Format

Only a decade ago, developing a format meant pitching to broadcasters, rewriting treatments endlessly, waiting months for approvals, sometimes only to hear nothing back. Commissioning is still a vital path, but it’s no longer the only one. Today, social platforms have become one of the most powerful ways to develop and grow ideas long before they reach a traditional commissioner.

Producers are increasingly now building concepts that are inherently social or brand-led and engineering them from day one with the potential to scale across YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. After finding and building an audience on those platforms, projects can either transition to broadcasters and streamers or continue to grow as social-first IP in their own right.

These outlets are valuable for identifying trends, gathering insights on everything from casting to format points, and gathering authentic audience feedback that would be impossible to capture solely through a traditional pilot or any kind of pitch document.

On social, your data becomes your pitch. If you can walk into a meeting with engagement metrics and a fandom already forming around the idea, you’re not asking for someone to take a chance, you’re showing them it works.

The blueprint
This approach is not about bypassing broadcasters. It is about taking greater ownership of the development process and removing the need to wait for permission before you start learning what works.
Here's what I can share to help do this:

1. Identify your culture
Not by copying trends, but by studying how communities behave and what they gravitate towards.
2. Design the IP to be scalable from the beginning
A social challenge can evolve into a talent tournament, dating experiment, travel format, or competition series if the core idea is strong enough.
3. Let the audience be part of development – and do it publicly
Casting tests, narrative devices, tone, and even the structure of the episodes themselves are refined in real time through social. We’re not waiting 12 months for a greenlight when we can learn what works and what doesn’t in 12 days.
4. Invite brands in early - as partners, not purely sponsors
When a concept has meaningful traction, brands get genuine value for audience access instead of forced or disingenuous integrations. Engaging a brand in a concept is certainly easier said than done. Branded production is still a relatively new approach for both brands and producers, and one of the challenges is often to build a compelling case to help a brand understand the partnership as an asset in advertising. This kind of partnership is often perceived as a risk, but it’s a direct route to new revenue streams via their existing target audience.
And what does this all look like in practise? Our own European-wide K-pop talent search show is designed to begin not on television, but via auditions on TikTok and YouTube where the casting process itself is the content. We will partner with global music labels and build fandom from the get-go, allowing us to fine-tune the different format layers such as the individual challenges, the performance structure and elimination mechanics – all before scaling to a longer-form show.

To be continued…

(Salla Kozma, Pig & Horse Productions)

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