A Matter of Trust

October 2007

It is no secret that the reality genre has changed the rules of television and certainly democratized the medium. It’s no longer just professional writers, producers and actors who work in television; now ordinary people not only participate in these shows, but they can become celebrities out of nowhere. And viewers at home can vote people off shows and determine the outcome of talent contests.

It would seem that a good format, plus relatively simple interactivity—such as calling in, text messaging and e-mailing—form a match made in television heaven. And to a large extent, they do. But the same tools that make some shows so popular can also be misused to the point of grossly misleading the audience. A case in point was the call-in scandal that swept through British broadcasters this past year like an insidious case of the flu. No channel was spared as case after case of wrongdoing, falsifying viewers’ votes or even illegal premium phone charges came to light.

There are certainly lessons to be learned from what happened in the U.K.

While the British TV industry is still calculating the damages and grappling with the very important issue of viewer trust, the rest of the world’s format business is moving on because audiences love shows that offer participation and interactivity. These shows not only capture large audiences, they also offer broadcasters and producers numerous potential revenue streams.

In fact, much of what happened in the U.K. can be seen as a result of broadcasters’ overzealousness in the quest for eyeballs, and a consequent lapse in editorial control. In almost all indicted call-in shows, several players were involved—the broadcasters, the producers, phone companies and more. Here are a few of the incidents:

•  ITV accidentally overcharged viewers who were voting for contestants on The X Factor by £200,000. More than a million people were each charged 50p instead of 35p. The error came to light during a regular financial audit. To encourage self-reporting when mistakes were discovered, the British media regulating body Ofcom decided against imposing a £250,000 fine. ITV instead donated £200,000 to charity and offered to refund those who’d been overcharged.
• Channel 4’s Richard & Judy daily quiz You Say, We Pay asked viewers to pay £1 per call to enter a competition where the contestants had already been chosen.
• Some 11,500 text votes for ITV’s Dancing On Ice finale were not processed properly because of a technical problem at the Vodafone network.
• Phone profits from the BBC’s Saturday Kitchen were donated to charity after the broadcaster admitted viewers had been asked to phone in to participate in a show they had no chance of appearing on.
• Five’s quiz show Brainteaser broadcast the name of fictional winners on screen when none of the viewers could answer a puzzle.
• The managing director of GMTV resigned after it was discovered that some callers to its premium-rate competitions had no chance of winning because potential winners had been chosen before the phone lines closed.
• Even the darling of children’s TV, BBC’s Blue Peter, was given a £50,000 fine by Ofcom for deceiving viewers when a girl touring the studios was asked to pose as a winner of a 10p-per-call competition last November.

The scandals took on such unprecedented proportions and triggered such outrage by the public that broadcasters quickly took action.

Channel 4 dropped all interactive quizzes from its schedule, except one related to Deal or No Deal. “We’ve taken the lead,” says Kevin Lygo, Channel 4’s director of television. “We’re not doing any premium-rate phone-in competitions any more, because the whole thing is so difficult to police properly.

“Viewer trust is vital,” continues Lygo. “We’re slightly in the eye of the storm, and proportionality seems to me an important thing to cling to here. Most of television—99 percent of it—is completely fine, enjoyed and trusted by audiences in every way. When there are mistakes made, when things are wrong, when deception takes place, or when in the keenest sense, like the phone-in shows, you enter a competition that you couldn’t win because there already was a winner [chosen], that’s completely wrong. It must be dealt with, and has been dealt with by all broadcasters.”

In July, the channel also announced an action plan to safeguard viewer trust in programs like Big Brother. The plan included: best practice guidelines for producers; enhanced training for producers, both freelance and staff; contracts tightened to make independent producers more accountable; promotional material to be cleared by producers and commissioners and an in-house lawyer; and a major audience research project to examine the issue of viewer trust.

The BBC is taking similar steps and ITV is awaiting the outcome of an independent internal investigation by the consulting firm Deloitte.

“We welcome the initiatives being proposed by Britain’s main broadcasters,” says Cathy Ditchfield, the director of marketing and communications at Pact, the organization that represents British producers. “It is important that broadcasters apply sanctions where producers fail to meet standards. However, if these serious issues are to be resolved, then sanctions must be applied evenly both to independent producers and those working in-house. There should be no double standards or wriggle room for anyone.”

ITV’s executive chairman, Michael Grade, argued that it is this very mix of in-house and independent producers working together in the white heat of TV production that can lead to accidental audience betrayal. “On the question of the production chain, we have been vividly reminded of how the world has changed since the early days of the BBC and then ITV, when almost everyone was on the company payroll, and when people stayed in the same jobs, even on the same programs for large parts of their entire careers,” he told the Royal Television Society in July.

