Do you love sport and have a knack for creating content?
We recently chatted to Alex Emery, Senior Assistant Producer at Sky Sports about what it's like to do his current job - and the steps he took to get there. Rubbing shoulders with Premier League players and managers, attending shoots, and helping build Sky Sports' YouTube channel from 250k subscribers to 3.5 million, Alex's story is enough to inspire any budding content creators and producers out there.
Tell us a bit about yourself.
I’m a Senior Assistant Producer for Sky Sports; I look after all of our Premier League access content, and turn it into YouTube first content. That content sits across Sky Sports owned and operated platforms and is adapted for short-form content on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
My day-to-day involves editing, producing, coming up with ideas for content, and attending shoots, but I also devise content strategies for Sky Sports’ social platforms.
How did you get into this role?
It probably goes all the way back to sixth form, when I knew that I didn’t want to go to university. I’ve always been someone who just knuckles down into work. I was looking for all sorts of apprenticeships and found Sky Sports’ apprenticeship to work in the digital media department. At the time, that involved creating content for the website and the app.
Let’s say there’s a player who no one knows that plays in the Spanish League, but is linked to Manchester United. Man United fans want to learn more about this player. That team would cut a highlights montage package of all of that player’s goals and then deliver it to the website. We also were cutting highlights of not just football but cricket and all sorts.
Two years into the role, there was a company that Sky partnered with to teach us how to run YouTube channels and social media - Whistle Sports. As a result of that partnership, Sky needed to set up a small team of people to solely create YouTube content.
Looking back at the first YouTube shows (at the time for Soccer AM), they’re not the shows I’m proudest of creating, but equally I think on your path to creating content that you’re proud of, you do have to make mistakes, learn from them and get better. I really enjoyed my work at that time, travelling to shoots around the UK and Europe.
In 2019, I was tasked with designing a content strategy for Sky Sports Football’s YouTube channel. At the time, we weren’t making the most of the plethora of content that Sky Sports had to offer.
For example, you might see a guest come onto ‘Goals on Sunday’ who tells a hilarious story which has done really well on the show. But that would be the end of it… so I had the idea to really maximise all of the content, adapting it for YouTube, creating attractive thumbnails and titles that attract people to that clip. Lots of people might not want to sit down for a whole hour to watch the show, but they can consume a 10 minute clip at their leisure.