Producer of 9 of the most watched global campaigns in the world
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Tony Hollingsworth exists firmly in the intersection of art, music and global campaigns. Beginning with the creation of the Glastonbury Festival, Tony created nine of the most watched global events in the world, including the two Nelson Mandela campaigns, “The Wall: Live in Berlin” and 6 other events each of which had a global audience of over 500 million people. Today, Tony is producing The Listen Campaign, a global, continuous campaign to benefit one billion vulnerable and disadvantaged children worldwide.
What was the decisive moment that created the modern Tony Hollingsworth?
Producing the Nelson Mandela 70th birthday tribute in 1988. It was an 11 ½ hour broadcast that was taken by a hundred countries. It involved 83 stars and reached 600 million people back when the world population was only 5 billion. I don't mean TikTok reach, I mean long form reach. The campaign changed the narrative regarding Mandela. We changed the positioning from “a black terrorist” to a “black leader” by creating a musical tribute to his 70th birthday and selling it to the entertainment division of broadcasters. Once we did that, their news division could no longer refer to Mandela as a “black terrorist” and that’s how we changed the narrative.
What changed in your industry that you could have never imagined? What I didn't expect to change is that broadcast and network television would walk away from music wholesale by the time you sort of get to the late 90s.
A second thing was the enormous rise in the quantity of programming dedicated to sports.
How did you cope? First, by developing true 3600 campaigns, not events, campaigns. Second, by integrating ad sales into every one of the campaigns. “Guitar Legends”, which was done for Expo 92 in Spain, for example, generated four times as much money from ad sales than the original assigned budget.
What’s in store for 2025? The Listen campaign is annual and global. Built to repeat, it's got deep, deep foundations. What we're trying to do in this campaign is bring the world's attention to the fact that we now have one billion very vulnerable, very disadvantaged children in the world. The aim of Listen is to communicate, to illuminate the problems these kids have, but very, very importantly, make the campaign positive, celebrate proven, scalable, replicable solutions to those problems as well. We're going to use 80 stars and creative artists to help us do that.
It should produce, according to IPG's calculations, $434 million worth of communications. That's just the bits, not the music, not the art, not the numbers, but the bits in which you're saying, here's the problem, here's the solution, what the charitable sector would call advocacy. It should generate an online community, and it should raise approximately $100 million per year from the public responding to the campaign to give out as grants to children's charity projects around the world.
What would you say about older workers to a CEO or CMO who is in the process of hiring candidates? One of the big differences is that we know that the world is full of bumps. It's full of changes. Black swan events. And what the younger people don't have is the experience of things going wrong. And quite often the older people have been through a few wars. And so they actually know how to manage things when things are starting to go wrong.
And I think older people have a way of standing back from all of this and sort of working through it. What one guy said to me when I was studying management. He said, Tony, in a crisis you have to look at what you've got in your hand, do not concentrate on how it got there. Just go, what have I got in my hand? And what can I do with it? Don't get involved in this went wrong and that went wrong. I didn't really know how important that was until I got to about 50.
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