James is co-founder of Pivot Productions Group — this interview has been lightly edited for style and readability
James Burtt: We launched Pivot Productions Group earlier this month. I had a big realization about this time last year that I’ve been in the podcasting space for a long while, but mainly in the paid-for production realm. When I was looking at what [sports personalities] Peter Crouch is doing with podcasting, and what Gary Lineker’s doing with Goalhanger, there’s a big opportunity here. But the bigger opportunity comes with obviously bigger risks and therefore bigger rewards.
I wrote a blog post about five years ago asking why doesn’t Peter Crouch leave the BBC and run his own thing, because if he owned the IP he’d earn loads more money. Ironically, I’ve subsequently found out that Peter Crouch actually read that blog! So that was the rationale.
I think we’re very uniquely placed in terms of the celebrity talent we can reach, plus the experience that we’ve got, that we can help people to maximize the value opportunity that there is right now for people to own their IP and build platforms, rather than just being paid 500 or a thousand pounds a session.
It has to be bigger than just the show. Where I think the opportunity is biggest at the moment is building a community - and I know community has been the buzzword for marketing since 2023, I think it was word of the year, wasn’t it, but people who get it genuinely right can have opportunities for their listeners and their viewers to come and see them in a live show, but also do watch-alongs and have an opportunity to come down to recording sessions.
I think it’s going to give us the opportunity to show talent in a different way and give them the opportunity to be seen in different ways as well. Because that’s another big thing that I’ve done in my career is help people to really communicate the brand message that they want to communicate and when you understand what you’re trying to put out there as the perception, you build content around that.
One of the interesting trends that James and I are talking about, obviously, is more and more content going behind paywalls. People are beginning to value quality content. I’ve always called podcasting a second class digital citizen, because the expectation is free with ads wrapped around it as the way of monetizing it. Advertising isn’t generating, for most people, the type of return they need in order to grow. So we are seeing a lot of money being put into Patreon memberships, Substack, super chats: it’s very interesting.
SS: What keeps you awake at night? What’s the thing that worries you?
JB: I don’t think anything really keeps me up at night other than just literally the workload of launching a new show. You know, anyone who’s done this before knows how much work goes into it. When you add into the fact that you’ve got big name talent, you’ve got lots of logistics and there’s a team involved in it, and all that kind of stuff.
But in terms of what keeps me up at night, in terms of from a fear perspective, I think we’ve just got so much further to go with podcasts. You look all the the stats. Still just over a quarter of people are listening on a weekly basis.
It doesn’t matter how busy the space gets. Great shows will find an audience and there’s a great opportunity. And the brilliant thing with how we’re doing it in terms of shared ownership with our talent and shared IP with our talent is that everyone’s got a vested interest to pull as hard as each other in the same direction.
SS: Thank you so much,. Good luck and congratulations.