ITV Studios took a big digital-first step in October when it unveiled Zoo 55, its new digital label focused on YouTube, social platforms and streaming services.
Ahead of its launch in early 2025, president of global partnerships and Zoo 55 Ruth Berry and COO Graham Haigh dropped in to the TellyCast Digital Content Forum this afternoon to talk about their vision for the new label, and the opportunities they see ahead.
“You really have to focus on what’s happening with your audience,” said Berry. “The audiences have moved, and during the global pandemic they moved even faster and have fragmented, spending more time on social platforms.”
That’s the challenge facing ITV Studios: taking its content to where those audiences are. Over the last three years it has been testing, learning and playing in some of those spaces.
“This year, we’re expecting about 10bn views across our portfolio in social,” said Berry. “We’ve really grown a business, so at which point do we give it wings… to take it to the next level?”
The big opportunity that Berry sees is playing in the social space – “particularly YouTube is important to us from the monetisation perspective” – and growing the scale further. “And what I get really excited about is the data that we’re going to get back,” she added.
It’s a big shift from being a B2B business, but one Berry sees as a strategic necessity. “We need to be there, and we need to be at the forefront of it, and we need to be thinking about who we partner with,” said Berry.
The pace of change and audience shifts is accelerating, which can be daunting for free-to-air broadcasters, but offers an opportunity for studios to grasp.
“There’s a point at which you think well, what is the moment of transition? From a B2B perspective as ITV Studios it’s a bit easier for us: we can get ahead of that transition,” said Berry, adding that digital/social is at the heart of ITV Studios’ overall strategy for growth. “It’s really front-and-centre of what we’re doing.”
Haigh took up the baton. “We’ve been doing this for a while already. We’ve got over 140 social channels that are live globally,” he said. “We’ve created a platform from which to launch Zoo 55.”
YouTube is key, as Berry said, but Haigh noted that other platforms are also high on the priorities list. “Different platforms deliver different audiences for different types of content,” he said. That includes archive content: chat-show clips nearly a decade old are regularly going viral on different platforms for example.
“We’re going to look at other mediums, possibly audio – we’ve done a lot of experimentation there – but also gaming,” added Haigh. Metavision Studios, another company within the ITV family, will be coming across to Zoo 55 to help with the latter, including owned-and-operated games and metaverse experiences.
Will Zoo 55 also be creating original content? Initially the focus is on exploiting existing content, and integrating Metavision. But ITV Studios has already created some original content – spin-off shows from The Voice for example, and a collaboration with The Sidemen around The Chase – so it is mulling the future strategy for Zoo 55.
“It’s not yet a place for content creation, but in the future that’s something we’re certainly giving great thought to,” said Haigh. In the meantime, there will be opportunities around branded content and partnerships – “quite opportunistic, but there’s lots of ways to collaborate” – and figuring out new uses for the ITV Studios catalogue
“We’ve got 90,000 hours of content and there’s some absolute gems in there,” said Haigh, adding that Zoo 55 is open to all conversations about potential partnerships and new ideas.
Berry finished off by talking about some of those gems. “I have an enormous passion for sport, so I can’t help but lean that way… I think there is an area to explore there that we haven’t done yet,” she said. “We’ve got access to content that we haven’t really thought about yet.”
