Kelly Day of AwesomenessTV

Kelly Day, AwesomenessTV’s chief digital officer, shares with World Screen some of the company’s strategies for global growth.

Just a few weeks ago, AwesomenessTV announced a new partnership with ITV, which will see ITV2 and ITV Hub acquiring the exclusive U.K. premiere rights to the global youth brand’s long-form premium series. The two companies will also co-produce new youth-focused original series together. This partnership is but one example of the ways in which AwesomenessTV is going about extending the brand’s international presence.

WS: How have you been working to increase the global reach of AwesomenessTV, and what sort of growth trajectory are you moving toward?
DAY: One of the things that I’ve been doing over the last two years is thinking about our international expansion and looking for partnership opportunities to continue to build our brand and build our business—looking both outside of the U.S. and within the U.S. as well—through relationships with companies like Netflix, Hulu, YouTube and others.

At this point, from a pure MCN perspective, one of the benefits of having built our business in the early days primarily on YouTube is that we have a large built-in global audience already. We see around 800 million views a month all around the world. What we’ve been focused on more in the last year or so has been expanding the footprint specifically of the Awesomeness brand and some of our other brands like DreamWorksTV and Awestruck. We’re thinking about ways to expand those through distribution partnerships, like the ITV deal we just did or the DHX deal that we did last year in Canada. The English-speaking markets were the initial focus because they’ve been a little easier to enter. We are very actively having conversations with a lot of different players all across Europe and are starting to look across Asia and in Latin America as well.

Ultimately, it will take us wherever the audience goes. For example, Brazil—where there is a huge amount of passionate enthusiasm for YouTube—was one of the earlier places we focused on when we did the deal with Endemol Shine Group last year. We already have a pretty big audience there and have thousands of channels on our MCN there, so it was an obvious place for us to look. Also, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, the Nordics, Benelux, Australia, parts of Southeast Asia and India are all interesting markets for us to pursue. I can see us pretty aggressively expanding into a lot of those territories over the next one to two years.

WS: How did the ITV partnership come about and what does it entail?
DAY: We produce a really large amount of premium television series in the U.S., primarily for the Verizon platform [go90], Hulu and others. We’ve been looking for partners internationally to distribute those more premium shows. We met with ITV back in the spring, and they have a pretty large 16-to-34 audience in the U.K. on ITV2. They were really looking at leaning into the younger end of that audience, the 16-to-24 demo, and looking for a partner who had a brand and a pretty big volume of premium content. For ITV, and broadcasters in general that are looking at how to reach a younger audience as they continue to try to improve ratings, a company like Awesomeness—which not only brings a pretty big volume of premium original content with really popular social-media talent and YouTubers, but also has a built-in marketing platform through our social footprint—is really attractive for them. That’s how the partnership came about. We’re going to be launching a branded programming block in early 2017 that will feature Awesomeness programming from the U.S. that will be seen for the first time by audiences in the U.K.

Some of the shows that have been incredibly popular on Verizon’s go90 service will now be going to ITV. They haven’t made their final selections yet as to exactly which titles, but I think it’s safe to assume that shows like Guidance, which stars Amanda Steele and was the number one show when go90 first launched, will be there. T@gged, which is our social-media thriller, is very likely to be there. You should expect to see Freakish, which is our first Hulu show that is launching later this year, as well as some of our more popular comedy shows like Third Wheel. I would expect to see all of those shows plus several others.

WS: What’s the strategy for the international licensing of AwesomenessTV’s programming?
DAY: It’s really about finding partners that we can develop long-standing relationships with. It’s one thing to just license a single show. That’s great and in certain markets we’re happy to do that. In a lot of the bigger markets, such as the U.K., Germany, Italy and Spain, we’re looking at the opportunity to partner with broadcasters, mobile carriers and different kinds of partners that will help grow with us. We bring our marketing, talent and all the premium content. They can partner with us in spreading the Awesomeness brand and expanding the reach of Awesomeness, whether through a branded channel, programming block, OTT channel or whatever the platform may be. Ideally we are looking for more strategic partners in some of these markets. That’s not to say we aren’t [licensing] or wouldn’t license individual shows here and there where it may be attractive.

WS: What are the goals and plans for the next 12 to 18 months out?
DAY: We’re going to keep moving forward with this strategy that we set out on. We launched a block with DHX on Family Channel in Canada last year. That’s been going really well. Now we’re going to launch one with ITV. For us, as the library of programming continues to grow—and we’re now producing 400 to 500 hours per year of original content—looking at bigger and bigger platforms to be able to distribute that content is certainly interesting to us. One of the benefits of a company like Awesomeness is that we can be really nimble. We own all of our content, we own the IP; so, we have a lot of flexibility in terms of being able to distribute it based on where the audience is going. Two years ago no one would have imagined that we would be creating all of this content for Snapchat. We want to be open-minded and retain that nimbleness so that as new platforms start to emerge, and the economics make sense around premium content, we can dive in.