Hook, Hold, Repeat: Capturing Rangatahi Attention Online (Live Recording)

A new generation of producers share how they craft bold, authentic stories for the fast-moving  world of social media – connecting rangatahi with local content that resonates. Panel: Jessica Todd (Cable Maiden Prod.), Perrin Hastings (Director), Hope Papali’I (Producer). Moderator: Sheldene Seth (Able). 

> 'First Place' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzXb-XlI3f8

> 'The Sender' https://www.instagram.com/thesendernz/?hl=en

> 'The Gender Agenda' https://www.youtube.com/@The_Gender_Agenda

> 'Sight Unseen' https://able.co.nz/our-productions/sight-unseen/

'Hook, Hold, Repeat: Capturing Rangatahi Attention Online' was recorded live at the 30th Spada Conference, 20 & 21 November 2025.

www.spada.co.nz 

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Transcript

'Hook, Hold, Repeat: 0:01

Capturing Rangatahi Attention Online' features Jessica Todd, Perrin Hastings, Hope Papali’I and Moderator Sheldene Seth. It was recorded live at the 2025 Spada Conference. Hello everybody, and welcome to the‘Hook, Hold, Repeat: Capturing Rangatahi Attention Online’ session today. My name is Sheldene I'm facilitating this conversation with these fabulous emerging producers. So this is us. I'll get everybody to introduce themselves first, and then we'll get into the the chat. So, starting with you, Jess. Kia ora I'm Jessica Todd, and I am the producer and one of the co-creators of The Sender. And The Sender was a 18 part scripted series, vertical, which we released on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. And, this is our 30-second trailer for you all to watch. This group text, right? Confess your sins To one another, or else I'll share them with the world. It just says The Sender. Whoever sent these knew we were gonna be together tonight. Who’d do this? We’re over! This is only fun for you if I’m your dirty little secret. One hour til I ruin your life. This is not good. Is it you? There’s one sure way to find out. Let's get lit!(cheering) Werk! Kia ora koutou My name is Perrin I go by she / they pronouns. And I am the writer, director, host and co-creator of the Gender Agenda. It's a, (thank you) it's a five part, docu series that went up on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram and, yeah here’s our trailer. My name is Perrin Hastings. I'm an animator, game master, non-binary creature of the night Oh you’re here for the tea honey!(cheering)

MUSIC: 2:15

Come with us everybody Female hyenas they actually have a pseudo-penis. Oh! Super interesting - Go on! Traditionally, I can slip right in with a white household. Yeah. I love your work. I don't. We need diversity. Just literally for society to function. Did you want to try on the pump vest? How do you get into wrestling? By the way? That's the kind of woman I wanted to be a hot girl. In this series I'll be diving deep into the everyday struggles surrounding gender and biological sex to discover how this all works. Honey you don’t need people to validate who you are. You already know who you are. This is the Gender Agenda.(MUSIC) Him, her, us them everything is what I am Talofa lava My name is Hope Papali’i and I'm one of the co-producers on First Place. And that was with Tikilounge And I co-produced it with Eileen Lee, Lisa Taouma as EP and Nicola Smith. Today's the first day of Polyfest practice Samoan group after school today. Tell me why the only person who wants to join Poly group What's a Polyfest? What stage are we at? Samoa! Polyfest is like the Olympics of Pacific dance. This year is the 50th anniversary, which means Saint Gabriel's has to make it count. Lua pati ma le Saint Gees Lua pati ma le When? When? You are all on detention. you are going to be spending it in here every day after school. Amene. Let’s not have a repeat of last year. We had a little incident. It wasn’t my fault. Things happen sometimes that day was just a series of unfortunate things that happen. 2025 is going to turn out really, really good.(MUSIC PLAYS) Get lost! Can you focus? And why does she siva like splashing her hands? Can you just tell us what we need to fix? For you, it's your face. We've actually got five weeks to show everyone what we've got. So we need to focus Talofa Paulo. Oi. Focus! We have a new student, Leone. She's from Saint Teresa. They come First Place every year. Safe space for all of Tangaloa’s creatures. It's Paulo, right? I'm the leader. This is my group. How about I move you out of this group Leone? Leaders who are fiapoko Always want To show off at the front. We're going to keep going until this is perfect. Good leaders, They lead from behind. You better be ready for this it’s not good you’ve not come to see your mum at the cemetery yet. It feels like kind of my destiny to be leader, and to be taupou Polyfest means everything to me. MUSIC Applause And ABLE produced its original series Sight Unseen that was released earlier this year. It is a five part, 5 to 10 minute factual series that launched on TikTok and Instagram and YouTube and our website and RNZ as secondary platforms. The series features open audio description, which is one of the services that we provide for media accessibility. I wanted nothing to do with the cane. I didn't want to change my personality to the cane. My vision was getting worse and hung up the skis until I found out about adaptive skiing. Being low vision. And then trans, I've got to think, is it safe to be here? Probably not. Got ya eye boogers. It's like you are caring Having the spiritual side, music and the disability, It's being able to nourish all of those. Sight Unseen - watch now. Amazing productions from these producers over here. I think what's worth opening up this session with first is, understanding our youth audiences and grounding us and what the research has told us about Rangatahi media behavior, because understanding who we're trying to reach fundamentally shapes how we make and distribute content. The 2024 ‘Where Are the Audiences?’ study alongside the 2022 Youth Audience research from New Zealand on Air makes one thing really clear that 15 to 24 year olds, and not just a younger version of the mainstream audience, they are a completely different media demographic. The research says that every single day, about 89% of youth are on social media and consuming global online video on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram Reels and Snapchat. And by comparison, only about 30% of them watch TV every day and they spend about 17 minutes on New Zealand on demand platforms. Their attention doesn't live in our traditional environments. It lives in global, algorithm driven feeds, and their discovery pathways are quite different. The youth study tells us that the number one way of finding out about content is through word of mouth through social media platforms, and very closely by algorithm recommendations. But what was interesting about that research that that shows that they actually really do value New Zealand content. They love Kiwi humor and authenticity and seeing Aotearoa reflected. But their behavior means they rarely encounter it. So most New Zealand stories live on platforms that they're not spending meaningful time on. So with this session, if we want to reach Rangatahi, it's about making great content where they're where they are. And so this is exactly what these producers have done. Content needs to be social first, platform native and algorithm friendly. And what I like to think of our generation is that we're a bit of a bridging generation. You know, we're familiar with waiting a week for an episode to drop on TV, but we also grew up with the emergence of Instagram and TikTok and seeing how that content performs and what actually rings true for people. And so I think one really interesting part of creating this content is identifying who we're making it for. And I think we each aimed to reach different groups of people, because 15 to 24 is a wide range of people, a big age bracket and the there's subsections and micro communities within that. And I think we each did that right. Hope, do you want to talk to who you are trying to reach with your with your content? Yeah. So we mine's a Polynesian audience. I don't know if anyone's just seen the Pacific Champs with the NRL How how big the Tonga versus Samoa game was. Polynesians love supporting themselves on screen. We love to see our representation. So I think with understanding our audiences for First Place, it really came down to the writers table and making sure that the representation of the writers, they know who they're writing about. So it was it was making sure that our writers had gone well because of the stories on Polyfest which for a Polynesian kid, it's such a big thing in their lives. So we had three writers - Mario Faumui who's grown up in the Polyfest system, He's also covered it on Fresh TV. Bianca Seinafo who grew up doing Polyfest as well. And then we had the Leki Jackson-Burke who who also was a writer on Inky Pinky Ponky and then he did a theater piece about Polyfest. So it was all these writers know these kids and they know this world. So that was really important. Yeah, that sounds super important. And Perrin, I would say that your content you made from a place of, you know, wishing or wanting that that type of content was available to you when you were that age brackets. Can you tell me a bit more about, the understanding of that audience? Yeah. For sure. Yeah. I mean, being a part of the trans community and just the queer and rainbow community in general, I think there was an innate need for, for me and other members of that community to see ourselves in content that wasn't just horrifying news reports. And. You know, when we're talking about trans and queer and takatāpui youth, there was so much that I wish I saw and understood when I was 15, even when I was 18 or 20, and I found it important to just go out and really figure out where those audiences were online, what the little pockets of community were, and what kind of influencers as well that they were following. And I found that so much of it was just people not just living proudly, but also really honestly and authentically sharing their own personal stories online. And so we wanted to capture that. We wanted to get out there and show some joy, showed the reality of everything that's happening right now, and also just deal with a lot of those weird talking points that attack us from all sides with a little bit of humor and go, hey, we're actually we're actually human. And, yeah, why not do it on the places that not only our audiences, but those talking points are platformed so much. So yeah, sure. And Jess, for your production, where did you sit in your production between that 15 to 24? Because that is quite a broad range. And I know you would have had done some thinking and personas. What kind of group you were trying to, to meet with that piece of content. Yes, we did a lot of thinking about that. So because we were making a pretty broad, campy teen drama, we kind of knew already that we would have. Well, yes, it would have, you know, a default female skewing audience. And also as two female creatives, Liv McClymont and myself, we were like, we'll probably end up organically having a more female skewed audience, which we did. But then we made quite a specific decision to, to make content that we thought would appeal to that 18 to 25 demographic like that half of that audience, because younger audiences watch content for older audiences, but older audiences don't normally watch down or younger, so we were like, oh, if we make something that appeals to the older audience, that might feel a bit scandalous or a bit naughty, or maybe a bit old for that other audience, they'll watch it, but not the other way around. Yeah, that's really, really interesting. And I know for us, in our early days of like the concept of our show, we really put thought into like, who exactly do we want to reach? Like what? What do they normally watch on the platforms? What what kind of activities would they do outside of social media? We really, really thought hard about that kind of stuff. And that kind of also influences the next part, which is the creative strategy. Like why? Why did you make your content the way that it is? And that could look from anything to how many episodes you made, how long the episodes are. What was your story exposition across these episodes? And I know that Jess you would have faced some interesting, decisions made with the different platforms and episode count and numbers and things like that. So tell us more. Yes, I think if I could go back and do it again, I wouldn't release the show on three platforms. That was a bit much. Because there's there's no uniformity between them. And so just like the technical outputs for each platform were so different and it was really overwhelming to be putting out, you know, 18 videos, with different, you know, they all have different requirements and all have different like legal requirements and music licensing requirements. It was really, full on. It was a massive learning curve. But we also made some really strategic decisions