Done + Dusted North America CEO on the Challenges and Opportunities in Live Event Storytelling

When it comes to keeping audiences engaged, everyone from streamers and linear TV networks to esports leagues and music artists are tapping into the power of storytelling through live events.

Melanie Fletcher, whose production company Done + Dusted has been putting on live events across comedy, sports, gaming, music, specials and awards shows since 1998, tells TheWrap’s Office With a View that costs can range from as little as $1 million to as much as $50 million in any given year.

“It’s hard to conceive and stage and produce an event that’s also a livestream of any scale for under a million dollars,” said Fletcher, who serves as Done + Dusted’s North America CEO. “But the smaller events are no easier. You still have to apply all the same energy and love into it.”

The company’s notable live events have ranged from the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, which generated 1.2 billion engagements, 22 million live viewers and a combined reach of 305 million to Riot Games’ League of Legends World Finals 2024, which became the most viewed esports event ever with 7 million concurrent views. Ryan Gosling’s “I’m Just Ken” performance at the 2024 Oscars, which generated 10 million cross-platform streams in seven days, was another big moment for her company.

Fletcher got her start in Australia as a producer for Saturday morning television programming before moving on to MTV Australia producing for the news division, where she developed a passion for live event storytelling.

“I like to call it the University of MTV, because there were no rules. We we’re making things up as we went and learning on the job every day,” she explained. “I was interacting with MTV offices around the world and very quickly knew that I wanted to go join MTV in America and work on award shows. I just loved the spectacle and the scale and the celebrity of those programs.”

By the late 90s, Fletcher was living in Los Angeles working the award show circuit on programs like the Video Music Awards. She subsequently moved to England to join MTV London, where she worked on the Europe Music Awards and other music specials, and would meet Simon Pizey, Hamish Hamilton and Ian Stewart.

The group would leave MTV to start Done + Dusted, which began producing specials in the music industry when audiences were still buying DVDs of concerts. But as that business shrank, they pivoted their expertise and passion toward other forms of programming. In 2003, they won the contract for the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, which was making the transition from internet to broadcast for the first time.

“We helped shape what the format for the worldwide broadcast would be and would go on to produce 16 of those, including last year’s comeback special after a hiatus,” Fletcher said. “As our genre ability broadened, we were able to attract some interest from clients in the US, particularly after Victoria’s Secret.”

Done + Dusted has gone on to build a scaled business in the U.S. in the years since, adding additional creative partners Guy Carrington, Katy Mullan, David Jammy and Adrian Pettett, which gave Fletcher the opportunity to move from hands-on producing into an executive position as North America CEO. 

When asked about the biggest lesson she’s learned in her career, she said being open to learning and willing to adapt – both from a creative and leadership standpoint.

“What I’ve seen around me is those that aren’t able to be agile and flexible and open in their learning, to change, to conversation, to making space for newcomers and listening to new, young, opinionated people, will very soon be irrelevant,” Fletcher explained. “If you don’t love learning, then this isn’t the industry for you. Every day I learn something big and important and new that I need to then apply going forward. And that’s what excites me and gets me out of bed, actually.”

Read on for the rest of TheWrap’s edited conversation with Fletcher below.

You’ve gotten to work on a wide range of events ranging from the Emmys to Beyonce concerts to speeches by President Barack Obama. What was the process like and the challenges of securing those opportunities?

When we first moved here, whilst we had a body of work and a history of some really solid work, we were the outsiders. I really saw us as the underdogs, not the least because we’re a group of different nationalities – there’s Australian, Kiwi, Scottish, South African and then some Brits in our mix – but it took quite some time to get respect from clients.

Our clients have always been quite broad, even more so now, but it’s been the networks and now the streamers, but it’s also been brands and gaming publishers and heads of state and royal families and so on. So to get respected here was just a slow process of producing very premium work and, over time, that work got noticed.

The superpower of Done + Dusted is the eight of us. It’s quite rare to have a group of eight people who run a business together. We can separate and work on a lot of different things at any one time. It gives us a volume, which in turn gives us quite a lot of publicity. One minute, it’s the Emmys, and then the next minute, it’s an inauguration. So just that breadth of work enabled our reputation to spread.

What’s the most difficult or challenging aspect of the work you do in live storytelling?

There’s always a risk with live and we as creatives and producers always want to push the innovation boundary. So we make it even riskier by using new camera technology or doing live demos for tech brands or whatever it might be. We don’t like repeating ourselves, so there’s a high risk that needs to be managed.

