Seen.TV'S Yusuf Omar | TellyCast Podcast

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Our guest this week is Yusuf Omar, co-founder of Seen.TV, the multi platform video publisher which aims to create a more empathetic and understanding world through storytelling. In conversation with Justin Crosby.

Yusuf's Story of the Week

Transcript

Justin: Hi, I'm Justin Crosby and welcome to another TellyCast. My guest this week is Yusuf Omar, co founder of Scene. tv, the multi platform video publisher which aims to create a more empathetic, And understanding world through storytelling. Yousef, how are you doing? Welcome to the show. Good, 

Yusuf: Justin. I'm so excited to be here.

Thanks for having me. 

Justin: Not at all. Amazing aims with your company. And we'll get to get to talk a little bit about those, but for anybody who doesn't know scene TV or scene dot TV, tell us about your business and this platform that you've developed over the last few years and tell us about the genesis of it.

Yusuf: We're a media and technology company. We've got 8 million subscribers. We've published over 5. thousand videos reach about a billion views a year. You can think about us as being a little bit like a BuzzFeed or now this, but much younger and a little bit more agile. And it was really born out of a response to what I think was a failing traditional media landscape.

Justin: Okay. So explain that a little bit. How is the traditional media? We're talking about news and reporting, aren't we? As opposed to necessarily documentaries, or maybe you do those as well. But let's talk about news to begin with. So when you say that sort of failing the audience, Explain that a little. 

Yusuf: I think it's failing on many levels.

I think it's failing as a business model, right? You're struggling to see sustainable, independent media organizations. I think it's failing audiences in terms of the type of coverage it does. I was, I think when we first launched this company was in 2016 and 2017 was, was kind of that time of the year.

And two of the biggest stories of my life were taking place at that time. One, the Donald Trump election elections and two Brexit here in the UK. Both of these stories, Donald Trump in the U S Brexit in the UK. Traditional media completely missed Nobody in most traditional media organizations thought Brexit was going to happen.

They were so predominantly focused on London without actually exploring stories in the broader UK. Same in the US. Nobody in these East Coast, West Coast news organizations thought Donald Trump was going to win the elections. They were all shocked. If you were listening to communities on the ground in marginalized voices in middle America or outside of London, you would have had much better signals.

You would have had a much better indication of I think that was when we realized, wow. They know they're outta touch. They're completely outta touch with real people and real stories. media organizations speaking to pundits and experts and commentators and not real humans on the ground. And maybe there was a better way to do storytelling.

Maybe there was a better way to do journalism. 

Justin: And do you think that gap between mainstream media and, and those communities on the ground, do you think that's got wider since when you started? 

Yusuf: I think we've now had a healthy appreciation for the role of user generated content. I think initially, media organizations thought of it as a threat to democracy and certainly a threat to their industry, and for hundreds of years had framed themselves as the sole arbiters of truth.

I think now there's an appreciation that actually most of the biggest stories of our time, especially over the last decade, have been people at the right place at the wrong time with mobile phones that have brought us content. So I think that has shifted somewhat. Having said that, I think media are still kind of looking for the next viral video, which they're just going to scrape from the surface and say, well, that's gone viral, let's put that on TV.

And that's kind of pointless. It has no value. If a video has gone viral, and BBC both publish it, One, I've probably seen it online before they published it anyway, so there's not much value to being first. And two, if they're all publishing the same viral video, I've got no real brand affinity at that stage.

I can't remember where I saw it and I'm certainly not likely to pay for that piece of information if it's, if it's so readily available. So I think the challenge that media organizations find themselves with, if they do lean into user generated content, is that it's ad hoc. You don't know when you're going to get the next good piece and it's unreliable, potentially low quality, potentially not factually accurate.

And for this reason, I think they find themselves in quite a difficult position. 

Justin: So tell us about SceneTV then, and the sort of content that you're publishing. You said, um, enormous amount of content you're publishing every year. How do you produce that? And tell us about, you know, give us an insight into the scale of your organization and how you operate.

