On 26 June, Sunny Side of the Doc hosted a panel titled “Show us the Money! Facing into the Future of Documentary and Factual Programming Funding.” The talk sought to explore some of the more successful examples of innovative new financial structures and commercial models that are already working for documentary and factual producers.
Moderated by The Bridge Managing Director Amanda Groom, the session saw the participation of Quintus Studios Head of Co-Production and Sales Anouk Van Dijk; Autentic GmbH Managing Director Patrick Hoerl; Spring Films EVP Documentary Films Figs Jackman, and Zinc Media Creative Director Stephen McQuillan.
The mic was first handed to McQuillan, who touched on the launch of Atomic Television in Bristol last year. The new label focuses on international content, which either entails international co-production or working on content that has potential global reach. “The show we’ve been working on is a National Geographic six-part history series titled Defending Europe. There’s obviously a European focus in it and the NGCI team commissioned it. EMEA [audiences] are the focuses of this series,” he said.
Spring Films’ Jackman added how most of his work is carried out outside of the UK, and is based on a long-standing tradition of docmaking and anthropological research which brought stories that could “naturally travel internationally.”
Van Dijk zoomed in on Quintus’ footprint, which is predominantly to be found in the US, South East Asia and India. “That’s where the views and revenues come from. In Europe we can geo-block and we find partners to co-produce with, including broadcasters.”
Zinc Media’s McQuillan highlighted how launching a new company is a brave move these days. “We’ve got 26 employees that do a lot of great work and need to earn a salary. We need to think long and hard about [the] business model and how to finance production. The situation has changed completely, and some changes took us by surprise. In our distribution business, we realised that suddenly the percentage of revenues coming from the digital market went up to the roof. And we didn’t even consciously target that market, we just gave a couple of hours to this or that little channel…”
McQuillan underscored how the “digital market shows very substantial, consistent growth.” “Today, more than 35% of our distribution revenues come from that market. When I speak of digital market, I speak about the channels, the outlets and the platforms bringing content straight to the consumers, with no middle men and commissioning editors.”
Some of Zinc Media partners include German channel Spiegel and US-based Curiosity Stream as well as six FAST channels targeting both German-speaking and international territories. “It’s not entirely clear how [the FAST business model] works, but we need to try out things.” More recently, the firm has also launched three doc-focused YouTube channels.
Next, Groom invited Hoerl to tackle the “big bad bear,” namely “dealing with brands.” Hoerl spoke about Valerie von Boehn’s Decoding Beauty. “We’re known for being a company that produces many science programmes for the international market, and we’ve been commissioned [on this project] by a well-known cosmetic manufacturer.”
Hoerl revealed they focus on telling the audience the scientific facts about the industry and on unpacking how the concept of beauty is changing in today’s digital age. The team aimed to produce a film that didn’t necessarily reveal its backer, but one that would explore the topic from “a credible perspective, yet in an attractive fashion.”
“It was a fully financed production. I can say we learnt a lot especially from the fact we were suddenly working with a company that pertains to a different industry. It’s been quite challenging to discuss [the making of] a film with someone who has no idea about how filmmaking works and come to some kind of ‘editorial consensus’ on what we were really doing there,” he further explained. “In the end, it worked out and I’m happy about the result. The company approached us because they wanted to build on our credibility in the field. […] They knew we’d help them to find an outlet so it could get shown, and that’s what we did [for them.]”
Later, McQuillan delved into the making of Defending Europe. National Geographic approached his team in London after speaking to a Dutch historian who discussed the idea of making a doc about Netherlands defending its borders for over 1,000 years. McQuillan and his team thought making a three-part series on the topic may be a bit too narrow-focused, so they offered to explore the topic from a European perspective.
Meanwhile, Jackman touched on some of his projects including Werner and Rudolph Herzog’s Into the Infernoand Last Exit: Space. For the latter, the project focused on the concept of finding mankind’s next home among the billion celestial bodies in the universe, which quite obviously also carried an ecological message bound to today’s worrying environmental crisis. “[These themes] resonated with us, [encompassing] space exploration, travel, education and science, and bringing [together] a whole family audience.” These strong key themes helped the company to engage in productive talks with Discovery+ and third-party financiers.
Van Dijk later focused on the importance and potential of YouTube channel to distribute factual content. She spoke about the importance of establishing regular schedules and carefully choose titles and thumbnails. Quintus developed a loyal web audience across South East Asia, in particular in India, Malaysia and the Philippines. These large communities are also pushing the platform’s algorithm to expand its horizons, opening up new audience segments and territories, and enabling audiences to find more videos more often. “Viewing time brings the actual revenue, though,” she said, pointing out how essential it is to keep these new viewers hooked. She also touched on the growing collaborations with freelance filmmakers, who can provide new content and untold stories from all over the world – sometimes these are European professionals based overseas, but on some other occasions they directly deal with local companies, such as in the case of Kenya’s Africa Live. Moreover, Quintus’ work is heavily result-orientated. On average, the firm aims to recoup costs over the first nine months, to make sure all parties involved make a fair profit.
Jackman praised Van Dijk’s “smart way of working” and stressed on the importance of gaining full, intelligible data from platforms and social media to better study the audience segments that producers and filmmakers aim to intercept. Van Dijk added how for a YouTube channel the first six months are key, although ups and downs are common. The outfit reviews audience insights about every 20 days.
McQuillan covered again the topic of working with brands. He mentioned his work on programmes focusing on superyachts, adding how these players don’t ask them to tell the “fancy lifestyle aspect of these boats” but, rather, to showcase “the amazing engineering and science behind them,” hoping to show the lack of manpower in the sector and hence attract new workers.
Towards the end of the conversation, the speakers tackled again the elephant in the room. “I think it’s fair to say that roughly 50% of all investments in factual content in Europe is coughed up by pubcasters, and this [tendency] is Europe-specific. […] We must be careful and look at what’s happening with pubcasters in Europe, they’re under a lot of political and financial pressures for many reasons we’re aware of. It’s unlikely they’ll increase funding over the next couple of years, so we better look for new models to produce our content,” Hoerl warned.
Broom touched on the gaming industry as a new partner which can “speed up development,” billing it as a good new avenue for IPs. Jackman agreed, adding how “mutually beneficial” it can be for producers to interact with the whole media ecosystem. McQuillan mentioned history podcasts, which are catering more and more enthusiasts.
For Van Dijk, exclusivity remains important, but not indispensable. She talked through how YouTube is helping to “push forward” content that does well on other channels, so the key may be to find “a sweet spot” to find new audiences without devaluing content.
Finally, the panelists agreed on Hoerl’s take about how producers and studios need to develop new skills – ideally, every producer should be a distribution strategist or at least able to find the right experts. In other words: storytelling isn’t enough anymore.
