn't gotten a job for a number of years. He lost his house. They were being helped by a charity and you kind of followed the story of the father and son right the way through. And I've done a little bit of his voice but it kind of works out well for them.
And also a real estate agent. So you had this story about homelessness and poverty in Las Vegas with lots of different angles through the access that these guys were able to get. And we put it onto our channel endeavor something like six weeks ago and it just generated 1 million views. And obviously whilst that doesn't equate to 1 million euros, it's still a healthy amount.
And because we operate on a best-year model, once we've retired investment, then Josh and James will start making some money for it and whilst it's on the channel. And we put it also put it onto Facebook. It's been pretty successful and then we took it to the mid-com and we're trying to sell that as a series. We've got one pilot at Las Vegas and then the client hopefully is to do another couple of episodes.
I know one of those is nothing will be in Mauritius. And that's been a real successful for us. Yeah, I mean that to me sounds like a really interesting model for the future when you've, as I mentioned before, you've got an enormous amount of talent. You've got a new way of distributing content and you can get straight to the story and get shows made quicker.
Everybody must agree that the normal TV commissioning model is broken and has been for a long time. I was listening to what you were saying earlier on about that pain of getting partners together. And by the time you get the last one in, the first piece of the jigsaw falls out or a key executive leaves and then they're all sound. And you've had any team of two years of working on this project and it doesn't happen and it's all fun-offing and that's crazy.
Yeah, I mean the other great thing is that we can bring light really quickly. And I say really quickly. I don't mean like in a matter of days, but it might be like a couple of weeks. I want to ask really not just too much.
So generally it will be like a two-page pitch, one with a general overview and one outlining the episode. And we kind of run the numbers obviously. We have the data from YouTube. We've got a social media team and they can look at what the performance, the benchmark against other similar shows.
So the other thing I want to say is also that we commissioning spikes on the channels and also performance on social media. And still a bit of it is getting things to go. I don't want it to be that the robots are taking over just yet. So it's obviously a bit of human intuition as well.
But it is useful having this data and hence we're able to, I mean what we can also do when we work on producers is that if what they pitch isn't quite right, we do a lot of analytics now where we can go back to them and say it might be locations or it might be the characters or the content. But we can say if you tweak it to this, which we believe based on our data will make this show perform really well. And if you're able to make those changes, then we'll greenlight it. And I would say usually we can greenlight something in about a month or two.
So it's still not super quick, but I think it is pretty quick compared to your usual TV, you can see way times. Yeah, absolutely. Well exciting opportunities in the future. Look forward to seeing how the model develops.
Mel, coming back to you, tell us about what you've got going on at the moment. Obviously lots of things you talk about at channels, consumer brands that you're working on with. I think it's Iceland, doesn't it? You've got some consumer brands that you've spun off on the back of the success of one or two of your food channels.
Yeah, no, definitely. So Twisted is our food drink lifestyle brand. We launched that in 2016. It was a real kind of success story for us.
It grew to a million followers in six weeks from purely kind of in studio, our own made original content for social. And it's kind of just been the gift that keeps giving for us really since then. And we've built I think it's nearly 30 million followers cross platform for that brand now. We've done lots of interesting things across the years.
We've got delivery only restaurants called Twisted London that operate out of Uber Eats. And that's been going for three or four years for us now. We have a food market store in Mercato, Mecha Palitano in Elephant and Castle, which is a Twisted one. We also appear in many Azdas through a team called Food Labs where they bring lots of different interesting brands, which means we've got kind of food to go and off the counter, twisted offerings for our audiences as well.
We did a beer last year with Brew Gutter, an amazing brewery based in Scotland where you give back for every purchase that's sold. We were donating every pound from every box to Food Bouncy to support cost of living that was going on last year and that link into Twisted. And this year we partnered with Iceland as you referenced and we've got a skew of five or six products that are in all Iceland stores across the UK, co-developed between Iceland's team and the Twisted team, which has been going great guns and we've been, you know, when we first launched it, they were featured across this morning and they were doing a taste testing of the products and so on, all kind of earned media and this model of using our brand online as a marketing channel ultimately to drive sales to our products offline is pretty, really effective and exciting. So that's something we've got going on.