early on, that I think served us really well in terms of because we were scripted show. We were like, how do we, you know, how do we get people to keep scrolling through the show? How do we get them to, you know, watch one video and want to keep watching more? And so we made some decisions that, like each episode has to start with something catchy, and it has to end with a cliffhanger. And so which is crazy for two minute, 2.5 minute episodes, you know, like it's moving so quickly. And what we ended up doing was actually just writing our show in a full script, like a full 44 minute script, and then kind of going through and breaking it up into those episode numbers and then going back and kind of doing hooky things like that afterwards. That's really cool. And you did the full commit, right? With your camera to. We flipped it fully. Yes. On its on, its on, its side. Yeah. We did commit to that. We were going to shoot landscape and then we're going to shoot landscape to upload that to YouTube. And then we were going to do a vertical crop for Instagram and TikTok. And then our lovely EP, Jo Raj, kind of convinced us she was like, If Instagram and TikTok are your primary platforms that you're focusing on, that you think you're going to get the most of the audience on, like, wouldn't you want to optimize for that? And also YouTube and also what happened? And this is sort of I mean, we'll probably touch on this again, is like the scariness of these digital platforms is that they can change their rules between the time you get the funding and the time you have to release the show. And so what kind of happened? There was a bad ones and some good ones for us, but a kind of good One was when that potential US TikTok ban was coming in, What that did was prompt YouTube to change its shorts requirement. So shorts on YouTube is the vertical, platform. And originally when we got the funding, you could only have videos up to one minute long on shorts. But that TikTok ban, meant that they changed it to three minutes. So we were like, yes. Do you, did you find it hard shooting in that ratio? Like - There’s definitely some stuff you have to get your head around at the start. Like all of a sudden when you're location scouting, floors and ceilings become really important in a way that they haven't before. And, you know, Isaac, our DOP and Liv, our director, they spent a lot of time blocking those scenes. So like, you'll see our cast in the group shots, like standing in thick pyramids instead of, like, you know, in a group, like just ways to do that vertically. And then we had our big monitor on set, which was flipped on its side as well. It only takes a day and then you're into it. You know, you’re used to it. And what kind of challenges did you face? Or what what creative strategies did you adopt for your series with that being mainly YouTube focused? Right. YouTube first. Yeah. So we were YouTube first, and then we also posted stuff on Instagram and TikTok. So we ran into the same issues of posting on three different platforms. You've got three different requirements. And for us, because we were shooting horizontally first, we then had to go through and figure out, well, how do we make this vertical? And a lot of it came down to almost shooting what we shot in 4K, so that we could always have extra room if we wanted to crop further, but we almost had to, frame things in, square format so that we could have most of the action towards the middle of the frame. And then it was easier to crop either way. But, especially, in that first season we're running, season two now, that was something we didn't learn until a decent way through, but we went, oh, this has to be vertical. too, oh no! What do we do? But, outside of that, when it comes to the stories, I think because our show was factual, it was easy for us to approach it, sort of like you would a YouTube essay where it's like, okay, we've got ten minutes to really unpack this one issue and see where it takes us. And you know, we set up the typical three kind of story blocks. And every single segment we had, we were like, okay, how do we evolve the issue from here into the next? Then we set up having three main guests, as well as that being built around, my own personal story to kind of frame it all in. So yeah. It was interesting. I mean, I definitely had flashbacks to when I was a teenager making YouTube videos and just like trying to figure things out and, yeah, I think sometimes when you're making this premium content, there is a, temptation to think, you know, oh, I've got to learn from film, I've got to learn from these established TV series. But there are so many creators out there right now on YouTube, on TikTok, on Instagram, doing these amazing pieces of content that are just made for socials. And there is so much you can learn from their strategies, even as independent individuals, because they're getting millions of views every day. You know, there's there's learning that they've done already. Yeah, for sure. And, First Place, Hope, took a completely different strategy to the likes of our productions in the sense that you guys produced a feature. What was the decision making around making a feature? Well, we were quite lucky with the feature because we know it's a formula that works. I previously did Inky Pinky Ponky with Tikilounge which today is sitting at 2.6 million views. But we by chance made Inky Pinky - Not by chance. While it sat as five, ten-page scripts But we got we shot it. We shot it like that. We shot at an episodic and then we came to cutting it and we sort of thought, okay, this, this actually sits sits as a feature. And so we, we put it out as a feature. And, and that rang true to kids as well. They loved it as a feature. And I think for, I don't know, poly kids and an old all teens, they do love films. I mean, the film industry isn't dying. Just how they're accessing it is dying. People can't afford to go to the movies, but they want to watch movies. So and that's what happened with Inky, kids was just watching it again and again and again, and then so we got to First Place and we were like, okay, let's take the formula that works, but let's have it be its own piece, and and what else do we want to talk about? for teen dramas? So we got to Polyfest because it's builds up to something. And yeah, I've got some I took some screenshots. This morning of some YouTube comments on Facebook, and I read one like a okay, so this comment is from Sasa and also today, this place has got 600 K views. And so we released in I think March. So we're sitting at 600 K views.

