Bailey Mackey on tackling the post-Covid funk
Māori-led New Zealand indie Pango Productions is shoring up its international relationships while converting its CEO’s passion for sport into commissions.
Bailey Mackey
As ever, there was a flock of dedicated Kiwi producers who made the trip halfway around the world to do business at Mipcom in Cannes last October. There may even have been a few more at the market than usual, what with the Rugby World Cup being held in France at the time and the All Blacks very nearly going all the way.
Leading the pack was Bailey Mackey, founder and CEO at Pango, who combines his passion for storytelling with his deep love of rugby at the Auckland-based film and television prodco, which has been behind a host of rugby-themed programmes in recent years.
These include the documentary series All or Nothing: New Zealand All Blacks for Amazon’s Prime Video; three seasons of Match Fit, the Kiwi version of Fremantle-owned Talkback’s entertainment format, in which former sporting legends take on a series of challenges to help them get back into shape, for Warner Bros Discovery-owned Three; and, more recently, Tour de Rugby, which saw Kiwi icon Taika Waititi explore France’s relationship with the sport for fledgling streamer NZR+.
Mackey, who also serves as deputy chair at NZ Rugby (NZR), is a former head of sports at broadcaster Māori Television and sees the popularity of access-all-areas sports documentaries continuing to grow in the years ahead, given the insatiable appetite of fans to watch content about their favourite teams, players or competitions.
“Sport is probably the purest form of drama there is. You watch a game and instantly you have a protagonist and an antagonist. And usually the antagonist for most Commonwealth countries is England,” quips Mackey, who played rugby himself for Ngāti Porou East Coast before joining the TV scrum.
Pango, which is also the Māori word for black, celebrates its 10th year in business this year and is the second production company Mackey has founded after Black Inc Media, which went on to operate as a division of Eyeworks NZ.
Among Mackey’s immediate priorities over the next three years is to continue to navigate a way out of what he calls the “post-Covid funk” affecting the international TV business, brought on by a combination of stalled relationships during the pandemic and the wave of consolidation and mega-mergers.
“Show me a platform globally that isn’t under pressure at the moment. There’s a cost-of-living crisis in a lot of OECD countries, there’s a real squeeze on the ad revenue model, which is on a steeper decline than any of us would have imagined, and the VoD model is challenging in many markets. So the view from the bottom of the world is that it’s tough.”
Nevertheless, Mackey says unscripted specialist Pango enjoyed its “biggest year” recently, thanks to relationships forged at markets such as Mipcom in the years leading up to the pandemic.
Match Fit was borne out of a partnership with production and distribution giant Fremantle and Mackey is keen to strike up more collaborations with larger entities to make shows in New Zealand before concentrating on shopping Pango’s own IP internationally.
Getting shows off the ground with buyers is rarely Mackey’s main mission when he travels to international markets and conferences. He instead prefers to foster key relationships with international producers and distributors that could pay dividends over the next three years.
“Being from a small market like New Zealand, scale is important. And the easiest way to scale up is to go into a relationship with bigger players. It effectively gives you a much more meaningful position in bigger markets. That’s just the way it is. One of the things you learn quite quickly in New Zealand is you might be a big dog in your own market but once you get to a market like the US, you need the collaborative approach.
“Growth is still on the cards. There are massive opportunities in the global market and we’re going to continue on that path.”
Meanwhile, Mackey says Pango has a “pretty significant stream of AI [artificial intelligence] work going on at the moment,” led by the company’s head of operations, Mark Taylor. “We want to be at the forefront of that and the reality is if you’re in the content game and you do not have an AI strategy then you will be poorer for it in the next few years,” says Mackey.
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