Will Scougal, EVP brand & commercial partnerships at ITV Studios and global lead for Studio 55, joined Zoo 55 managing director Martin Trickey for a session on Brands and Fans at the TellyCast Digital Content Forum today.
Scougal started by talking about the strategy behind Studio 55. “There’s a lot of rhetoric around attention being hard to find and fragmented. It is fragmented, but I don’t believe it’s hard to find. What is hard to find is high-quality attention,” he said.
Hence the decision to create a single point of entry for brands into ITV Studios – Studio 55 – to have a discussion about how to get that high-quality attention. Scougal also talked up the ambitions for “low-friction deals” with brand partners in getting to the creative expertise that exists within ITV Studios, and around co-creating content together. “That barrier has now been removed.”
Trickey explained how Studio 55 and Zoo 55 complement one another. Zoo 55 started as a distribution play digging into ITV’s archives, as well as reinventing IP.
“It’s about the audience, and building that audience. But what we have now: we are distributing content digitally, but we are building audiences, building fandoms, and we are building an ecosystem that we can do lots of really exciting things with,” he said. “It’s now taking on a role where together we will start to look at what we can do with that audience.”
Scougal agreed, and said that brand partners are enthused about the audience that Zoo 55 can bring, but also the insights on why certain pieces of content are working.
Flexibility is key to the deals being done, including publishing collaboratively with brands and creators in different ways, rather than forcing everyone into one particular model. “The lawyers love us! There’s no boilerplate: every single deal is different,” laughed Trickey.
Scougal talked about specific projects including It Started With a Kiss, a 10-part vodcast sponsored by Tinder, which was looking to use entertainment to reach the LGBTQ+ community. “It’s gone brilliantly: I think it entered the top 20 of the relationship [genre] charts within the first couple of days, and has just kept growing since then.”
Tinder played a key role in the development of the vodcast, emphasising how brand funding is increasingly important for these kinds of new IPs – but also that these new IPs can be vital for the brands’ own ambitions.
“Increasingly, entertainment and IP is becoming a really powerful and important lever in business growth and brand growth,” said Scougal.
“You can look at brand affinity, you can look at brand awareness, but also when you’re looking at the bottom line and the impact of a certain piece of entertainment IP… it can have a very incrementally positive impact. This mantra of ‘IP is the future of brand-building’ is something we talk a lot about.”
TikTok-first dating show Double Date Island is another example of Studio 55’s approach, with auditions segueing into a more-familiar reality-dating format.
Trickey also talked about catalogue content during the session. “We have an amazing catalogue, but it’s not all gold. We have a few prime targets on which we focus our attention,” he said.
“We have a very clear idea about what kind of programming is going to work. We have to be very honest about the fact that some stuff in there hasn’t aged well, and some stuff in there has no cultural relevance… There are still some nuggets of gold in there, but maybe not as many as there were a couple of years ago.”
“More and more we’re looking at those standout shows that are really going to cut through,” he added, citing Graham Norton, Hell’s Kitchen and River Monsters as three examples. “But we’re actively looking for more.”
River Monsters is a key case study. Last produced as a TV show nine years ago, it has been revived for the digital world since Zoo 55 got access to it two years ago, with online views and revenue soaring thanks to “reengineering TV episodes like Lego blocks” to suit the pace and style of social media.
There has also been the launch of Fish On!, the River Monsters podcast presented by original host Jeremy Wade in which he tells the stories from the show. “The trailer did 41 million views in 48 hours!” marvelled Trickey. “And the comments have been almost entirely positive. The fanbase loved it.”
Is a brand new series of River Monsters a possibility? “We’d love that if that could happen,” said Trickey. “Who knows?!”
The final topic for the session was gaming, and the opportunity Studio 55 sees there. “Fans are everywhere. They’re creating things themselves, they’re creating games themselves, they’re creating UGC on TikTok and some of that involves gaming,” said Scougal.
Trickey agreed. “AI has allowed everybody to start being a coder,” he said, also pointing to UGC-driven gaming platforms like Roblox as having the same effect.
“That doesn’t mean necessarily that they’re going to be good!” he warned. But Zoo 55 is exploring how it can take some well-loved brands into Roblox and similar spaces. He’s been sworn to public secrecy on which brands that might be, but watch this space.