Sasa goes: 22:19

This for real Feels like a Samoan Disney Channel movie. And I mean it in the best way possible. There's humor, drama, tiny bit of romance, but most of all, there was heart. This movie had great lessons in resilience, leadership and pressure We feel trying to carry the these family legacies. It was an awesome. It was awesome. Thank you so much. Coconet TV and that's got 200 likes. I'll just read one more. Okay, so this one is @Stayseki The fact that we got to watch this masterpiece for free is so so, so great. This film was so good that it's also got me feeling mixed emotions as well as everyone else. I loved how the movie legit sums up what happens during Polyfest and the struggles, because they're all true. I'm so happy that I got to watch this and definitely I already told everyone about it. This movie helped me feel more connected to my Samoan side, period. And so I thank you for this beautiful movie ripping our Polynesian roots. And so that's got 400 likes. So amazing. Yeah. That's so, so good. And it's definitely about that accessibility to reaching content like this. Right. So because it's YouTube, anybody can jump on and watch it, which is, which is awesome. And if they like it. That's right. If they like it. If it speaks to them. 100% and it's clear that it resonated, with your audience, you know, for us, one of our creative strategies for our series was ensuring that it was accessible with, the open audio description and also showing what gold standard looking, captions look like. And so that's something that was important to us. And we feel like that was part of our, strategy to reach the people we wanted with our series. I know another part of in creative strategy is coming to terms with a lot of the community guidelines with these platforms. They each have different rules and regulations and and ways that you can, you know, share your stories or, or show. I know that it was a thing for you with The Sender and likely for you to Perrin in terms of what you can show and what you can say online. And that was a big challenge. Do you want to talk a bit to that? Jess. Yeah. I told ya I could go on and on and on about this one. Yeah. We knew early on, like, so our original concept was we, we thought we were going to make like New Zealand Euphoria and it was going to be like edgy, cool and like it's going to be like drugs and sex and stuff was going to happen. And then we were like, oh, we'll get banned off the platforms if we do that. And you know, has a legal requirement within NZ On Air funding we can't really do that. And so we kind of had to do a big switch on and into a lot of research before we got into scripting as to what, what we'd even be allowed to put on those platforms. Because there's and there is some very clear guidelines, and then there's some areas that they keep purposely very vague. And also because all these platforms are international, they also couldn't guarantee that it would necessarily, you know, fly in every single country, like Saudi Arabia's views on, on sex education is very different to New Zealand or Australia or even the US's views. And I use sex education as an example because in one of our episodes, like opens on a biology book and they're looking at diagrams of the vagina and penis and talking about it. And we were like, is that is that going to be okay? Like, are we going to be able to get that in? And we were like, no, no, that falls firmly under sex education, which is allowed. But we had to be conscious of like amount of swearing or. Yeah, or how much romance we could have. There was some guidelines on Instagram that said you could have everything up to passionate kissing and then you then then it would then you get, you know, blacklisted or taken down or or all those terms. And so we were like, okay, cool. So we did like, we, intimated masturbation, you know, but and we got away with that. But like, really interestingly, on TikTok, one of our episodes that I would say has like the least amount of sort of that sort of content, they wouldn't let us put any financial spend behind it, like any marketing spend behind it, because they said it had like they had this whole sort of vague thing of like, oh, it's got potentially like pornographic images and it's just some like shirtless dude. Oh, that's so random. Yeah. Like these platforms, they can be so hard to work with. What about you Perrin? What was your experience in that with, you know, sharing really important information and getting it right and making sure it stays online? Yeah. We're in a sort of interesting place. I mean, we ran into a lot of the same issues around, you know, swearing. I think YouTube has some arbitrary rules around, you know, swearing in the first minute or so, and then the next month they changed that to no swearing at all. And then if you put a censor beat, sometimes they pick that up and then go, no, let's suppress. So yeah, there's, there's a bit of playing with that. But I think queer content in particular has a strange relationship with social media, because there are a lot of companies, I'll say meta in particular, where they don't openly say that they suppress queer content. But you look at the numbers and they absolutely do. So sometimes we see and I even saw just the other day I put up a, community animated story that starts off with, you know, my friend texted me and said, do you want to meet up with my lesbian friend and the word lesbian got that severely suppressed on, YouTube shorts. Even so, we went from getting, you know, 1.2 K, overnight on most of those animated community stories to getting 29 views just because of the word lesbian. That's insane. Yeah. So there can be a bit of, back and forth with that. And I think it also speaks to, the kind of 24 hour nature of posting on socials where you do have to have people monitoring monitoring the release and being able to creatively adjust if something is being severely suppressed