You may not recognise The Juice Media by name, but you’ve almost certainly laughed at — and learnt from — its videos.
The company just celebrated five years of producing Honest Government Ads, a series of satirical videos made from the perspective of an all-too-honest “Australian government” spokesperson.
“By doing honest ads, we’re making the government say what it really thinks about us and how it treats us,” Juice Media founder Giordano Nanni told Crikey.
It would be easy to underestimate The Juice Media. It’s a small-scale operation, run out of Nanni’s Melbourne living room and produced using a single camera and a green screen.
But its reach is surprisingly enormous. Its YouTube channel — the major platform for Juice’s content — has 695,000 subscribers. That’s more than 7News, SBS and Network 10 combined. Each of its videos gets a couple of hundred thousand views on average; the best ones are viewed by millions. Together with its Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, The Juice Media has more than a million followers.
According to Graphtreon, it’s got more than 3800 paying Patreon subscribers chipping in anything between US$1 and US$100 a month. (How much each subscriber is paying is now private but the information was public until July 2018, when it was earning US$6.17 a patron).
The Juice Media built this audience with its biting videos on Australian current affairs, lampooning government “shitfuckery”, as Nanni likes to call it in his scripts. Each video contains scathing, nuanced critiques of complex topics — covering the intricacies of Australia’s voting systems, Australia’s lack of action on climate change or the trial of Witness K — combined with cheesy, overproduced graphics and the occasional slapstick prop.
Nanni takes pride in balancing entertainment and accuracy in the videos.
“I do try to make them very factual,” he said. “My strategy with satire is never to just get a laugh. What’s the point of laughing if we’re not going to learn something important here?”
Nanni acknowledges it’s hard to precisely measure the impact of a series like Honest Government Ads. He points to views as a basic way of understanding how many people they’re influencing — and says that by that metric, he considers their videos a success.
He said he’s proud of Juice’s ability to take mainstream media reporting on important topics that it considers undercovered and bring them to a bigger audience, like the company’s video on the Indonesian occupation of West Papua.
“It’s an issue that very few people know about unless you’re an activist, but that video has over 3 million views. There’s a level of knowledge that comes from that. It’s better than it was before,” he said.
Similarly, its most popular video ever was a March video about flattening the curve. At the time, Nanni says, the government’s message was still inconsistent and the epidemiological concept was foreign to most. Their three-minute “advertisement” has been viewed more than 7.5 million times.
The Juice Media has also been able to mobilise its audience beyond just watching videos. It joined with Digital Rights Watch to campaign against Australia’s controversial anti-encryption legislation law.
“We collaborated with them and linked people to this tool that we designed to make submissions to a Senate inquiry. We got 17,000 submissions. The government fucking ignored that and introduced the legislation with Labor’s support anyway,” Nanni said with a laugh.
Nanni says Juice Media’s videos have drawn the attention of a few people in politics. In 2017, the National Symbols Officer of Australia wrote to the company to say that its use of the official Australian government coat of arms broke the law. A week later, the government introduced legislation that criminalised impersonation of a government agency with up to two years’ imprisonment, something that Nanni worried Juice Media could fall afoul of. It has subsequently received a complaint from the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet for using a real screenshot of a government website containing the coat of arms.
“I nearly choked on my coffee. If that’s all it takes to confuse our satirical videos with your policies, what does it say about your policies?” Nanni said.
Nanni said the company has received DMs from Anthony Albanese suggesting a video idea, praise from Kevin Rudd, and one of its scripts read in Parliament by Adam Bandt.
The videos sometimes draw the ire of other governments too. Juice Media’s video about West Papua has been banned in Indonesia by the Indonesia government.
Nanni thinks the videos have been resonating because they use journalism rigour and style, and take it a step further by calling out bad behaviour and ridiculous policy. This is increasingly important, he reckons, during the pandemic and while the climate continues to change.
“It’s very hard times and people are struggling with a lot of challenges, whether it’s financial or social — it’s also a mental health problem that we’re all going through,” he said.
“Often than focusing on changing the government or policy, we can help people stay a bit more sane. We provide an outlet. We call it ‘shitfuckery’. And It’s not just about the jokes. We build a bit of community and solidarity. I think that’s an important factor that people don’t think about.”
Watching their videos has been a bit cathartic but each one makes me angrier and more committed to doing something including getting Labor to up their act. I hope enough people, including the young who suffer the most from Coalition policies get the same urge to do something.
