THE KATERING SHOW
WHO
Tamasin Simpkin
The Katering Show producer
Producer Tamasin Simpkin and writers/stars Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney (who both also co-directed season one of The Katering Show) started out by crowd-funding the web series Bleak through Pozible. It gave them a budget of $10,000 to create the four-part series, which had episodes ranging from three to six minutes. They used Bleak as proof of their skills as creators and applied for multiplatform funding at Screen Australia with a new web series The Katering Show. They were successful and secured a budget of $150,000.
“That seems so crazy now,” says Simpkin, referring to how that money had to be stretched to cover the first season.
Season one premiered on YouTube on February 10, 2015 and episodes such as this Thermomix one became a viral hit (it currently has 2.3 million views). Off the back of this success they were approached by companies including US streaming service Fullscreen and national broadcaster ABC.
“That was the beauty of it: we had people approaching us that wanted to licence the show rather than us having to go chase people down,” Simpkin says. ABC commissioned a second series of The Katering Show with slightly longer episodes of between eight and 12 minutes, and it again got Screen Australia funding.
But working with the ABC presented some unique differences, says Simpkin: “It was quite interesting to go from having something on YouTube where it’s yours globally all at once, to season two, where we had an ABC iview exclusive period and it went to Fullscreen in the US. So it was quite difficult to manage our social media marketing around the show to our fans worldwide when a lot of them couldn’t see it yet.”
Season 2 became the most watched ABC iview original series ever, and ABC has since commissioned a full-length series called Get Krack!n from the team.
Simpkin says there are a few key things to keep in mind for emerging content creators.
“One: figure out what you consider success is, so that you know what your aim is."
So is it a proof of concept? Are you trying to build and prove there’s an audience for your videos, so you can jump into TV? Or do you want this to be your full-time career on YouTube? Simpkin suggests you figure out what you want, and adjust expectations for views accordingly. Not everything is going to be a viral hit.
“For season one of Katering the intent was we wanted to make more of that show. We wanted it to do well enough on YouTube and prove that it had an audience so we could continue the conversation, whether we went down the network route or decided to go for sponsorship. Also to prove the quality of the writing and the production values of what we were making. But then obviously it went even better than we could have expected and it changed the parameters of what our success was slightly.”
Her second piece of advice concerns marketing and distribution. “Because it is a whole other production on top of the actual show. It’s worth finding someone who’s done it and just having a chat.”
“And three, know that in the online space there’s no completely wrong or right way to do things. For example, we released all of season one at once. The logic behind that was we only had a limited amount of ad spend so if we were pushing people to our YouTube channel we wanted all the videos to be there so people could watch them back to back. But at the same time, others would argue if you do it weekly then you’re encouraging subscribers rather than people just coming and bingeing, and that’s how you build a fanbase.
“For pretty much everything online there’s an argument for doing things a certain way, which makes it hard. But it also means you can choose and it’s all a learning experience.”
THE STRATEGY
If you’re making content for YouTube, Simpkin can’t emphasise enough the importance of marketing when it comes to building your audience and brand.
YouTube has a Creator Academy that gives content creators tips to make videos stand out, whether it’s by adding a subscribe button or having trailers on landing page.
For The Katering Show season one, the team created a digital marketing strategy that included buying advertising around the launch on 10 February, 2015. They put a banner ad on Reddit, Facebook ads and paid to have their videos prioritised on YouTube during that time.
“We even had it come up as a pre-roll ad with season one at one point,” she says. “There was this one person who said, ‘I came here to watch a Dr Phil video and this came on … best ad I’ve ever seen’.
The reason behind the ad spend around the launch?
“You want to push your videos as hard as you can in that first week because of the algorithms on YouTube. You want it to get trending because then it comes up as a suggested video and features on trending websites. One thing about the internet is, if it turns up on one trending website, the same article is mirrored across hundreds of websites,” she says.
“We made it onto the front page of the Reddit video page. And we got on the front page of YouTube for the top videos in Australia.”
Simpkin says in film and television, publicity is ramped up in the lead-up to the film’s release or the show airing. In their experience, web series work in reverse (Read how writer/director/producer Julie Kalceff from Starting From Now built their audience here).
“We realised doing season one that there was no point in pushing it before it came out because no one really knew who the Kates were. So if they read an article the week before it came out, the chances of them remembering when it would launch and then searching for it were really slim.
“With a web series, as least when it’s new, the publicity push begins on launch day and from that point on. That’s when you want to be on the radio station or in articles online so people hearing about it can look it up (straight away).”
But the marketing shouldn’t stop there.
The tail for web series long. Someone today could only just be discovering season one of The Katering Show.
“When we went to season one we had no established audience but with season two we already had a following on social media and they’re (basically) your direct marketing people: if they like the show, they’ll go on Facebook and tell everyone about it.”
She says online you have an “amazing opportunity” to interact with these fans.
“There’s the comments section on YouTube videos and we also have Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and an e-newsletter, which are all little productions in themselves in terms of coming up with all the content and sharing things on a regular basis.”
Because people who have been fans from the start need a reason to keep subscribing or they could be lost.
“When I’m talking to people who are making web series for the first time, I understand that side can feel like a whole second show in itself. You have to figure out a way to generate enough content to sustain it without making too much work for yourself, so it’s this balancing act.”
And by making additional content for those people who champion the work, it ensures they are still present for the next project.
SPONSORSHIP AND AD REVENUE
“There was a time when we were looking at the sponsorship side but we didn’t go that way. We felt you can’t really be making fun of products if at the same time you’re worried about trying to sell them in a way a company would be happy with,” says Simpkin.
“We did do a little bit of sponsorship but in the end me and the Kates deferred most of our wages to cover the cost (of season one) … Everyone else got paid, but they were on an award.”
She said a small amount of money came through YouTube ads.
“There’s an illusion that YouTubers make all this money just from having videos on YouTube but most are doing it from product placement … You’ll notice they often do reviews in their videos, or outside of their show they do product spots and that’s their income.
“So (for us) it was YouTube ads and then we have some merch (merchandising), which we make more money off than the ads. That doesn’t necessarily suggest you can actually make much off merchandise. It’s just that ads are such a small trickle.”
To make this a sustainable career, they reached an impasse at the end of season one: “It was either we go for the sponsorship side or we go with someone like the ABC to commission it, so we can actually get paid, pay our crew and actually step it up. So that’s the way we went.”