or if you know something even just looks a little bit odd. Sometimes the warnings won't come up. You need to be able to react totally if you know only 29 people have had this content delivered. Because just to reiterate how confusing and difficult it is to make shows for social media our queer episodes are the most viewed. It's funny how it all works. Hey, and I know other challenges that would have you would have faced in this in the development of making of the series would be, I know music would have been a big part too, in terms of wanting to get get it right and ensuring that your music doesn't, you know, get pulled down off, of those platforms because of the licensing. Do any of you want to speak to that? Yeah. So I must have spent like two weeks of my life full time, like researching, like what are appropriate music licensing like for Instagram, YouTube and TikTok? And I swear I spoke to every expert in the field. I was like, talking to (unclear) and I was like, talking to Rachel Fawcett who did n00b In the past, you know, I was we were working with Big Pop music publishing and like and everyone we were talking to ChatGPT being like, what do you got? We were talking to lawyers and no one could give us a conclusive answer on what the like legal, including the platforms themselves on what like the legal worldwide requirements would be for the type of music licensing we would need. And that's because we had made a creative decision that we wanted to use, like actual New Zealand pop tracks like not, music, not like, you know, just the words escaped me, you know - Thank you, that one. Yeah. And and so therefore, how would we license that? And so we kind of managed to figure out that basically as long as we bought like a worldwide sync license and had a licensed appropriately for social media, that would be okay. Turns out it wasn't. And we found out two weeks before release that TikTok won't let you have more than one minute of accumulative music per video, even if your videos like 40 minutes long, which it can be, you can't have more than one minute of accumulative music. That's not from like the TikTok library. And we were like, because our episodes were like two and a half, three minute, and a lot of them had more than one minute of music. And we, you know, we only found that out through an incidental conversation with our marketing person from New Zealand On Air who had been talking to her colleagues at New Zealand On Air, who had just come back from Australia, who had just had a meeting at TikTok Australia, and the music guy, and they put us in touch with him and he's like, yeah, yeah, sorry. And we were like, oh, so we had to completely recut our episodes for TikTok about two weeks out. Stressful! Yeah and make decisions about like, okay, well, there's the one minute mark. All right. Cool. And yeah, that was a nightmare. And so stressful. I can imagine. And that's the thing with these platforms is so much can change in the time from when you start to finish that you. They have to be malleable. They have to be. You've got to be able to adjust with the changes so that they can sing online, which is which is stressful. But, but we did it, guys. We did it. Now, I'd like to really touch on, like, a big part of these productions is that there was a lot of mentorship and professional growth that happened, with these productions. And I know each of us would have had an EP assigned, or that worked with us for developing and seeing it right to the end. And I just want to touch on, you know, what value that had for you, maybe Hope you'd like to start? So my EP's were Lisa Taouma and Nicola Smith. I'll start with Lisa Taouma, because it's quite hard to just talk about Lis for this kaupapa because she's been such a champion throughout my career. And for a lot of kids that have come under that Tikilounge / Coconet umbrella, she's given us a lot of mahi and she's she's taught us all we know. Basically, I wouldn't be sitting here if it weren't for Lis She gave me my first producing opportunity. Same with Nicola Smith. I basically don't work if it isn't for those two giving me mahi! But yeah, with Lis It's a generational thing. My auntie Mona, Mona Papali’i who was the first, Polynesian on screen. Sorry. She gave Lisa her first tour around TVNZ, so it was only fitting that Lis you know, gave me my first opportunity, and I just, bring up my auntie because I want to read a quote that I always go back on, that my auntie said back in her time. Sorry to bring up my phone all the time. So she said,“We fear TV more than the pakeha’s do because there are so few of us in television. Television doesn't belong to us. We could be in South Africa for all we know.” And that's that's all. That's always stuck with me because, you know, this this was the 80s and I think, Lisa, Lisa's come come through in her generation. And she's completely changed the landscape of, of television for, for Polynesians. And she was ahead of the curve with Coconet and TikiLounge especially putting she was she's been putting stuff through YouTube since the early 2000s. Yeah. And so she's built her audience and, it's a strong audience. So, yeah. So I don't know if I answered that. And Nicola Smith is the same. She oh, they just believe in me and they trust that I can do the work. And I feel so safe in their environments to to really thrive. Yeah. That's great. So you felt like you can try things. I can try things. And I can also lean on them. Yeah. With any prod questions, spiritually, I can lean on them. Mentally I can lean on them. But yeah, they're And they're the same that there's all the other people on First Place can say the same about those two. They're always supporting us and making sure we feel safe and supportive and also making space for us. Yeah, yeah, that's really important. What about you guys? What was what was your experience with that EP producer relationship on your productions? Our EP was Jo Raj