Yusuf: Yeah, for sure. So we saw a different way of doing things. We thought, what if we could train communities around the world? to tell stories with mobile devices. I mean, there is over 3 billion phones around the world. These are effectively 4K cameras that are sitting in our pockets. It's like a Ferrari, but most of us are driving in first gear, right?

So what if we could train communities how to tell stories with mobile phones? What if we could curate and aggregate that content? What if we could remotely direct citizens to share their lived experience? And what if you had a team of journalists and fact checkers and producers who were able to do that?

That we're then turning that into something really amazing, right? Polishing those diamonds, producing really high quality storytelling. So that's effectively what we did. My co founder and I traveled all over the world. We trained 20, 000 people in over 100 countries, how to tell stories with their phones.

We call them mojos, mobile journalists. And we created this massive network of storytellers, which we could tap into during COVID 19 and, you know, at other times throughout history. But then we realized through that process, what people struggle with in the storytelling process, because you know how to tell a story, you know, you've done so for years in your marketing background and now today in this, but most people don't know how to tell a story.

Even if they have hardware, like a mobile device to film. And even if they have distribution like Snapchat and TikTok, there's a reason why the 1 percent go viral and 99 percent consume because the 1 percent know how to tell stories. So we realized specifically what people struggle with. People struggle with shot lists.

They struggle with interview questions, they struggle with storyboarding, they start to struggle with putting together a structure, a sequence, with a start, a middle, and an end. And it wasn't scalable for us to travel around the world and keep training communities, so we started developing tools and technology.

And we basically created little tech that functions as a virtual journalist. that helps guide citizens through the storytelling process. And that is what enabled us to launch all these shows. 

Justin: Are you talking about a course just a video course? Or are you talking about technology embedded into the into the device 

Yusuf: embedded specifically into the mobile camera?

So the idea that you open up your mobile camera and all the instructions that you need, whether it's in an app, or whether it's through the browser, or whether it's even directly within your experience and tick tock or Instagram. All the instructions that you need to tell a story are right there. Oh, wow.

Yeah, and what that means is, we can do a story on, you know, somebody in their mental health condition, and they've got everything they need to tell their story. But this is where it gets really good, Justin, because you can do a story on mental health, and then you can integrate storytelling tools into that story.

And what that means is the audience watch a story about mental health, maybe just say it's about depression, and then at some point in that narrative, they can open their camera and create a story about mental health. So your audience become your consumers, become your creators. And I think that's like the gold standard of where we want to be, where we create this like user generated content flywheel, where you watch a story about climate change, you create a story about climate change.

And that's a really exciting future for me in terms of media. 

Justin: Yeah. And how does that work? From an economic perspective, I mean, is it a little bit like Newswire or an agency where creators, let's think, um, logistically how it works. So they, they create their video, then presumably they upload it and your, your, your editors back in.

Yusuf: Exactly. 

Justin: Yeah. 

Yusuf: We've got a team of 35 people around the world. They're sitting in the US, UK, South Africa, India, all over the world. They pick it up. And this is where we do the editorial process. And there's really no shortcuts to some of that, right? The fact checking, the verification, structuring in a way that's virally interesting.

I think because we preloaded the storytelling on the front end, the post production is a lot easier. Like I think one of the challenges with like, you know, I used to work at CNN and we had a product called CNN I report, which was just, you know, submit your UGC. The problem with that is you have a floodgate of garbage and you're like, Oh, what is this?

And what do we do with it? But I think if you preloaded a story angles and ideas and treatments and all that kind of stuff. It's a framework, right? Yeah, it's a framework. Exactly, a recipe. If you've done that up top, it makes your post production a lot easier. You know, better quality data in, better quality data out.

I guess your question around monetization is the one on most people's mind. And everyone that's listening to this is like, okay, but how do you make money? We've generated 9 million in revenue through this process. And it's quite simple. The first revenue stream is programmatic ad revenue. So we create the content.

We publish it on platforms like Snapchat and Facebook, and we earn money from the ads that play in between. And on a platform like Snapchat, there's an ad playing. We have a three minute video. There's an ad playing like every 20 or 30 seconds. So a user might go through five or six ads watching one story and we earn revenue on that.