“Production teams knew each other very well,” continued Grade. “The editorial chain of command was short, clear and effective. Organizations had their own internal ethos, their own collective memory of what was and what was not good form and good practice.”

DIALING-UP TROUBLE

The world has indeed changed, and in today’s fragmented TV landscape, in the desperate chase for ratings, broadcasters will do just about anything to win that race.

The call-in scandals have been quite an embarrassment to the British television industry, one that has always bragged of being the best in the world. It has also raised several questions: The first is, has it damaged the format business as a whole? Two visionaries of the reality-TV genre, John de Mol and Mark Burnett, think definitely not.

“I can imagine, because I’ve been in this business for almost 30 years, that the pressure broadcasters are under to perform and to deliver ratings sometimes can lead to situations that, when you look back, you didn’t want to be in,” says de Mol. “The fight for viewers is huge, and I don’t think what happened in the U.K. is something you can [attribute to] the whole genre and the whole business. There are always exceptions to the rules and there are always things you have to look at—what caused [the call-in situation] and what are the reasons that it happened—and not draw general conclusions.”

“Things go wrong sometimes,” says Burnett, although he adds that despite what happened in the U.K., audience-participation shows are here to stay. “Calling in and text voting is certainly going to become much more prevalent in America. The U.S. is probably one of the least text-friendly countries. It’s very prevalent in Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and South America, so I think you can fully expect a lot of text-based additions to TV.”

The other question that many in the industry are asking is whether or not the U.K. scandals have caused a glitch in the short-term demand for some call-in shows. A number of distributors believe so. “I think it has made broadcasters wary,” says Andrea Jackson, the managing director at Zeal Entertainment. “Hopefully, in a positive way, it will allow broadcasters outside of the U.K. to recheck their systems of control and accountability, to learn from the problems seen in the U.K. and to avert a similar problem from happening.”

“We believe the U.K. call-in incidents have caused viewers to have less faith in the quiz format,” adds Kees Abrahams, the CEO and co-founder of 2waytraffic, the Dutch company that owns the rights to Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? and produces content for multiple platforms, including formats.

“It’s hard to say to what extent broadcasters are less open to call-ins. But we are confident that if interactivity is a naturally integrated creative part of the format, it will continue to be successful,” continues Abrahams. “In the entire line of business, companies will always do their utmost to prevent this from happening, wherever they’re based. No one benefits from these types of incidents, but unfortunately people do make mistakes.”

Shows with various types of audience participation are so popular, and can guarantee such huge ratings—one case in point is American Idol—that format producers and broadcasters will not shun them. Quite to the contrary, numerous distributors continue to offer them and devise new and better forms of interactivity.

Zeal Entertainment has a number of formats that include audience participation. What’s the Big Idea? was created by and first broadcast on TV2 in Norway and has been broadcast on RAI 1 in Italy and TV2 in Denmark. The show is a nationwide search for the best new idea or invention. A panel of experts selects a shortlist of the best ideas from around the country, but viewers at home also have a say by phoning in to vote for their favorites.

Also from Zeal Entertainment is the Chatterbox Partnership format Under Construction, which has been produced as local versions in more than 20 territories, in which 13 couples compete to win a dream house. The couples must build the house from scratch with their own hands, and each week a couple is voted off until the final week when two couples and their families reach the final moment where the nation can vote and decide which of these families can move in and make this house their home.

“A viewer phone-in means that the audience can shape the result of the program and makes the audience feel more involved in the narrative,” says Jackson. “Broadcasters understandably like to generate additional revenue around a program from viewer call-ins.”

“It’s not just about being able to vote for the outcome of the show,” adds Rob Clark, the senior executive VP of entertainment and production for FremantleMedia’s worldwide entertainment division. “It’s hugely important to a lot of our formats that the interactivity goes beyond just the idea that you see some contestants and then you vote for them, or you see a telephone number and you can ring up to be a part of a quiz. Programs have to live on many platforms now to be successful globally.”

FROM CALL TO CLICK

New platforms provide more ways to connect with the audience. As viewers become more tech savvy, broadcasters and producers have to not only keep up with what kinds of programs viewers want but also how they want to interact with them.

FremantleMedia’s Clark mentions that shows such as America’s Got Talent and American Idol have very active websites. “You actually need a quite sophisticated, worked-out interactive broadcast platform strategy,” continues Clark. “And it’s not just young people who use the Internet; it’s actually people who have leisure time, so quite often it’s retirees. It’s fascinating to see who uses American Idol’s website.”