and similar to Hope, Jo has been kind of accidentally my mentor for the last 5 or 6 years or so. We met at a workshop and just hit it off and and she has again I don’t feel like I'd work if not for Jo Raj. And I just I met her at a time where I was really burnt out and disillusioned with this industry. I'd had quite a few bad working experiences, and I didn't really feel like I had someone who I could look at who was older and more experienced than me and go, I want your life. Not just like your career, but like your life. And, well, like, you know, in this room what you and. And I met Jo and she just, like, lead with kindness and compassion. And I was like, oh, you can work in this industry and do those things. How fantastic. And so this was the first time, you know, I'd had her on one of my projects and, God, it's just such a relief to have that person And then you're like, ahhhhh And Jo knows everyone in the industry. She's like, don't worry, I'll connect you to blah blah. And then you go, we’ll solve this problem it's fine. And you're like, oh, great. Well, she's like, don't worry. 20 years ago this happened to me and dah dah dah dah daaaa And I'm like, cool. Thank you Jo. It's yeah. That mentorship is is so incredible. And I'm so glad that that was like factored into this fund that we all got this funding under. Yeah. Yeah. So, our EP was Amanda Beckett, as well as Kim Harrop. They're both with Rude Girl Productions and, to say they mentored us throughout this process, I think is an understatement. Without them, I mean, I, I've been an animator for six years. I've been very used to being behind the computer for any kind of production that we do. And being able to being sort of given the keys by them to step out from behind the computer, get on to, you know, production set, get into the field and actually make these stories exist, Was incredible. And that goes into all the kind of finicky behind the scenes things around, you know, booking travel, booking locations, making sure that legally we're allowed to do things, stuff that I wouldn't have thought of, otherwise because I'm just like, yeah, I've got the story I want to make cool. I'll do it then. And also, I was lucky enough to be mentored by Ramon Te Wake Who’s(woo) a legend. And she was with me She’s only 21, though. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, she was a part of the the youth audience we’re actually going for Yeah. No. And Kim Harrop actually introduced me to Ramon And from the moment we met, you know, she gave me a hug and I just felt so welcomed and, to not just, you know, production industry, but also just my, my queer trans community, which I was connecting with for the first time. And, yeah, no, it can't be understated. The impact of having people who have been in this industry for a while or, you know, a few years ago, for Ramon she’s only 21 And, you know, having them reach down and be like, hey, you want to make this cool thing? I want to make it with you. Let's do that together. It's really awesome. For, our EP was Dan Buckingham, and what I really loved about having that mentorship and that you know, him as EP, is he really let us do stuff like and just try stuff and was there when we needed him, like, oh, should we do this? Oh we want to shoot on the mountain like we want to do all this kind of stuff and always just was there as a, you know, a safety net for our production. But I really feel like it was driven by our production team. And I just want to shout out Jazz dos Santos, who was producer as well. It was definitely a big step up. You know, it would have been head of department roles for us for the first time for some. And, and that was wicked. And I'm just so glad that to have had that opportunity. So once we've made the stuff, it has to get out into the world, and we would have taken different approaches into how this, you know, met the audiences that we endeavored to reach. Do you guys want to talk a bit about, like, what your rollout was like, and do you want to start, Perrin, on how that all went for you? Yeah, for sure. So with social media, as opposed to putting something up on TV or in cinemas, we had the interesting, conundrum of not having a built in audience. So our brand was launching independently, we’d created our own social media channels on all of our platforms, and we had to build that from scratch. So before we even thought about releasing our content, we had to get the algorithm on our side. We had to go out and follow similar creators. We had to like a bunch of content. We had to, yes, stop. Like grooming the algorithm, to place us correctly before we even do anything. And then it was also our long organic marketing, campaign. So we, as we were shooting, did little questionnaires with each of our guests. We did, what advice would you give your 15 year old self? if you could have any food right now, what would you have? Just these little, like, bite of questions that could potentially go viral if everything went super great. But being able to use those, post those, and then also collaborate with each of our guests who had their own audiences to bring them in and be like, hey, here's another safe place. Like, hey, come on in, we've got something cooking for you. And then once we were actually releasing, those collaborations did amazingly for us. It brought in tens of thousands of people, from a platform that had literally nothing before. And then on top of that, we did a lot of paid marketing as well. So that cannot be understated. Having a boosting campaign on YouTube, on TikTok, on meta is very, very much needed if you don't have an audience already, because there are going to be a lot of people out there who will be super passionate about your project, but just haven't had it show up on their feed. So yeah, that's a big part of it. And also just making sure when you're boosting content that the ads don't come across to advertisey, and considering whether you want to do skippable ads or non skippable, because when somebody is trying to watch content that they're super connected with and suddenly they have your face show up on screen and they're stuck with it for 30 seconds, they may not leave with the best impression of you, so.... Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it was mostly content that we already had as a part of the show as well, like Little Cut down snippets, but I mean, I we did a trailer, I wrote ad copy and stuff for that, with Kim guiding me. And. Yeah. No, it's it's just about getting in people's faces, hooking them in and also not making them hate you in the process. You would have done something similar to just starting from scratch. I feel like I just learned a lot from Perrin, actually. Was that, that was a great idea. Yeah, exactly. Yes. I feel like I've blacked out a lot of this part of it. It was. It was hard. We. What did we do? We probably should have done some, like, liking and following of similar accounts, but because we also had to build our accounts from scratch. But we went for almost a pure, entirely organic in terms of we didn't, create any ad content for it. Like online ad content. But we did do a lot of paid spend for boosting the videos. And it was evident which ones we'd put paid spend on versus the ones we didn't. So, yeah, I would say, that's very important for sure. How about you Hope? I think you can do all the distribution, all the marketing plans you want, but ultimately with Polynesian audiences, they will promote your content themselves. And I mean that by fanning it on TikTok. So, with First Place, the writers were really strategic going off Inky They wanted to be smart. So since we were doing Polyfest and if you know the world of Polyfest in 2014, there was an iconic, Polyfest girl called Lina Lee and it was covered on Fresh TV And it was a whole thing how amazing Lina Lee was, because she was Korean and she was so amazing at her Samoan. So we, we, we wrote a character into First Place called Shy, and she has the same sort of storyline, and she goes off and she's a fuataimi and she's amazing. And so the TikTok fans recognized that and they recognized Lina Lee and they reposted it and they and they cut an edit of Shy in First Place and then intercut it with Lina Lee from 2014 with Fresh TV footage. And so that itself on TikTok has got a quarter of a million views and 40 K likes. And that's just from a fan edit. Yeah. And then there's other things that they've clipped from the film. And that's the same thing. A quarter of a million. The lead girl Victoria I always thought, oh gosh, are we are we making her life too miserable like she's, she does all these things at school, and then she goes home and she's cleaning, and she's working with her father all night to make money. And there's a clip on TikTok where someone's clipped her and goes, this resonates with me so much. I've never seen anything so relatable. And that's got 300k views, 50 K likes, so it's as if the fans love it they’re Going to be your organic marketers for sure. For sure. And the hard to reach. That's that's super important. And that kind of leads into, you know, what redefining success looks like a little bit because that is a result of success is that people are sharing your content, making their own content from your content. I know that impact for you Perrin looks different as well, with people that would have communicated directly with the Gender Agenda’s page about experiences, am I right? Yeah, yeah. So from the get go, our goal you know it's it's nice to get a lot of views. We were very grateful to get a couple of million views across all of our, platforms on the first season and, yeah, that that was amazing. And we're super thankful. But the main mission was always to get this information out there and to get these stories out there and to really humanize our communities and make people feel okay with being themselves, with being trans takatāpui, genderqueer in any way. And that success really came when we started having people reaching out. We were flooded with messages, some in the comments, some in the private DMs, of people who had seen the show and were like, hey, this is the first time I've seen a non-binary person on screen. And that makes me feel better about being non-binary in everyday life. It's, you know, we we just had an episode about gender affirming surgery go out, and talking about the long wait list, and we've been flooded with, messages of people going, yeah, I've been on the waitlist for this long. I've dealt with these people. And we really need to change this. And, you know, by the end of the season, we were able to collate many, many pages of messages and just look at it and be like, wow, we actually had an impact here. You know, we can go to community events and be like, oh yeah, you've heard of the Gender Agenda. Like, oh, I love that story. Yeah. Oh, I know this person from the show. Like, oh, I was friends with them in high school. They were always amazing like that. That was amazing for us. And that's what success looks like for us. Love it. And Jess? We just wanted views!(laughter) You got heaps. Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, we just wanted views. And we've done pretty well. We've done, we're getting towards 1.5 million across all of our platforms, so that's really cool. And I went back in sort of prep for this and looked at our original proposal that we had sent through, and we had said that we were because we didn't have a lot to measure ourselves against at that point, because we put this proposal in in like 2023. And so we were we picked n00b the TikTok series of n00b to sort of because it was vertical was on TikTok. It was teen drama. And so based off the numbers, we said we were aiming for 2 million, like total views across all our platforms by six months. So we haven't quite hit that. I think that might have been a bit ambitious, but we're like, well, on the way. So that's really cool. And we've also had a I mean, I say surprising, but this wasn't an aim, but we've had a really great festival run, with the sort of web fests around the world we've gotten into like 6 or 7 and we just won Best International Series at the Bilbao Webfest which was really cool.