Sky Creative’s Paul Mortimore Knows His Audience Well
The nature of production as the industry knows it is evolving and fast, ushered in by challenges around sustainability, diversity, budgets, and the drive for more content at scale. To discuss all this and more, Remote Filming - the leading remote streaming service technology - is asking the industry’s top production experts about their best practices and the way they’re utilising technology to help overcome the challenges at hand in an ongoing series for LBB.
Anthony Barry, co-founder of Remote Filming says: “We’re all seeing the industry change, I believe that when it comes to tackling the myriad of production issues, especially sustainability, technology is key. Bringing together the right people and the right technology is how we can make a real difference to production.”
Today, LBB speaks to Paul Mortimore, head of advertising production at Sky Creative, Sky’s in-house creative agency, the biggest in-house agency in Europe. Paul has worked on some of Sky's biggest projects like ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’ starring Idris Elba alongside some of the world’s top sports talent. Diversity and sustainability are top priorities for Paul, Sky Creative, and Sky at large. That’s why Sky has committed to its 'Sky Zero Policy', a promise to become a carbon-negative business across all of its operations, suppliers, production teams, along with everything and everyone else in the supply chain. “We have internal requirements from the business to make sure that everything meets this sustainability criteria,” Paul says.
As for creativity, Paul notes that Sky is in the content business and the marketing and advertising arm is an extension of that. “It’s about making great content and delivering it to our customers in a way that will resonate the most.”
LBB> Paul, thanks so much for agreeing to take part in this interview series! What was your path to production like? Did you always want to work in the creative industry?
Paul> When I was growing up in Bristol, there was very little visibility of agencies or the advertising industry. It wasn’t something I was made aware of at school. After I left school, I didn’t take a traditional path to the industry. I went to play football and I ended up becoming an apprentice professional football player, spending four or five years doing that. That didn’t quite work out as I didn’t end up in the Premier League! I then spent a year working as a personal trainer and one of my clients’ husbands worked as a music video producer. She said that he was working on a video ‘M&S Pres. The Girl Next Door’ for Salsoul Nugget and asked if I wanted to go along and watch how it was made. When I saw the production I thought, that’s what I want to do. I then became a runner and worked my way up from music videos and corporate to FULL creative where I spent a very enjoyable decade before three years at Discovery before my current role.
LBB> Today, you’re the head of advertising production at Sky Creative. What appealed to you about the role?
Paul> When the opportunity to work for Sky arose I jumped at it because of the content, the brand, and the work that they do. I didn’t have to think twice about it. Sky’s internal, in-house agency is huge and it produces really great work and ideas.
LBB> Sky Creative is the UK’s largest in-house agency and is responsible for all of the media company’s varied advertising content. What’s the benefit of working on everything in-house from a production perspective?
Paul> Sky is a huge company with a lot of different areas that are all based around living the key values and understanding what your customers and audience want. We also have a really good, close relationship with our marketing team so we’re always on this journey together. From a production point of view, it’s never the case that we’re just involved in the production element, which it can be in other places. At Sky Creative, we’re part of the whole journey, part of the strategy and the brief. So when the work comes together, everyone is working as a full team, which makes it a really enjoyable place to work. There are no siloes, everyone is integrated. We still use external production companies and houses but the ideation and the strategy we create is all done together. It’s great to be involved in every part of the creative process and from early on too.
LBB> Are there any pieces of work/projects that you don’t think would’ve been possible if they weren’t created and executed in house? Why / why not?
Paul> You can do anything in house or externally. What we have in house is the ability to really live what the audience wants because Sky does it day in, day out. I think that's a good explanation of how good in house is these days; in the old days, there was a very big difference between what could be achieved in house and what could be externally. The way we work at Sky Creative, especially at the moment, is we work in house when it comes to the ideation and strategy, and then we will work with external production companies. For example, last summer we did a huge Sky Sports start season launch with Rattling Stick, the idea started in house and then we partnered with them on the actual production.
LBB> Which industry trends do you find affect what you do most, i.e. sustainability, diversity, different platforms, demand for high volumes of content, etc. How are you addressing these?
Paul> It’s all of the above, actually. We worry about sustainability like everyone else. Our business is very diverse which is great because it adds so many different views internally. Diversity is key to what we do. It's about bringing youth involvement from production and from creative and through the whole agency and into Sky itself. And the diverse nature of where we are at the moment, I think it's great as well, but yeah, hopefully, that keeps me awake at night.
On high volume we are fully through the line area so we go from direct marketing at the very top or bottom, whichever way you look at it, all the way to our big TVC. And we do everything in between. One of the big changes we've certainly found over the last few years is with producers moving away from siloed roles. Now all the producers have varied experience so that they can do an off-air campaign, we can do through the line, we can do direct mail, or they can sometimes get involved in some of the big TVCs. Overall, high volume is what keeps me awake at night!