This sort of well-researched satire is probably about as good as any, and the number of views suggests it is spreading its message quite effectively. On the other hand, laughing at something tends to relieve any anger that might be more appropriate and quickly gets cosy. Tony Davis wrote under the heading, “Stop clapping, this is serious,” in The Sydney Morning Herald, March 1, 2003, about Tom Lehrer:
Lehrer is of the opinion that while satire may attract attention to an issue, it doesn’t achieve a lot else.
“The audience usually has to be with you, I’m afraid. I always regarded myself as not even preaching to the converted; I was titillating the converted.”
“The audiences like to think that satire is doing something. But, in fact, it is mostly to leave themselves satisfied. Satisfied rather than angry, which is what they should be.”
His favourite quote on the subject is from British comedian Peter Cook, who, in founding the Establishment Club in 1961, said it was to be a satirical venue modelled on “those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War”.
For people like me, if I don’t laugh, then the alternative is to cry.
“It all depends” is my answer to Lehrer.
A well researched satire is educative to most, for example, if someone says “we are reaching our climate goals – just like we did with the Kyoto protocol”, you can just point them to the Juice Media’s most ambitious ad to date https://www.thejuicemedia.com/kyotocredits/
I knew about this issue but 99% of Australians (still) don’t.
I hope you are right, but I suspect you are really reinforcing Lehrer’s point. You like what you saw in that video, but you also say you already knew the facts behind it. I’m not sure how much solid quantitative data backs up your 99% figure for Australians who are more ignorant than you, but for “Juice Media’s most ambitious ad to date” to be making a dent in that number, some of them would have to both (a) see it and (b) believe it. You provide nothing to suggest that is happening. It would be far more encouraging to hear from someone who said watching these videos turned their world view upside down.
Hi SSR,
On a lot of the local issues they raise, like Cej above, I am familiar with much of what they are covering, but sometimes I learn quite a bit more. This week’s satire video was the prime example of that:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uXo7wtGW7M
I thought I understood the so called “Gas Led Recovery”, but their coverage of Gisera gave me an understanding of a whole area of it that I didn’t have, and left me feeling concerned, instead of amused (moreso than any previous Honest Government ad that I have watched).
If you look through the comments under the Youtube videos (I don’t watch on other sites, so I can’t speak about how those are viewed), you will generally see a split between people quoting the funny bits, or talking about their concerns, or regularly, “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry” in response to the funny satire versus the serious underlying subject. All of that suggests that the satire is having a reasonable effect on a percentage of viewers that are looking past the comedy.
Equally importantly, they are not just producing effective satirical “ad’s” – many of the ad’s are followed up with a 40 to 50 minute podcast on the story behind them. By the viewing numbers those are mostly getting 10 to 20 per cent of the hits that the ad’s are getting – a few get higher, and some of the highly shared ad’s get a lower percentage – some with about a million hits, only have 40 to 50 thousand hits on the follow through story – but I would suggest that is still decent follow through in the context that was concerning you above. Their Youtube video list is here,
https://www.youtube.com/user/thejuicemedia/videos
which will show both number of views and the range of what they are presenting beyond the bare bones satirical ad’s, which I do share semi regularly with friends or family who are not offended by swearing – and this week I did discuss my concerns about Gisera, pointing out that “unfortunately they base their satire on facts”. That said, I have not written to any politicians or similar about these issues, so perhaps the fact that I don’t do more than discuss the occasional issue raised there (as well as here in Crikey), may confirm your concerns that these forms of media are not doing enough to make people politically active, but it does at least raise some awareness.
I don’t believe Tom Lehrer was referring to a country which has one of the least diverse media sectors in the world, where a dominant organisation adopts partisan positions and influences the focus of other media. Satire then gains importance.
In Oz, satire has a significant role, provoking thought on issues that are otherwise a mere media blip, information not readily available, buried as insignificant or simply not reported.
Judging satire by its ability to start political movements sets the bar far too high. Call it what you will – lampooning, taking the piss, deflating or ridiculing the arrogant, provoking thought or humorously informing – all valuable.
Its excellent. Should be compulsory viewing for anyone allowed to vote.
This is the best news I’ve had all day at least some people are getting a more realistic view of how stuffed our political system is and not just relying on the pathetic commercial media for the dribble they serve up as news.
Excellent videos keep it coming!