The other challenge is the purpose of live. We wrestle with that often. Does it need to be live? Should it be live? Why is it live? Are we the brand and the audience benefiting from this being live? I think it is quite hot right now to be live and sometimes shows are better not live, actually, as an experience to the viewer. So it’s walking that line, and really, if you can go live, make sure that actually there’s a real reason for it.

What do you make of the shift in live storytelling moving from linear TV to streaming as the former’s ratings decline?

Our philosophy has always been quite simple: our work and output always has to be premium, regardless of where it’s going, and we have to have a broad client base and we’re a volume business, which means we should produce the networks, the streamers, the digital platforms and creators and artists because our skillset is tapping into entertainment as a format to solve a problem for someone.

We’re always obsessed with who’s watching this, how are they watching it, when are they watching it, what are their watching habits, is it solving a problem for them, is it engaging them, would they respond to comedy or something intimate or something deep and telling or do they need spectacle to get them off their doomscroll? That mindset takes you out of what can be quite a depressing thought that ratings are dropping and people are not watching live entertainment in the way that they were.

The only true part about that story is they’re just not watching it the way they were. Everyone still loves live and then you get these random rating spikes on some shows and you’re even seeing it on networks. I think live is actually quite protected in that it generates virality, conversation and community discussion. Even if we’re doing it via text or sending memes about a show, however it is, we want something to grab onto to generate conversation with our friends, our colleagues and our families.

On the topic of premium content, what do you make of the rise of YouTube and creator content in the Hollywood ecosystem?

Most creator content, despite its authentic nature, will not be premium and will remain user generated. It will do the job it has set out to do, which is to engage and entertain and often to sell and there’s space for that, and that is proven by the growth in that creator economy.

I’m obsessed with creators. I like to see them as authors and even broadcasters of our content. We see creators as a channel, so we take over their feeds or their handles, and we pump our content through those pipes, get into their subscriber base and it’s proven to be extremely effective, maybe more effective than being on a streamer, because you’re really getting to the consumer or customer base of that brand or artist.

So there is an exciting intersection between creator world and Done + Dusted world. But I don’t think we need to compete and I don’t think we need to compare. I just think we’re really different and we can benefit each other.

As you look ahead, are there any areas you’re not already in that you’re looking to expand into?

A couple of years ago, we took on another partner, Adrian Pettett, who runs a new vertical for us in the immersive experience space. We just thought it was such an interesting and clever way to entertain people and we really saw a future in it. So we invested heavily into that and it’s taken many, many years, but we’re about to open our first original immersive experience later this year in London. 

All good producers are actually entrepreneurs, because they’ve got to be able to take risks. But there’s one thing taking risks in a writer’s room and then there’s another thing taking risks with your bank account, so at some point you have to find out what’s right in the balance for you. 

Are there trends that people should be paying more attention to than they are already?

There’s no question that AI won’t change our business, it will. I’m very interested in trying to understand the best use cases for AI in live and how we can interpret those into our workflow without being obstructive and negative to change. That feels like a big proposition.

I think, particularly with live, how can AI make it cheaper? One-off live events that are from the ground up with no pre-existing event to bounce off are traditionally quite expensive and I would love to figure out a way to produce big spectacle cheaper, because it will help the business as a whole.

I would say we’re still in baby steps of how we apply it, certainly to the administrative business and some of the creative work and using Midjourney and and other design tools. We do a lot of stuff in Canberra, which we love, their AI tools are really clever, and obviously ChatGPT. There’s new technology around Cue Pilot, which is how you script camera shots and so on. That’s still in the early days of figuring out how to implement that in a live situation, because it is high stakes when it’s live. That naturally makes you a bit of a control freak, so handing over the reins to AI is still a bit scary for us, but we’re open minded. We want to figure it out.

What’s your advice for someone looking to break into the industry?

My number one piece of advice would be when someone asks you to do something, regardless of what it is, to absolutely nail it, and then the next thing they ask you to do is going to have a bigger outcome, and then absolutely nail that, and then keep going until you’re sat at the table that you want to be at being asked to do the things you want to be doing.

Hard work is unavoidable and you need to turn hard work into something you love. Otherwise, it’s an uphill struggle. Young people need to really figure out what they’re good at and what they want to do and hopefully those two things align. And then they need to work really, really hard because there is no shortcuts.

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