And you know, you can earn 200, 000 on a three minute video. A video that might've cost you less than 200 to produce. So in this way, the margins are really insane. I think where media companies get in trouble is where they produce content for digital, but they do it at television operating costs. That's where there's a huge differential, right?

If you're spending thousands of dollars to produce content, but you're not seeing those thousands of dollars back. That's, that's where you kind of get in trouble. 

Justin: Yeah. Okay. So in terms of length of content, you're shooting the content directly on the phone, but is that then being edited and optimized for each different platform?

Or is it, or are you talking about, you know, it's, it's all vertical and it's all for short form or relatively, or we say short form. Um, it's actually, what's an average length of the videos that you produce? 

Yusuf: Yeah, the average length at the moment is three minutes, but it's so interesting, like our three minute has become like medium form because when we think about short form, it's like a minute or even a minute's long, people are like, Oh, you know, an Insta reel today must be 15 seconds.

So that becomes a short form. So that's moving all the time. I think what's really interesting and what I'm most excited about is what we call a derivative content strategy, where you can have multiple derivatives from the same piece of content. We now have a scenario where we're working with. You know, for example, we're working with these incredible creators out in Gaza.

One of them's name is Ahmed. We've been working with him for a few years now. And after we'd produced 30 videos, each of them with three minutes long, we were able to aggregate that together and produce a feature length film. So we produced some film that was almost 40, 40 minutes in length, one cohesive narrative.

And even though it's vertical, we ended up putting it up in cinema screens, played in cinemas all over the world. It's currently touring at the moment. So that's exciting for me. What's that called? What's that? That documentary is called Ahmed Alive. I'll send you a link. It's, it's well worth the watch. It really is the gold standard of what user generated content can be.

It tracks this journey of this young guy named Ahmed who grows up wanting to be a travel blogger. And that's a terrible career pathway for a Palestinian from Gaza because he can't travel, right? He's, he's basically confined within these borders. So he decides to become a travel blogger at home and basically tell stories from within Palestine.

Really beautiful stories of food and fashion. 7th happens. His house gets bombs. He becomes a refugee. We see him week by week moving from situation to situation. He eventually makes his way out of the country and, and arrives in South Africa. It's a beautiful narrative. And you know, you're at the edge of your seat all the time.

Say, oh, is he going to make it? Is he going to survive? And I think what I realized is when you watch it in the cinema, even though it's vertical, even though it's optimized for mobile phones, for the most part, it doesn't matter. Audiences don't care. They just want a good story, whether it's vertical or landscape or shaky or handheld, or, you know, the audio is not great in places.

I think if anything, in a world where we're saturated with content and young people feel manipulated to lie too often, They want real raw directly from the ground voices. And that's what that we've been able to achieve there. 

Justin: Yeah. Now I can, I can imagine how captivating that will be. Cause I mean, I find myself on Tik TOK, scrolling through and just seeing the number of people who were just talking to camera.

Livestreaming for hours on end, just sharing whatever they're thinking and having conversations directly back with their audience, which is, uh, unnerving to begin with, but actually, you know, this is how we're consuming content. There's certainly the new, uh, young generation 

Yusuf: potential. For the last hundred years, we've been limited to a group of, you know, comedic writers sitting in Hollywood and they defined what is funny and, and who is talented and, and which, and now you're casting the world to find like these hilarious individuals and highly entertaining people.

It's like, yeah, I actually, I worry about those Hollywood writers today because they're not just competing with chat GPC on one side, they're competing with this like global talent pool. 

Justin: Yeah. So, uh, let's talk about AI and. Presumably that's incorporated into your workflow, right? Massively. And tell us a bit how you're utilizing AI.

Is it, is it purely for editing or is it at all stages of the workflow? 

Yusuf: Our entire workflow relies on AI and it's been able to drastically reduce our operating costs. Just for perspective, Justin, when we We grew quite quickly. When we were at the beginning of the pandemic, we were co founders, myself and Samaya, we're also a husband and wife duo by the end of the pandemic.