(applause) thank you everyone, thank you But it's funny because that I think that means more to people in this room that does to our audience. Our audience doesn't care about that. But yeah, we that was our success. Yeah. Views so good for us. We really just wanted to reach as far and wide as possible, with audiences about, you know, audio description and these important stories of blind and young, low vision people. And, you know, we've racked up into the mils with that series as well. And that was important to us, was getting that out as far as possible. Because accessibility is important. And that brings us to the end of our session. We have time for questions. There will be a mic coming around. Someone straight in there. That's amazing. Amazing. Work, all of you. It's really inspiring. I wanted to know, because community and engagement and connection is so important. How do you deal with answering the, messages from people? Very carefully. You definitely have to pick your battles, because not all of the messages that come through, extremely positive. And that's where having a moderation team to keep everybody safe is really, really good. And it's also just good to have a bit of a boundary between, you know, the people on the screen and the people, throwing hatred at you. But, on the good side, I would generally be sent little, like, notifications just to be like, hey, this came through. Do you want to respond? And the only strategy I have when I'm responding to stuff like that is just be human, respond to honestly and, and with empathy. And, you know, that's why people are connecting with you in the First Place. They they resonated with something in your voice. And, so getting your voice back is always going to be a win for them. But what a crazy responsibility. Oh yeah. Yeah. And it can seem very weird, but I think when you're putting stuff up on social media, you have to remember that these are very personal connections you're making with people. I think there's a degree of removal between us and the TV screen. When you're seeing faces on socials, you're seeing the names you're seeing, you know, the intricacies of someone's story playing out in front of you. From the everyday bits to the hyper produced bits, people are going to feel like you're their friend, and you don't have to play the role of their best friend. But sending a little message to be like, hey, thank you for reaching out, I see you, I respond to this detail of your story. Have a great day. Goes a long way. Kia ora everyone. I'm Thomas Coppell. Hi. And these beautiful filmmakers, storytellers, content creators, were all funded through ‘Within My Reach’ which was a one off It was a $5 million injection into New Zealand On Air for youth content, bespoke for social media. And they're all evidence of success, all evidence of success, of reaching millions of views. Because when we were doing the, I ran, I project managed the Initiative, and when we were setting it up Inky Pinky Ponky was our example of success. You know, it was like something that just came out. It was a specific audience. It had done really well online. But each of you have found that specific audience, that specific person that has been your advocate and the algorithm that spreads you far and wide and you've shown what's possible for, our communities, all of our communities. When we really our rangatahi on the platforms, so you should be super proud of yourself because I'm very proud of you. And, well done. Well done. Thank you, Thomas. Yeah. Thank you. Is there one more question anymore? Hello. I've got a question for The Sender series. Did you, like, with the Gender Agenda, did you put in little behind the scenes clips to keep yourself in the. Algorithm, or did you not want to, like, muddy up your timeline? Did you just do a series or was it more. No, we did do a little bit. But we didn't do a lot. And honestly, we we could have done a lot more, but it just came down to resources time. How do you fit that into the shoot day? Along with an EPK, poster shoot Oh my God. So yes, we did do a little bit. Our social media manager, he, if you go into a. We. We didn't put them on. We did. We put them on both our Instagram and TikTok feeds, but we didn't put them on YouTube because we did a slightly different release for that. So we did a couple of ones of like we got the cast, like asked like, what's your favorite emoji? I honestly think that's an area where we could have done more, but, we just didn't have the resources to do it. Unfortunately. I'll just add to that for a second. It's worth considering right from the get go. Right in pre-production. What kind of extra content you might want to do? Because that's going to play into how you do your production. We had to have people set aside, you know, five minutes of time to do a quick post, interview, interview, you know, for those little questions, we had to have someone on set who was, you know, a helping hand for carrying things and for the extra camera. But they were also taking behind the scenes pics the whole time. So when it comes to social releases, especially if you don't just want to do that main content, you need to think about it the whole way through, and having a social media manager from the get go is the way to do it. Awesome. I think that's us for today, everybody. Thank you so much for coming. A big round of applause to these wonderful producers. And, We'll be floating around as well. I know this is a very deep topic that we can talk forever about. And so if you see us, please come and chat. But we would welcome a conversation with you. Thank you.