SXSW London has quickly become a fixture on the festival circuit, with a dizzying amount of events covering a new cross-industry landscape with creativity at its core. It’s all fast sessions, lots of information with a sense of trying to get a grip on a working world now moving at new AI-fuelled speeds. The full title of this session was The Next Frontier: Audience Building in the Platform Era with Ant & Dec, in which the loveable duo revealed that - of course – they are canny media operators behind the cameras too.
Their continued prime time TV dominance has been paralleled with a recognition of the rise of digital content; aside from launching their own podcast Hanging Out With this year, and doing things like Instagram Live Q&As straight after episodes of I’m a Celebrity, they’ve been busy buying up the IPs from their old shows like Byker Grove, SM:TV and Saturday Night Takeaway in order to repurpose clips for social media channels, while developing their own production house Mitre Studios – Ed Sleeman, and Nadia Afiari from the company also joined the panel.
As with Piers Morgan, who spoke later on on the same stage at Shoreditch Town Hall, these are old pros who have fully embraced new media and are reaping the rewards, though unlike Morgan, Ant & Dec have maintained their Saturday night TV trusted host status, while seeing the light of smaller productions for YouTube; they recount that families will now sit and watch their live podcasts on YouTube together. Mitre Studios is essentially part old school production house, part new school start-up.
What was perhaps lacking with this talk is how your newcomer – aspiring star or business owner – can build their own reach. If you’re Ant & Dec, doing funny and engaging content comes as naturally as their Geordie accents, but for those breaking in, who can you build an audience without being a loudmouth hate-monger?
In such a spirit, one thing SXSW London should look at is opening to floor to audience questions in these sessions – tough, with time constrains, but it would add further value and spontaneity to proceedings.
