The Booker Prize Foundation 2022-
Charged with devising and overseeing all video productions for The Booker Prizes social accounts, Youtube and the Booker Prize and the International Booker Prize ceremonies
Since joining the team video views grew from under 1,000,000 in 2021 to 284,000,000 by the end of 2024
During the same period social followings grew from under 300,000 in 2021 to 1.35 million by the end of 2024, with a social reach of 240 million
I started to work for the Booker Prize Foundation in 2021 as a digital media consultant, helping to formulate an editorial strategy that would see the recruitment of an editorial team in June 2022. Their objective was to transform the Booker Prizes from yearly literary awards to a contemporary year-round global digital brand for readers of fiction. I joined this team as an executive producer in 2022, tasked with overseeing an increasingly ambitious video strategy for social and in-venue content. Over the years we have produced documentary content about the Booker Prize and its aims, deep-dive interviews with Booker Prize winners (including Penelope Lively and Thomas Keneally), short-form interviews with shortlisted authors, and video partnerships with influencers and Dua Lipa’s Service 95 newsletter.
Total video views
Behind these extraordinary growth figures are a handful of key productions that go some way to explaining how we have reached such a large audience in such a short timeframe.
Booker Prize and International Booker Prize shortlist films
Since 2022, and under my supervision, the Booker Prizes have commissioned production company Merman to produce a series of two minute social-first films in which performers read extracts from the shortlisted books for each prize (the International Booker Prize, and the Booker Prize, both of which occur each year). I have overseen this relationship and acted as executive producer on all of the films so far produced, which have now spanned six prize shortlists and gained just over 100 million views. The below graph shows the huge year-on-year increase in views of these films, but does not show how much of an increase even 2022’s figure of 1.4 million was on the 2021 pre-Merman shortlist films, which only reached 100k views on YouTube and were not optimised for social distribution.
Shortlist films - views
The films have attracted a huge range of performers to the Booker Prizes’ cause, including Eleanor Tomlinson, David Harewood, Jarvis Cocker, Adjoa Andoh, Dua Lipa, Tobias Menzies and Sharon Horgan. They also form a key part of the winner ceremonies for each prize, and in 2022 won a Drum award for best campaign in culture. You can see the film for 2024’s winning book, Orbital, below.
The Booker Prize livestreams
Globally, the Booker Prize owns the moment the winner is announced, as the Radio 4 Front Row coverage is only available in the UK, and there is no official media coverage for the International Booker Prize. So it is important to livestream the winning moment for each award, and to clip the winning moment and speech for social publication as soon as we can after that, since those two videos attract a huge amount of social attention.
For the 2023 Booker Prize we commissioned television production company Sunset and Vine to produce a 45-minute TV-level live programme running up to and including the winner announcement, hosted by ‘BookTuber’ Jack Edwards, who co-streamed the production on his own YouTube channel. Live and subsequent views across the two YouTube channels have totalled 77,000, which is a 550% increase on the 2021 livestream which recorded a total of 14,000 views.
The winning moment and winner speech, clipped from the livestream, attracted 500,000 views, more than double the 200,000 views 2022’s equivalent videos attracted.
In 2024, we commissioned Small Wonder to manage the livestream, which was a much more stripped back affair, and with a budget more in-line with the small but dedicated audience the livestreams typically attract. We livestreamed to Instagram as well as YouTube, but optimised primarily for vertical viewing to reflect how the majority of the Booker Prize followers consume our content. Nonetheless, the ten minute programme recorded a 53% year-on-year peak viewing audience, and represented a more streamlined, efficient model to carry forward into future prizes.
The winning moment, clipped from the livestream, attracted 17.3 million views, up 3,400% on the 2023 Booker Prize. Along with other content generated on the night - including our red carpet coverage, see here - the total video views for this year’s winner ceremony coverage topped an unprecedented 50 million.