We were 105 full time staff around the world. So we'd massively had to grow this team out to be able to facilitate all of this content that we were creating. A lot of those jobs were incredibly labor intensive. For example, to work with a storyteller and to create a custom storyboard. Where to visualize their story required a team of illustrators.

We've now been able to automate that with products like Dali 2 and being able to create custom storyboards. To do pre scripts where we'd have to generate a script of kind of structuring what somebody's story might look like. The natural language models can do this much quicker than we can. And to be honest, a lot better than we can.

Including creating suspense, et cetera, when you've designed the right framework. I think for all of these tools to function well, though, you need your own data. If you're simply going to rely on ChatGPT and enter a couple of prompts, The level of output is going to be, you know, questionable. With 

Justin: the thousands of videos that you've got, that's basically optimizing it through your own content.

Yusuf: Exactly. We've got these 5, 000 videos that we're able to plug in and that gives us so much nuance. We know exactly what kinds of stories will work, what kinds of stories won't, what kinds of headlines go viral, what don't, what kinds of thumbnails do well for us. We can tell you specifically where people drop off on the narrative, like they drop off three seconds in and why they dropped off.

Oh, okay. That word triggered them, or this visual was too boring, or this color was too boring. This means we can get really scientific about like, our opening shots and ensuring that we keep you watching for as long as possible. And we've seen the results. I mean, Our watch time has increased substantially the amount of the average retention per episode which to us equates to more monetization more revenue Well, that's the 

Justin: key watch time, isn't it?

Exactly. It's 

Yusuf: huge. Yeah, it's huge. 

Justin: And so how do you come across your contributors then? I mean, uh, how is presumably that's through social media and but talk us through that process 

Yusuf: Yeah, casting is so important, right? Because you can have a great story to sell, but finding the right person to tell it is critical.

There's two sides to it. One, there's inbounds. Once you grow a large enough audience, your audience become your creators and they want to contribute stories. But we are actively leaning in on platforms like TikTok and scraping across them, looking at a really large data set and saying, okay, if we want to do a story on menstrual hygiene and period poverty, Here's all the people that are talking about that story.

Here's the ones that are doing it most successfully, analytically, et cetera. Effectively TikTok and Instagram reels have become the world's largest. human experience libraries. So it's a great starting out point. 

Justin: Yeah. And short YouTube shorts is, obviously it's one minute essentially, but, um, do you utilize that?

Cause it's much harder to monetize, isn't it? 

Yusuf: Yeah. YouTube shorts seems like it's still not quite as developed a content archive as, as TikTok and Instagram reels and Snapchat spotlight. It's a particular verticals of content and doing very well podcast for one and kind of expert commentary as another.

We haven't quite figured out YouTube shorts yet. One of the reasons for that is I suppose it's a good lesson to anyone listening is we're really focused on platforms that lack content equilibrium. That means, you know, a platform like YouTube has a lot of consumers for sure. It's the second biggest search engine in the world, but it also has a lot of creators and that balance of creators and consumers.

That's not an interesting place for seen TV to be like, we don't want to fight with a billion creators to try and surface. We focus on platforms that don't have equilibrium where there's a lot of consumers, but not a lot of creators. Believe it or not, Facebook is a great example of it. Facebook still has 2 billion users.

Justin: Well, I was going to ask you about your demographic, your audience, because presumably it's, it's, it's a, it's a youth, young audience. Facebook's must be getting quite a bit older though, now when it taught you talk about that demographic. So are you talking about the different platforms? You're, you're appealing to different demographics through different platforms with the same stories.

Yusuf: In a perfect world, we would be doing custom content with custom platforms. We don't currently have the bandwidth to do that. Like I would love to do bespoke content for each platform. For now, our main priority historically has been Snapchat. Snapchat's another great example of a platform that has a really large audience that are underserved.

If you are 13 to 24, uh, 90 percent of that demographic are on Snapchat in the U. S. They're very big in Germany, France, the UK, Australia, Scandinavia, basically the affluent countries. So that's where we focused. We launched a really large audience there. We monetized there. Facebook has kind of been a subsidiary product.

