Every year independent production company, Sunset+Vine, produces the host broadcast for the Royal Kennel Club’s (RKC) show of the year, Crufts, with Channel 4 being the primary rights holder. During the competition this year, Sunset+Vine produced 17 hours of programming for Channel 4 and More4, alongside 11 hours per day of live streaming on the RKC’s Crufts YouTube channel, as well as populating its other social media channels.  

Sunset+Vine’s senior digital strategist, Will Godsiff, noted that this year was the first time he has seen the previously siloed Crufts TikTok content sliding into Instagram, while YouTube itself has carved out a niche that is making it standout for content creators.

Godsiff comments on the strategy Sunset+Vine takes for the RKC’s Crufts digital coverage: “We create content for the Crufts YouTube and TikTok channels, which we actively manage, and they’re active on Facebook and Instagram as well. Each year you’re having to slightly rejig your platform strategy and your content strategy because of how the platforms are developing. On YouTube, historically we’ve always done slightly longer feature-based content and we continue to do that alongside the live streams and the in-event clipping.

“On TikTok we’ve always siloed that producer so that they’re working almost entirely independently and nobody can come and bother them, but that content has started to bleed into the Instagram account now. There is an audience for some of this slightly more – I don’t want to use the word ‘silly’ because we create it in a serious and professional way – entertaining content.”

Often there is a crossover between the host broadcast and the digital content, and this time around there was a crossover that worked very well for those more entertainment-based digital channels.

Explains Godsiff: “This year we had a really fun crossover because Dustin Rhodes, who’s an ex-WWE and current AEW professional wrestler, was showing his Mastiff, called Beast. For YouTube, we did a ‘Meet the Beast’ feature where we were chatting with Dustin about how he got into showing, tell us about your love of Mastiffs, and that sort of thing.

“Then for TikTok and Instagram, we created a vertical video where we tasked him to guess whether the names we were reading off were wrestlers names or dog names. It created that slightly surprising content that the audience responded really well to. Quite often people were there saying, “I never expected to see wrestling and dog showing crossover on my feed”. He was really game and really fun as well.”

Across the Crufts platforms in the two months prior to the dog show as well as during the event, there were 135 million organic views with over 260,000 new followers. While the TikTok content took the most lighthearted approach, it was the highest converting platform for ticket sales for Crufts.

TikTok slide into Instagram

While traditionally the Tiktok content has been run by a dedicated producer, this year content for TikTok has bled across into the Instagram content, as Instagram has morphed slightly.

Comments Godsiff: “We always silo a dedicated TikTok producer, but now [that role is] more of a short form vertical producer as our activities on TikTok have bled over into the other platforms.”

On how and why the Tiktok content has bled over into Instagram content for the first time, Godsiff explains: “I think there’s two major reasons. One, I think internally the client has seen the success of some of these videos on TikTok, and whilst we didn’t necessarily have one that hit stratospheric heights this year – our most viewed one from a previous year is about 17 million views on one video, with others that quite often break five million views – I think they’ve seen the success of being able to be a bit more lighthearted,” he notes on content from TikTok being pushed onto Instagram.

He adds that the second reason is that the differences between the platforms themselves are smoothing out as they compete against each other, which helps make this content share from TikTok to Instagram possible without being jarring to Instagram users.

“I think there’s generally a slight flattening of the platforms, whereas in the past, they were all very different,” says Godsiff. “Now I think successes on either platform is slightly starting to bleed through. A couple of years ago, TikTok started allowing you to post images because they were competing directly with Instagram, and so Instagramers have become aware that original content, fun content, forms well. So there’s almost a dual sided move, in that it benefits the client, and there’s a flattening of difference between platforms.”

YouTube gaining popularity

Godsiff says that YouTube is the platform that is holding its own and evolving in an interesting way: “I would say that YouTube is the one that’s starting to really stand as an isolated place for output. With YouTube Shorts, you’ve got massive potential for discoverability through short form vertical content. They’ve made it so that you can livestream very easily in verticals, so we simultaneously live streamed the main arena feed as a vertical option for people to come across in their shorts feed, but simultaneously it’s got the long form user base and that’s where people are watching.

“At Crufts I’d say about a decade ago about 50% of the channel views during the event came from mobile phones. Now during the event, it has completely switched to smart TVs and games consoles; I’d say it’s about 80% of the views from January through to the end of March are coming off of computers for those long form views,” Godsiff says.

However, he adds: “I think Instagram and TikTok are continuing to duke it out for that vertical supremacy and still trying to get people to watch longer. But YouTube has ‘appointment’ viewing almost cornered, and are now moving into the short form vertical. It’s interesting how it’s developed over the past few years.”

Young generations are switching to YouTube as they try and get some downtime from snacking on very short, almost addictive content on other platforms, says Godsiff. He refers to what he has seen change on the Crufts channels over recent years in terms of viewing figures.

“Particularly for younger viewers, their consumption time on YouTube far outweighs any of the other platforms. I think particularly for Crufts, it becomes appointment viewing and [proving that], the watch times across the weekend are really high. Whereas some of those other  platforms market themselves as endless, snackable pieces of content, I think there’s almost a slight drain on that; people are trying to take themselves offline a little bit more and have more meaningful interactions on social, so a long form piece of content that you can sit and really appreciate starts to become really useful.

“I think YouTube itself, while not the most easy platform to monetise on, is one of the ones that plays into the strengths of creators,” concludes Godsiff.