We also just launched our first podcast with Twisted called What Combo, which we've done in collaboration with Sony. So we've got firm Brady, an amazing comedian hosting that and we have different celebrity guests on each week, talking about kind of different flavour combinations and also obviously food is a central part of that conversation but expanding into kind of broader combos in life what works together, what doesn't. And that made it into Apple's top 10 new podcasts and we launched it a month or so ago. So that's been super, super exciting.
We also just did what I think is kind of one of the most interesting bits of commercial work with Cadbury's and Caramilk. We actually, the campaign was a lot of it was online and across our channels but we extended it into the real world as well. We actually launched a pop up in London for the day where we had a chocolate bar to the bar, everything in it was themed and made out of chocolate. It was all about kind of heroing Caramilk and Aussie, Aussie's favourite chocolate campaign.
So to go and kind of touch and fill in the real world, which has always been the mantra of jungle and that diversification, how do you have brands that may be born online and build community online but a tangible in real life and always really, really excites me to see that stuff come to fruition. I think it's brilliant. That's fascinating and real sort of again, appointed to the future in terms of content creators and publishing businesses, building brands and then, you know, a brand is only a brand. When it comes something other than you originally said, you know, a book is a book but actually if you take that out to be an event or you take it to be a movie, you know, it becomes a brand when it becomes a physical representation across different medias.
What's interesting to me is that obviously you've got a brilliant team there of content creators and publishers and data scientists and extremely smart people but setting up consumer brands, how do you do that? Because that's a different skill set to what you originally had within jungle. I'm right in saying that. Yeah, yeah, we had to learn this lesson slightly the hard way, in the honest with you Justin.
So when we first launched Twisted Restaurant side of the business, we did it ourselves and it turns out we are not restaurant to us. You know, you should have seen the menu, it was ridiculous, it was buying high selling low and we just weren't the experts in that. So the way that we tend to operate on these things now is via joint ventures. You pair what we're really, really good at with experts, where they're really good at something that we perhaps don't have in house and enables the what we're trying to create to be the best version of itself.
So we relaunched with the London with a very experienced restaurant or business and with the podcast, you know, we're doing that in collaboration with Sony and all of their kind of something else music audio based experience. If these things kind of go brilliantly, what we can do over time is bring more of that in house and build a team of experts around it and start kind of keeping more of the lion's share of those ventures, but absolutely kind of to mitigate risk. We always consider joint ventures in the first instance of anything that's not kind of within our wheelhouse. Yeah, tested learning and then, you know, learning is the key isn't it really?
Yeah, it is. Yeah, well, I wish you all the best of luck with all of those projects and I'm sure we're going to see more and more from the channels that you run over at jungle. Yeah, really. Thank you.
And now it's time for story of the week where my guests get to highlight the TV or content industry new story that's caught there. I in the past seven days. Adam, what's your story, the week? Yeah, my story of the week just in was something that I saw in in deadline.
And this was about BBC being urged to take action over over little Britain because I'm in a racist sketch being on on I player. And it's not the first time this is this has come up, but it has raised its head again. And what I find really interesting about this is it really, really is a just a different sort of opinion and some are very much for removing it because it's like, why should there be racist programming on my player? And others are saying that over yourselves, it's comedy is very off the time.
It came out in 2004, what you're getting in your niggas in a twist for. But I can see both sides of the story and I think in terms of creative freedom, you know, it's a bit like when you know the right of dialogues being edited. And it's interesting because I didn't necessarily agree on those books being edited. I just think they've been around for so long, why do it now?
Although I did appreciate that it may not be suitable in this day and age. But I think the little Britain one, I think, takes it a step further because it's obvious racial stereotypes. And what's surprising is that this was even allowed to be in 2004. I mean, I guess it wasn't really 20 years ago.