We published for Snapchat. We grew an audience of 13 to 24 year olds, predominantly young women, in fact. And then we kind of, you know, publish that same stuff on Facebook and we just saw growth there again. I think Facebook is underserved. It's 2 billion people. It's one third of humanity. Yet. If you ask most media people, Oh, are you, are you investing in Facebook?

It's not interesting to them at all, 

Justin: but it's about, uh, but the content is, is, well, it's a big enough audience. As you say, there's, there's not many creators that are still investing. There was a period I think, you know, maybe 10 years ago when a lot of creators were focusing on, on Facebook. And that was, you know, that was one of the main platforms and they died and they died.

Why was that? 

Yusuf: Yeah. I think a lot of those companies too, right. Buzzfeed news is one of them and vice news were another, they unfortunately built their entire business model around that platform. They relied solely on the programmatic ad revenue and they rode that wave. And when the times are good, it's great.

And they were seeing money. Right. And then the algorithms change, audiences changes, CPMs change. Suddenly the revenue stream is pulled from beneath their feet. And it's, you know, it's a cliche, but it is true. It really is building your house on somebody else's land. You know, you can build the biggest audience on this platform and make hay while the sun shines, but, but it's not always going to shine.

And I think those companies and creators struggled to diversify revenue streams. So for us, programmatics are the cherry on the top. It's great, but we can't be the core business. We're increasingly diversifying into branded content, right? Sponsored content, working with organizations. Remember all these companies around the world also want to do real raw user generated content from their beneficiaries, from their customers, et cetera.

We're also exploring licensing organizations like news Corp or NBC. They license our video content. They also are building out their own video players on their websites and they have no inventory. Not many people have a large vertical video inventory. And if you've got an evergreen library, you can kind of plug it in there.

So that's where we found, if you want to survive, you've got to be diverse. You can't have all the eggs in one basket. 

Justin: How much of your time at CNN, before you set up, uh, SceneTV, inspired you to create this platform and this, this, this business? And what was this at CNN that, that, you know, that gave you the idea?

Yusuf: Every stage of my career, different media organizations taught me different things, and all of that had to come together to produce this. So, I, my background was, I was a, like, I became known as the world's best mobile journalist. I was, from about 2010, I was hitchhiking from South Africa to Syria, up the whole of Africa, telling stories, because I wanted to be a foreign correspondent, but there wasn't many opportunities to do so.

I was in Egypt during the first Arab spring. I was in Syria smuggled in, in 2014. I was in Congo in 2012. I was always in these crazy environments shooting with a mobile phone. So that experience of like just freelance running around taught me the value of the mobile device. I'm like, wow, I can put stuff out in the world.

I don't need satellites. I don't need anything. I can broadcast the world. Joining 24 hour news stations in South Africa. I used to be a journalist out there that taught me that it was acceptable for television screens. I was able to shoot with phones, get up on TV, and nobody cared. I was like, okay, cool.

So now I'd learned the value of the mobile phone, and in stage two I'd learned that broadcasters were willing to accept this quality of content. Of broadcast content. Then I moved out to the Hindustan times in India. I was the mobile editor. My job there was to train 750 journalists across 27 offices, how to make videos with phones.

India taught me scale. India taught me, okay, this is scalable. I can, I can apply what was otherwise just me with a phone to large groups of people that I can start playing the aggregator, the curator of all this content, moving to CNN in London. I started to understand media from a business perspective. I was working on the Snapchat show.

And we were a team of seven people putting out this, this episode that, you know, once a day. And I was starting to get an idea of, okay, revenue comes in, publish on these, on the platforms. How does that business model work? But I was also looking at that headcount and saying, wow, this is a lot of people.

Seven people like, and we're all sharing this pocket pocket of cash. And I thought, okay, this is a, there's a leaner meaner way to do this. Also, I think the major lesson when I was at CNN was the lack of diversity in the media landscape and the prioritizations for certain types of stories. We were more likely to do a story about a listeriosis outbreak or food poisoning in the U.

S. than we were to do 200 people that die in a landslide in Ethiopia. And I realized, wow, there's a significant difference in lives and how they're valued in this media environment. 