LBB> What role does technology play, like remote streaming or AI for example, in helping to address the trends shaping the creative industry?
Paul> Technology is ever-evolving. We’re dipping our toes in at the moment and having a lot of conversations about AI. AI can be a very simple answer to difficult questions at the moment. From a personal perspective, I think it needs to be treated carefully. It’s a useful tool but it’s years away from replacing the kind of creativity that my team produces. Remote streaming is incredibly good to have, especially back during the pandemic when we had a couple of big productions take place. We were probably one of the very first few big production companies to go and commission very big sets of ads called ‘The Collector’ that were made with multiple shoots in different countries. We used remote streaming for that and I think it’s a very good tool and can be helpful in multiple ways. In my personal opinion, you can’t beat being on set and seeing what’s going on. There are so many things you can pick up on when walking on set that you can’t from a purely camera perspective.
LBB> Why do you think as an industry we’re still doing so much travelling for shoots and productions? Is it really necessary?
Paul> Personally, I think it is necessary in the world of production. I think with ever changing budgets, ever-changing landscapes and sometimes talent availability, you may have to go to certain places. I think the key thing in what we do is taking the sensible approach. Sustainability is certainly at the forefront of everyone’s mind at the moment and we shouldn’t regard travel lightly. We always consider why we’re travelling. I think with ever decreasing budgets, sometimes we have to sometimes think slightly out of the box. One of productions' great skills is being able to make creative ideas even when we’re dealing with low budgets. Sometimes I'd love to shoot it in a specific place, but we can't afford it though we could go elsewhere and make it happen. I do think we need to be very careful about who attends the shoots and Sky has a system in place where everyone who attends is two things: they’re necessary to the shoot and they’re people who can not only add value but also make decisions. It’s important for sustainability and also it’s about just being sensible about who’s on set. I recently came back from a shoot in Cape Town which was done there due to weather conditions. We ensured that everyone on set was absolutely relevant and able to make decisions whether that was financially or creatively to get the most without taking multiple people. We only had four people on that shoot with us.
LBB> Some brands are mandating a maximum number of people to attend shoots to improve the sustainability of their work. What do you think about this?
Paul> Like I touched on above, I think that makes sense from a sustainable and a sensible angle. A lot of people would go on shoots to gain experience and I think that still needs to happen but it can happen in the UK. I personally think there should be a number which is realistic for the shoot from a budget and environment angle. We can also use local production crews effectively so we can take our core team and then deploy local talent which makes it much more sustainable.
LBB> Which pieces of work/projects that you’ve worked on stand out to you most and why?
Paul> ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’ directed by Danny Kleinman. That was really good because we had a really broad range of talent - we were able to shoot with [sporting stars] Erling Haaland, Jack Grealish, and Emma Raducanu. It was really difficult from a production perspective as it was really hard to get everyone involved. Another stand out was a piece of work we did in lockdown, ‘The Collector’. We shot it in July with a company called Biscuit who did a fantastic job. One of the benefits of Sky being a part of Comcast is that we have these incredible relationships with all the studios. One of our ideas involved ‘Jurassic World’ and I remember having conversations with people involved in the actual film about the dinosaurs and how they would react. We were also dealing with ILM who worked on Transformers and they really helped us out.
Another that stands out is the partnership we did to launch the first season of ‘Formula 1’ on Sky. My team and I had access to decades of garages with the original cars inside them like JPS and a Ferrari from the ‘50s, Nigel Mansell’s Renault was there too. The shot was set up so all the cameras looked like the pit of F1 and the camera was on a track filming this evolution of F1 through the cars. It was feature-film level production values shooting cars worth £8 and £11 million. It goes back to what I was saying about the in house capabilities giving us access that an external agency just wouldn't get. But we have a good pre-existing relationship with F1 and McLaren. As an in-house agency, we’re embedded in the wider brand so Sky Creative can go directly to Sky Sports, directly to F1, the film studios to make ideas happen. We do sometimes get the door closed on us but it’s always worth trying.
LBB> The ‘noisy content landscape’ has become a cliché and yet it remains true. What do you think is the key to creating work that cuts through the noise?
Paul> The beauty that we have at Sky is really knowing our customers, understanding their needs and what they look for. So when we create content we always keep that in mind. Ads today can play it quite safe and when I look at some of the stuff in the past that stands out, it tends to have a lighter touch. Today, I see a lot of ads going the post production route when the in-camera, for real route is available which I do think adds something to it. It’s a very hard question. The focus should be on really understanding what the audience wants, that’s the key thing. At Sky Creative, we work really closely with our creative and strategy teams, aligning with marketing and that helps us a lot.
It's a content business. So you know, it's always been delivering content, like churning out content. So actually, the marketing, advertising and creative function of Sky is no different to the content output, right? It's all about content and making good content and getting it out to the customers in a way that they are going to that will resonate with them.