But yeah, it was my story just because I still not decided. I don't know. Like I read it and I thought, I don't know what I think of this. And it changes on the most of the basis.
I think, no, why don't I just pull that particular segment and just run the rest of it. And the other part of me is like, no, look, it's obvious time. There's probably people who think it's funny whether that's right or wrong. So I don't know.
But I just kind of caught my eye when I saw it. Yeah, it's funny. It's funny. When you look at comedy and you know, some things people think of different senses of humour, right?
Some people find some things funny, some things not. But obviously you were the actual layout of context and you know, 20 years ago and 30 years ago and 40 years ago, you know, it's not a simple answer to it. Is there really, and you know, you've got as I say, you've got context laid over that. But also you have got the ability to flag things up.
You'll be able to the flag before the show or before the scene to say, you know, this was created at this point in time, but start moving into sort of censorship and it becomes a very sort of sticky area. Well, no, interesting. Well, I'm just going to add to be fair to the sort of, I think they did put a warning in front of it. And then it becomes a matter of choice.
They're flagging that this content contains something racially explicit. If you then choose to watch it and you're offended, well, then you've chosen to watch it. So I think as far as I'm aware, they did put all that. Okay.
Mel, how about you? What's your story doing? It's quite different from that one. I won't wait in on that.
Otherwise, we will literally be here all day. But I do think there's a difference between somebody being offensive and somebody just being racist and what I don't think being of its time as it's used to keep publishing monetizing whatever that content. So that's my side of it. And actually, I've been off for the last week or so.
So I've been reading as much because I tried to switch off. But I read a brilliant piece in the drum by Kevin Lynch, who was recently made redundant from Oakley and the title of a greatly straight away. I was asked by Oakley's created director here of five arguably useful lessons. And I was kind of expecting it to be a scathing, I've just been cut from this business.
But it was really, really insightful, humorous, brilliant piece about kind of all of his learnings from the work at Oakley. I think it's some extent an advert for what he's doing next. But the bit that really stuck with me is, you know, Oakley transformed their business. You know, existed for a long time.
But we probably would look at it as kind of a broadly new brand because they completely rethought the way that they approach marketing. And they're one of their key lessons out of the five is people don't give a shit. Sorry, I'm not allowed to swear on this. But people don't care about your brand.
Once you accept that, it will absolutely unlock freedom for you to talk and, you know, think about marketing in a completely different way. And I just, yeah, any marketeers out there, I would suggest they read it because I think there's so many valuable nuggets in it. Lace with humor and quite inspirational. So big shout out to Kevin Lynch.
I'm wishing that for everything that he does next. I just thought it was a brilliant piece. We'll put the links to both of those stories in the episode description so you can go and check those out. And now it's time for Hero of the Week and Get in the Bin.
Mel, who's your Hero of the Week? Again, I'm going to send this out to a couple of weeks because I have been off so, do forgive me for that, Justin. But my Hero of the Week is Norwich City Football Club and I'm not an Norwich fan, I'm a Spurs fan. But I don't know if everybody saw what I think most of you did, the advert that they did for Mental Health Awareness Day with the two football fans.
So incredibly powerful. Targeting and audience probably is still, you know, knee type of targeting on kind of talking about mental wellbeing and mental health. Brilliantly executed, you know, unexpected from Norwich. But yeah, I just thought it was an incredible piece of work and probably impactful for quite a lot of people.
I thought it was fantastic as well. We'll put a link to that as well. It's a great little, amazing little clip. But before we move on on that, Mel, I'm a Leeds fan.
So, you know, I've just got to say, well, I won't say anything. Adam, who or what is your Hero of the Week? So my Hero of the Week, it's a good story. This is Ali.
It's a German neurosurgeon called, I'm going to get this name on Mel, Peter Bacochzi. And Peter Bacochzi, so he's my Hero because last Friday there's a Peruvian electronic artist called Sophia called Cisis released her album. And on her debut album, there is a track called Bacochzi. So it's dedicated to this neurosurgeon.