Justin: Well, it's advertising as well, isn't it? I mean, it's the business model of news organizations, SKUs, what sort of stories that they want to tell.

Yusuf: Yeah. But I also believe that there is a bigger audience out there that they're not tapping into because they just don't have the right kind of content that's going to be representative of those audiences. So it's all these things that come together that, that kind of get you to a point of, of seeing a new opportunity.

Justin: So now you're overseeing this really exciting user generated content, Platform with that comes a certain amount of responsibility, doesn't it? You know as a journalist and you know The sort of stories that you want to tell and how you tell them how are you approaching that? 

Yusuf: We can't afford to get it wrong as a and we still very much are in the journalism part of the media landscape I think we have the potential to expand out into tourism and fashion and food and we should do that But for now as we're in this like factual Space, what are we selling other than trust?

You Right? I mean, you only have to get one story considerably wrong enough and you lose trust and, you know, trust is one of those things like a relationship, it takes, you know, a long time to build and you can lose it in an instance. So, our emphasis on continuing to hire the most senior, incredible, uh, journalists and editors to make sense of all this noise, to separate fact from fiction, to make sure we're providing enough context, has never been more valuable.

I think what adds further complication for us is we're dealing with a very young audience, 13 to 24 year olds. We're dealing with very sensitive subject matters, sextortion, suicide, and we're both having to navigate ethically the right way to, to take on those, those kinds of story, uh, matters, but also navigating content guidelines.

The stories that happen to be the most important and also happen to perform the best are also the same verticals of content that are most likely to get violations on a platform. So we have to be incredibly careful and delicate about how we tell sensitive subjects on these platforms. 

Justin: Yeah. And you mentioned Vice TV earlier on and Vice was one of the front runners in the digital first news.

Mhm. industry, they've obviously gone through a whole lot of problems now and sort of they're, they're, uh, you know, a shadow of their former self. Um, Looking at the learnings from them and BuzzFeed and many of the other news organizations that have, you know, been the trendsetters, if you like, in this space, what is it that you're taking forward then as a business that you've seen perhaps where they've struggled?

Well, you know, what, what learnings are you taking from that? 

Yusuf: I might come under fire for saying this, but I don't think there was anything interesting about their businesses. I still don't. What do they have other than a strong brand vice with sex drugs and rock and roll of journalism BuzzFeed? We're like, you know, we're cute and quirky and viral but there isn't actually, you know below the if you lift up below the hood What's actually there?

What makes these organizations scalable? How do they go from producing? You know ten videos a week to a hundred videos a week. The answer is they hire more people They hire more staff. They buy more cameras. They get more edit suites And I don't think those kinds of businesses are interesting at all.

Like if you are not scalable, you are not in my mind, a very interesting business to invest in. And there's not a very bright future for you because dynamics outside of your control change like algorithms, like revenue streams, like CPMs, and suddenly you find yourself in trouble. I think the lesson that I take and, you know, I've read the book traffic and some of these others that have like, you know, good warning stories.

Is one, be incredibly lean, continue to be lean, like how can you acquire as much attention and views and virality as possible? With as little spend as possible. And we've seen this lesson, right? A lot of the YouTube original Snapchat, originals, Quibi, all these platforms that did the really fancy expensive stuff, they didn't survive.

They died. So say lean is one and to invest in tools, systems, processes, and technologies that continue to keep you lean, you have to build that moat. You have to build that defensibility. You have to have some kind of secret source. That says I can, like, nobody can gap into this, uh, or at least it'll be very difficult for them.

They'll need this technology. They'll need this data set. They'll need this experience. They'll need this community. And you bring all those things together and you start to have some sort of defensibility. 

Justin: You talk, finally, you talked about the film that's happened alive. Yeah. Yes. And just thinking about longer form YouTube.

documentary content. To me, that would be the obvious next step for you. And then perhaps also to move into licensing that content into linear networks around the world. Is that something that's on your radar? For sure, 

Yusuf: Justin, I actually had a meeting with my team about this today, I said, and you're spot on, I think, over the last 14 years, 1415 years, if you had done high quality, longer form stuff, expensive, you'd find yourself in a pretty tricky spot, because the revenue streams weren't there.