Clark says that the site gets billions of hits. “People want to know more about the contestants,” he continues. “Or they want to know what’s happened on a program they’ve missed, or they want to know what other people think about [the contestants] so they enter the chat rooms. Or they may want to know what else is happening—is there a tour? That idea of interactivity is vital on those big shows now, but not just as a voting process.”

The Internet has been very important to formats from Distraction as well. “Internet participation has been hugely successful for one of our live game-show formats called All Against One,” says Michel Rodrigue, the president and CEO of Distraction. “It generated 50,000 participants per episode.”

Sparks Network has Mash Up from Digital Magics, which is a full-scale professional television format on the Internet that offers new innovative forms of audience interaction through video participation, games, interviews, prizes, prestigious guests, extravagant polls, dating games and more. It’s currently available on Alice Live WebTV.

Another format from Sparks member Digital Magics that includes interactive elements is Taxi Meter. In this talk show, the traditional TV studio is replaced by a taxi, with the cab driver as show host and a guest politician as passenger. Viewers at home can ask their questions through live web or mobile video-participation, video-messages or simply by posting their questions on the channel’s website.

“Broadcasters are very eager to take a step further from just voting and easy SMS competitions,” says Fredrik af Malmborg, the managing director and cofounder of Sparks Network. In fact, he believes that adapting user-generated content in shows “is a matter of survival for the TV industry. I think we will soon see the new breakthrough format that really will bring user-generated content in the best way to TV, in the same way as Big Brother and Survivor changed the reality genre.”

The Portuguese company beActive has created several cross-media entertainment formats. One of them, Sofia’s Diary, started up as a web blog, and in just a couple of years developed its own TV and radio shows, spin-off DVDs, music CDs, books and a monthly teen magazine.

Beat Generation is beActive’s latest format. It mixes factual entertainment with scripted drama and features five young adults living together who decide to start a video blog. Its success has spread to TV, radio, mobile phones, printed media and podcasts. It is accessible at any time and on whatever device viewers want.

“Beat Generation is a perfect mix between a scripted fictional TV series and a factual-entertainment show, with a 360-degree approach,” says Nuno Bernardo, the program’s creator. “The format not only works on the Internet and mobile phones, but it has also brought young audiences back to watching TV.”

MOVING ON

The charge for finding better and more interesting ways for viewers to interact with shows is on—a charge that no one and nothing can stop. These shows have the potential of attracting huge audiences and generating equally large revenues. But before the U.K. market can completely join the bandwagon, it must deal with the issue of viewer trust.

Why would British viewers watch the new generation of interactive shows, much less participate in them, if they think the outcomes would be predetermined or the voting tampered with?

“Nobody’s walking around saying, ‘I can no longer watch TV,’” says Professor Adrian Monck, an award-winning broadcast journalist with CBS News, ITN and Sky News and now head of journalism at City University, London. “Children still tune in to Blue Peter and [adults] vote on shows such as The X Factor. The response to these scandals has more to do with issues about unregulated competition and falling ratings.”

Monck’s book Can You Trust The Media? will be published by Icon Books in April 2008. He believes that the solution lies in broadcasters spending a chunk of their budgets to have competitions professionally run and managed. “Newspaper editors wouldn’t get involved in a competition, so why should producers? It’s beyond their area of expertise. Policing interactivity has been tacked onto their job titles and it’s unfair to them.”

Niall McKinney, the founding director of Utalkmarketing.com, looked into the scandal at GMTV (whose breakfast show ran competitions urging viewers to ring in, despite having already chosen winners, resulting in the resignations of two directors). He believes that British broadcasters will eventually be able to recover from the scandals. “They need first and foremost to be squeaky clean,” he says. “Second, they need time to restore trust, doing work in tune with their brand, such as raising money for charity and committing to good deals for viewers. ITV’s and Channel 4’s moves to donate money to charities following revelations about audience deceit was good.

“Any more incidents,” says McKinney, “and audience credibility could be damaged permanently. We have yet to measure whether sponsorship and advertising will be dented around shows with tainted reputations. As the Internet slowly erodes TV ad revenues, this is not a good time to find out.”

With many participation-TV shows suspended or dropped from British schedules, and the BBC awaiting a separate review by former BBC News chief Ron Neil, ITV is pressing ahead with a new series of The X Factor and a drama called Rock Rivals (by Shed Productions) that will ask audiences to vote for their desired ending.

Some analysts put the cost of suspending quizzes at ITV at around £1.5 million a week. The long-term effects, in the U.K. and abroad, remain to be seen. Sparks’s Malmborg comments, “I think this is a very U.K.-centric scandal. Few countries outside the U.K. would take it that seriously. The British people have a very high level of trust in television. Viewers in other countries would not be as surprised that everything you see on TV is not true.”