Meet The Woman Who Decides What You Watch
When Cécile Frot-Coutaz was eight, her family left their city life in Lyon, France, for the quaint, apple-pie suburbia of Maryland, USA. Her father, a research scientist, had been transferred to the National Institute for Health in Bethesda and had enrolled his daughter at the local American primary school. There was just one problem: Cécile barely spoke a word of English.
And so for the next few months, she remained largely silent, instead choosing to observe and absorb everything about this strange new world – its sworn allegiance to the American flag, its obsession with participation sports, its quasi-fetishistic culture of positivity.
‘I spent three months with no idea what was going on,’ she says, eyes widening at the memory. ‘The way you learn a language when you’re that age is not linear; the brain stalks information. For the longest time, you don’t have enough connections or words until it reaches a critical mass. Then you start to understand and things fall into place.’
Observing and absorbing complex new worlds has been a big part of her life for the past 15 months. In 2019, she left her position as the CEO of Fremantle, one of the world’s biggest TV production companies, which has developed everything from American Idol to Deutschland 83 (and where she’d been for 23 years) to become Head of YouTube for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA).
It’s a huge job at an especially interesting time for the Google-owned company. Now 15 years old, YouTube has morphed from a video platform famous for serving millennials clips of cats on skateboards, to a global media, news and entertainment platform that has made stars out of thousands of kids creating content from their bedrooms.
Along the way, however, it has become many other things: an unwitting recruitment tool for extremist groups, a hotbed for conspiracy theorists, and a Petri dish for bullying. Which means that, at 54, Cécile Frot-Coutaz may have taken on the toughest job of her life.
We meet on a Friday afternoon on one of the hottest days of autumn. The streets are scattered with tables and laughter, people resplendent in the new dressed-down uniform of leggings, T-shirts and oversized dresses. I find Cécile sequestered away in a private member’s club in Mayfair, dressed in a sharp jacket with a huge Saint Laurent bag beside her. She has the forbidding appearance of a power broker: straight-backed, hair that manages to look both expensively groomed and insouciant at the same time, and a face one would describe as the outcome of ‘excellent genes’. Her accent is that of the well-travelled – an ‘international’ voice shared by diplomats, supermodels and the children of oligarchs.
So what does the Head of EMEA for YouTube (her official title) actually mean? She laughs and, suddenly, her entire face softens. ‘It’s a good question, because it’s a complex place,’ she smiles. ‘At YouTube, the things that come across my desk are, firstly, partnerships…’ She then lists a dizzying array of partners – for the uninitiated, these include big brands such as Fox Media (for whom Fremantle created shows including American Idol) and independent creators such as Ryan Kaji, a nine-year-old from Texas who started his career unboxing toys and now has a YouTube show called Ryan’s World, with 26.9 million subscribers. (In 2019, Kaji was named YouTube’s highest earner, bringing in $26 million in revenue.)
YouTube pays out ‘probably the equivalent of Channel 4’s programming budget’ to its creators, she confides – so keeping them happy and productive is essential. This means part of her job is to ensure there is a healthy pipeline of new products to help maximise YouTube creators’ businesses.
But then there’s also publishing partners to look after, and music label partners (because more than two billion logged-in users watch a music video in a month). And then, of course, there is the trickier moderation side of the business, for which the platform has found itself in and out of hot water. YouTube is an open platform, which is, of course, both its beauty and its challenge. When the world is uploading videos of golden retrievers in paddling pools, that’s fine. But when it’s uploading everything, that’s a whole other story.
‘YouTube will always be an open platform, but within that there is a responsibility to ensure the content on it is not harmful to our users. That’s where moderation comes into play,’ says Cécile, adding that one of the biggest investment areas for the company right now is moderation – both machine and human.
‘Our role is not to curate, but we need content systems in place to make sure we remove what is harmful, and don’t recommend anything that – while it maybe doesn’t breach our policies – we don’t believe is a quality experience.’
It’s a tricky one, because one person’s idea of offensive content is another’s legal right to express themselves on a public platform. The crux is that YouTube is a private company, not a public space. Though because the world sees otherwise, it has been dragged through the courts for alleged censoring of seemingly legal content many times.
In February last year, right-wing channel PragerU argued the First Amendment to the US Constitution, saying YouTube had infringed its rights by ‘censoring’ its conservative views. In a landmark case that could have wider implications for arguments of free speech online, the US court decided that, despite YouTube’s ‘ubiquity’, it was a ‘private forum, not a public forum’.
‘It’s a complex area from both a societal and an engineering standpoint. You have to create the [content] policies,’ Cécile says, referring to the company’s stance on what constitutes harmful content. ‘But it takes four to five months to create a new policy, because one of the things you don’t want to do is make decisions on the fly. [The policy] also has to change all the time. You [also] have to devise a policy you can train human reviewers to enforce at scale in a bunch of different languages globally. So if it’s too long, or too nuanced, or too complicated, you won’t be able to enforce it at scale.’
She says that in the second quarter of 2020 they removed 11 million videos that breached YouTube’s content policies.
‘And 52 per cent had never been viewed! So the machines are doing a good job. The enforcement is pretty good but it’s not perfect,’ she concedes. She gives the example of the swastika: the technology struggles to understand whether it’s a neo-Nazi emblem or the Buddhist ‘endless knot’ symbol.
‘The debate is, where do you draw the line? It’s easy when content is illegal. When it’s not illegal, you get into different opinions. You don’t want to get to a place where you are censoring, so there’s a fine line,’ she says.
As Cécile speaks, it becomes clear that a platform that started life as a video dating website (YouTube’s first-ever upload was co-founder Jawed Karim at San Diego Zoo talking about how cool elephants are – in a bid, one imagines, to showcase his sensitive prowess to a female audience) has become a moral maze of fine lines and grey areas.