But now we're in a really weird time. We're in this time where one, there is a saturation of user generated content, right? So a lot of noise. Two, we've got, uh, generative AI, which is producing even more content, many of which is indistinguishable from, from reality and, and, and would appear to be reality.

So what does that mean? We're now in a huge, a larger volume of content than we've ever seen before. I think the only way to progress is exactly what you said. is to go deeper and more meaningful and more structured and longer form and more depth and more analysis and more insight. And, you know, do the stuff that, that, that the TikTokers can't do, that they don't have the experience to do.

They don't have the resources to do. Again, it doesn't mean you have to be expensive about it. You can do it in an incredibly lean way. But I think that's, that's what you said is exactly what I told my team today. I said, we can't do what we did for the last few years going forward, because the landscape is, is right now very, very different.

Justin: Yeah. And we've seen the success that, uh, companies like Barcroft, uh, have had through that and selling out to other companies. Future building amazing ip. Yeah, that's right and and Finding fantastic stories and telling them with the right at the best possible people from a from a production perspective So and we've had 

Yusuf: great conversations with the folks at barkoff because it's the same dynamic, right?

They've got all these amazing shows on youtube and snapchat and even they're asking themselves the question Okay, if this is costing me, you know, five thousand pounds to produce this episode and if we produce it for a thousand pounds You maybe if it sees a 10 percent or 20 percent reduction in views, that equation is worth it.

So I think they're also doing the maths and starting to say, okay, how can we tell these stories in ways that are more organic, more, more kind of, uh, on the ground. 

Justin: And now it's time for story of the week where Yusuf gets to choose the TV industry or content industry, new story that's caught his eye. In the past seven days, Yusuf, what's your story of the week?

Yusuf: I think it's this headline of publicists buying this, uh, influencer based marketing agency for 500 million. This is a remarkable shift in the industry where for the longest of time, creative agencies have said, no, we're, you know, more creative. We're going to do bigger budget productions. And it's now the acknowledgement that brands want influences and their reach and distribution.

And two influences offer a lot of talent in terms of content production. They are creative and, you know, very, very low cost and a lot more risky. They can do a lot more 

Justin: authentic, as you say, 

Yusuf: so much more authentic. So this signal is, is a really big one for me. And I think a lot of other digital marketing companies around the world are going to be turning around and saying, yo, what's our influencer strategy?

Uh, are we, are we going to acquire, you know, multi channel networks? Are we going to acquire companies that have got influencer networks? Are we going to build them out organically? It might be too late for that. Can we still make an inroad there? Like. Uh, are we going to do what scene TV is doing and raise a new generation of storytellers that don't exist, but they've got to do something.

So yeah, that 500 million price tag for me says a lot. 

Justin: And what does that mean for publishers then, uh, that are in the video space? 

Yusuf: Publishers are in a difficult spot because when I look at brands today, so historically a brand like Colgate. Would go to a channel like a channel 4 and they'd say hey, I want you to do a show about dental hygiene And we'll pay you to reach your audience.

Just say they're paying them 100, 000. Today, if Colgate took that same 100k and deployed it to TikTok ads, just boosted it directly on Instagram, they will see much better performance analytics. Significantly better. This means publishers are in a difficult spot because publishers have built their entire business model around I own the audience and you pay me to access my audience.

And now brands are saying, Actually, I don't need your audience. I'll I've got a pretty big social media account myself. I'll pay Instagram. I'll reach the audience directly. Effectively what the brands do want and don't have is, is the actual content, that real raw content. So publishers need to potentially start behaving a little bit more like agencies.

They need to potentially start offering white labeled services where they're just doing the production side of things and kind of dropping their ego and saying, actually, we're not going to get the distribution deal and that's okay. But they're going to have to figure something out fast. 

Justin: And in some cases, uh, you know, the influencers and creators have got bigger audiences now than publishers, then publishing groups, then TV networks, essentially, 

Yusuf: don't have.