And the reason it was dedicated to this neurosurgeon is because Sophia's mum was in Peruvian and dying of cancer. Because the surgery was so dangerous, nobody wanted to operate on her because it was so risky. So Sophia posted a clip of her song on Instagram saying that, and asking if Peter Bacochzi would do this and dedicate it to his track to him, if he would operate on her mum. And through various means of social media, Peter then saw this.
He then did the surgery on Sophia's mum. And what I think is really good about this story is Sophia, as a thank you, then, took Peter to Burkhine in Berlin, which is one of the most notorious clubs. So this is like Peter, the 55 year old neurosurgeon, probably having a very good time at Burkhine. I thought that was a really good inter story.
That's a brilliant story. Fantastic. Well, again, we'll put a link to that story as well, Adam. Very inspirational.
Happy material for a nice doc there. You never know. And what about in the bin? Who are you throwing in the bin, Adam?
It might be slightly controversial. Okay. But it's only just for this one instance. I'm going to put Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr in the bin because there's this announcement of the Beatles kind of new single and using AI to kind of bring John Lennon back to life and using this recording that they've kind of managed to through the use of technology.
I kind of feel John recorded this before we died and I kind of always think I didn't release it for a reason. And I just think these things should just be left to lie. And to bring back another bit, it's not a new Beatles track in 2023. Can't we just enjoy them for kind of who they were and what they were.
And the other thing that really, really, really, really knew about this is that the 12-inch single is coming out on. So it's one new track and then on the B side, it was the Beatles first single. We just should know this, but maybe something like that. And that's 1999 for two tracks.
Ridiculous, ridiculous. So as much as I love Beatles and I actually met Paul McCartney earlier this year, he's a very nice guy. I've just for this particular reason I'm putting the company and we're going to be in the bin. Wow.
Wow. The surviving Beatles are going in the bin. That is controversial. I'm going to reserve judgment, Adam, until this track comes out, which I think is going to be the day that telecast comes out on Thursday, the 2nd of November.
So we'll see. And maybe we'll do this at the Telecast Digital Content Forum, Adam, which I know you're presenting at. So, Mel, how about you? Who or what are you chucking in the bin?
I love to that, by the way. I am. It's very vocal. It's not related to the industry at all.
I want to put in the bin the people that attend Big Brother Live Evictions and shout, get someone out. Like, who are these people? Are they real or are they paid actors? Are we still doing that in 2023?
We talk a lot about well-being and duty of care on television programs and the psychological impact. I think it's bonkers that people are still going to do that in this day and age. So I'd like them to absolutely get in the bin and say that. In the bin?
Yes. I think that's a really good point actually. I've never thought that before. But it is crazy by it because if somebody doesn't know them just to say shout, you know.
And then they listen to it. The psychological impact that must have for thinking a country HU is terrifying. So please stop doing that. Alright.
Mel, Adam, it's been great episode. I really enjoyed speaking to you both. You're both going to be at the Telecast Digital Content Forum, which is happening on the 9th of November. If I Southbank, Mel, I'm going to be really enjoying your session, which is called On the Money, What's Next in Social Video Monetization, which is sponsored by Fall Studio.
And Adam, you're going to be presenting On the Drop, which is the Evening Studio Showcase session of new projects. Along the lines, perhaps, of what you've mentioned earlier on when it comes to freelance projects and some clues about new projects you're looking for partners with. Exactly that. Yeah.
And we're all presenting a new format that we're presenting as well. So very exciting. Well, looking forward to seeing you both there and everybody else that's listening to the show. Please come down.
It's still available via telecast.com forward slash events. Thank you, Mel. Thank you, Adam. Great to speak to you and have a good week.
And I'll see you next week. Brilliant. Thanks very much, Justin. Thanks, Mel.
Well, that's about it for another week's show. As ever, I hope you enjoyed it. This week's telecast was edited by Ian Chambers, as always, and recorded in London. Next week, we'll have two more speakers who will be appearing at the Telecast Digital Content Forum, which is sponsored by BBC Studios.
And they'll be pointing to the future of the next generation content industry. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next week. Stay safe.