YouTube now has more than two billion users a month, largely in the 18-34 age group, with a rapidly growing older audience, too. It informs the world on everything from how to apply highlighter to the latest health updates on Covid-19. Think of it as The New York Times meets the NHS, with every entertainment channel you’ve ever known thrown in to a sharing space – along with your dad’s home videos on how to plant tulips. And it has done all this in under two decades. Which means YouTube needs a leader who can understand nuance, foster creativity and never loses their cool.
Cécile didn’t mean to have one of the biggest jobs in entertainment. She comes from a modest French family, with no connections to the world of media. She stumbled into business on the vague recommendation of an English teacher, who suggested it would be a good fit.
‘So I enrolled at a grande école. It was 1985 and there weren’t many women in those schools. One of my uncles said to my mother, “What’s the point? She’s a woman. She’s not going to get anywhere.”’
But, after graduating, Cécile followed the traditional ‘business’ path, attending INSEAD – one of the world’s most prestigious business schools – before moving to London.
‘I was pretty close to becoming an investment banker,’ she says. ‘But at the last minute, the Pearson group came to campus. In those days, they had the Financial Times, The Economist… so I joined them. They owned some TV assets but hadn’t really managed them actively. They wanted to build a TV business, so they hired Greg Dyke, who wanted someone to do the strategy – so he hired me.’
Meeting the former Director-General of the BBC was a turning point. Cécile describes Dyke as ‘amazing’ and pivotal in transforming her career: ‘He was terrible at giving feedback but was always being pestered to give it. So, a year and half in, he said, “What do you want to do?” I said I didn’t know. He said, “Well, you can do pretty much anything you want.” I was like, this is unhelpful. So I said that I’d like to run something.’
Shortly after, the Pearson group bought a large company in the US that made, among many things, Baywatch and Family Fortunes.
‘One Friday night, we were working on the organisation [of the business]. He draws a little box on the org chart and writes ‘Southern Europe’, then puts my name in it. The following Tuesday, I bump into him by the lifts and he says, “Are you excited about the new job?” I was like, “What new job?” And he said, “The Southern European job.”
I said, “Greg, I can’t do it. I have never run anything before.”
To which he replied, “What’s the worst that can happen?”
(Dyke later told her that the key to running a business was ‘to make decisions... Just make sure you make more good decisions than you do bad ones’.)
By 2001, she found herself in the US running the entire business operations for the company, now known as Fremantle. At the time, the UK had a hit with Simon Fuller’s project Pop Idol, which the Fox Broadcasting Company wanted to bring to the US. There was just one issue: Cécile’s creative counterpart in the company had previously had a run-in with Fuller.
‘I was told, “You’re going to have to pick [this] up…” I was completely unqualified! I’d never worked on a show like that, I was always on the business side. So [becoming executive producer of Idol] kind of ended up in my lap. That was the beginning of a completely different phase of my career.’
When Cécile talks about TV, she lights up. She talks about it in the same way a designer talks about fabric or a writer about words and structure. During her time at Fremantle, she was responsible for some of the company’s biggest hits, as well as its most creative endeavours – Idol, yes, plus The Young Pope and My Brilliant Friend, among many others.
Under Cécile’s leadership, Fremantle was developing some of the most exciting content audiences had seen for years, raising the bar of what constituted quality entertainment and competing head-to-head with Netflix’s original programming, where money appears to be no object. (See the reported $150 m deal they sealed with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.)
She was also instrumental in convincing many broadcasters to use YouTube as a means to not only reach a wider audience, but allow their shows to live on for far longer than the two or three months they would air on television.
Which begs the question: why leave when you’re on a roll? She admits she was headhunted, but the decision to leave the world of TV for YouTube was not one that needed much thought.
‘I was 50 when I changed…I mean, I could have stayed another five or 10 years [at Fremantle] and I would have had a fantastic time. However, I don’t think CEOs should hang onto a job forever. Companies need new impetus, a new approach, a fresh pair of eyes. The world changes, so that’s been one of my philosophies: at some point you’ve got to move on.’
Besides, she doesn’t see herself as defecting to the enemy. Neither does she see it as moving to a platform that offers any less creativity.
‘If you think about the creative process in TV, it’s very different to the process for YouTube. In TV you develop, you package, you think through your whole show, your whole series… Then you have to find a buyer. You usually have to convince a person, who then has to convince their boss to fund it – there is a gatekeeper who says yes or no. But as a creator on YouTube, you come up with the idea, you film it, you upload it, and then the platform supports you in building that audience. There’s so many stories of creators who had an idea, pitched it to television, got turned down and then found success on YouTube. It’s not because that person in TV made the wrong decision. It’s that, on YouTube, you can find success by serving niche communities and audiences. It serves the underserved very well. To me, the intrinsic creative freedom of the platform is just incredibly inspiring.’
It feels to me that YouTube offers Cécile the unbounded creativity that TV, which is bounded by national audiences, never could – coupled with the capability to reach a wide and niche audience in the same way Netflix currently does.
As her PR, who has politely squirrelled herself away at the other end of the club, hovers in our sight line, I ask Cécile what success looks like to her. She has, after all, been married to the same man for many years (he works in biotech) and has two daughters, aged 12 and 17, as well as one of the most dazzling CVs in the world.
She is silent. After a few seconds, she says: ‘I suppose success is getting to a place where you figure out what your purpose is and whatever you do lines up with [that]. And then you get to a place where you’re making “happy choices”.’
And then, just like that, she is gone; off to take another call in her car on the way home. From the outside it looks exhausting but, to Cécile, it’s part of a choice that brings purpose, happiness and the means to keep her creative motor revving.
This article appears in the January 2021 edition of ELLE UK.
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