So exactly. You're Mr. Beast and your copies. And these guys are, you know, they're going to become billionaires and they're doing really well. Unfortunately, they're not scalable. They are what you'd call all profile, but no product. They're a profile. And unfortunately they get hit by a bus tomorrow. There is no company there.

So I think influencers are in a very powerful position, but they also have a ceiling to just how big they can be in a way. 

Justin: Yeah. Yeah. And you can imagine, uh, some very interesting, potentially venture capital deals coming into the influencer space and management groups. And to turn them into media business.

Yeah. Yeah, 

Yusuf: exactly. Yeah. Like take a Mr. Beast and scale him and say, okay, you have the secret source for YouTube. Let's apply it to a thousand creators. 

Justin: And now it's time for hero of the week. Yousef, who's your hero of the week? 

Yusuf: You're speaking to a journalist so my answers will be relatively political. I think the Palestinian Olympic team are, uh, you know, everything that, that, that, that nation has gone through to show up on the world stage in Paris right now is quite remarkable.

I mean, we saw the opening ceremony, which has been covered in controversy, but to see that group of athletes representing their flag on the world stage has been quite admirable. 

Justin: Yeah. What did you make of the opening ceremony? 

Yusuf: Mate. Controversial. I mean, people are, are, I think. People who I did not expect to see strong religious views are suddenly showing up.

I mean, I know Elon Musk's position on, on. 

Justin: He was talking about Christianity being in, uh, you know, in crisis. And 

Yusuf: yeah, exactly. I've been quite surprised to see this kind of resurgence of, because I mean, in, in those parts of the world, in, in the tech space, in the media space, you know, religion is not really talked about that much to any considerable degree.

So it's been surprising to me. I come from a Muslim background, so I'm very familiar with, with people being very upset by depictions of religious occurrences. I mean, you remember the, like, the Charlie Hebdo occurrence? Yeah. People frequently ask me, well, how do you, Yusuf, respond to something like Charlie Hebdo?

As a journalist, and just as a human, I'm a big believer in free speech. I'm a big believer in people being able to say what they like, even if it causes offense. I think there is a difference between, if you take the Charlie Hebdo thing, for example, between what is legally the right thing to do and what is ethically the right thing to do.

Right. And people can debate that forever. 

Justin: Yeah. 

Yusuf: Uh, but myself personally, I'm, I'm, you know, I think part of these civil liberties that we've enshrined is, is the right to offend. I think where Paris, uh, I think where the French are slightly wrong is they are so proud of their right to free speech and libertarian values and say what you want and offend if you want.

But at the same time, they have got a hijab ban on their athletes. 

Justin: Yeah, 

Yusuf: these two things don't sit well for me. We're on one side, they're like, Hey, we have the right to offend and we can do whatever we want at opening ceremony. And it doesn't matter if you're religious, you can be upset because the French are free.

We're free to do what we want, but you're not free to wear a job. You actually have to conform to our principles. So I don't know. I think there's a bit of a hypocrisy there. 

Justin: And how about get in the bin? Yusuf, who and what are you throwing in the bin this week? 

Yusuf: Same political response, Netanyahu. I mean, going to the US Congress and a standing ovation amidst what has been called a plausible genocide is, uh, I think one of those things that we will look back at history and wonder how we enabled this to happen.

So yeah, I'm putting Netanyahu in the bin. All right. 

Justin: Okay. Yusuf, thank you so much for coming on TellyCast. It's been fascinating to Hear about scene TVs. I really enjoyed this. It's really exciting business and uh, I wish you all the very best. I'm sure we're gonna be hearing a lot more of you in the coming years.

So, uh, thanks again for coming on TellyCast. 

Yusuf: This was amazing. It was like therapy . 

Justin: Well, that's about it for this week's show. I hope you enjoyed it. TellyCast was produced by Spirit Studios and recorded in London. For videos featuring the movers and shakers of the TV and digital content industries, don't forget to subscribe to TellyCast on YouTube.

Just click the link in the episode description or search TellyCast TV on YouTube. We'll see you next week for another show. Until then, stay safe.