Dawn Airey

January 4, 2010 World Screen

In the spring of 2008, Dawn Airey surprised the British media industry by quitting her job as managing director of global content at ITV and returning to Five, the channel she had helped launch in 1997, as chair and chief executive. It was during her first tenure at Five that she established her reputation as a top media executive. She famously described Five’s remit as “the three Fs: football, films and f***ing.” Airey is outspoken, often controversial, and unfailingly passionate about the television business and Five’s future, even in today’s challenging economy.

 
WS:The Five you returned to was quite different from the Five you left.
AIREY:I left Five when it was seven years old… I did leave it as a quite noisy child, with a boisterous personality. When I got back I thought it had got middle-aged very quickly. It hadn’t had its teenage years and fun twenties and thirties or forties, and that is one of the challenges that I have. To a degree, channels always take on a bit of the personality of the directors of programs in particular, and possibly of the chief executive. So after I left and then the directors of programs changed, Five went down a different route.
 
We were very deliberately a noisy brand when we started out, partly out of necessity, but also because of a very intentional positioning. We wanted to do things differently; we needed to be different because we had a fraction of anybody else’s budget and it had to work effectively for us. And then a new management came in and they wanted to take it a different way and that was supported. But I think Five lost its way a little bit because it tried to be what everyone else was doing rather than remember what it was very good at. That’s why it went from being a very needy, loud, demanding child you couldn’t ignore to something that was very comfortable, very, very safe, but a bit boring.
 
WS:And what have you done to turn it around?
AIREY:We brought in a new creative team. Richard Woolfe has joined us from Sky1, and I lured Jeff Ford back from Channel 4 to manage acquisitions and the digital channels. We’ve also got a string of new creative appointments in the programming department.
 
Those appointments have already started to bear pretty good fruit. We’ve been commissioning a lot of fast-turnaround documentaries, which get us noticed and make a lot of noise fast. And we’ve announced a whole host of key entertainment and talent announcements, whether it’s Paul Merton doing a new series, or Robson Green or Louise Redknapp, Justin Lee Collins, Zoë Ball, Jamie Theakston, Ian Wright, Melinda Messenger or Kate Walsh.
 
We just recently bought what I hope to be the hit U.S. show, which is FlashForward. We have also commissioned big entertainment formats that will feature in the autumn schedule.
 
We have launched an early evening entertainment magazine between 6:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m, Live from Studio Five. It’s a new-style news-and-entertainment format. We’ve got high hopes for it.
 
And we’ve done all of that against the backdrop of the worst entertainment economy that I have seen in my 25 years of work in broadcasting. This year I’m looking at revenues being down 20-plus percent. Not surprisingly, when I joined, most of the channel’s programming money was committed to 2009, so we had to take an aggressive review of the overhead, a consequence of which was losing 25 percent of the staff—a painful but essential outcome. We’ve also had to substantially reduce the program budget, but we’ve done that through renegotiating the contracts, and taking money out of non-key areas of the schedule and focusing it on prime time. We’ve done all that and, interestingly, the results are quite spectacular. We are the only family of channels to have grown its share of viewing year to date. So I’m pretty pleased with our performance.
 
WS:Despite the fact that your budget has been reduced for obvious reasons, are U.S. shows still important to your family of channels?
AIREY:Oh, God, they are really important! Five has always had, right from the beginning, really good U.S. series and films. We’re changing the structure of the schedule so it goes back to being slightly more stripped and stranded so it’s easier to navigate. From the autumn, we will be almost exclusively narrative on the main channel from between 9 p.m. and 11 p.m., and we will do that with U.S. series and movies. We’ve got the top-rated U.S. series in the U.K.: the CSI franchise, NCIS and The Mentalist, which is a huge hit, and I mentioned FlashForward. So we will continue with our preeminence of U.S. product.
 
And Five US, the digital channel, which we rebranded earlier this year as Five USA, that little “A” made all the difference. That is exclusively devoted to U.S. programming and it plays a key role in our overall performance. Actually, U.S. acquisitions are important for Fiver as well. Fiver and Five USA are delivering year-on-year growth figures and are doing spectacularly well.
 
I am sure we will continue to be the home of U.S. drama, although some of our detractors say, “You’re overly reliant on CSI.” Well, CSI accounts for 5 percent of our ratings. Coronation Street accounts for 10 percent of ITV’s ratings. Deal or No Deal on Channel 4 accounts for 10 percent of their ratings. So we’re not overly reliant on any one specific series, but they are an important part of the mix. We are very happy and proud to have the best of the U.S. on the channel.
 
WS:The British government released its Digital Britain report, which outlines its vision for ensuring that the U.K. is at the forefront of the global digital economy. One of the issues the report addressed is the future of Channel 4, which faces a substantial funding gap. Is the prospect of a merger between you and Channel 4 completely off the table?
AIREY: It is for the moment. Digital Britain wasn’t just about the broadcast landscape—it was about the broadband landscape, too. The government and Ofcom asked us to come up with a solution for the funding problems that Channel 4 presented. And we did. But ultimately they didn’t go with us for a number of reasons, primarily political. They were opposed to the idea of a state-owned asset, like Channel 4, becoming a public-private partnership, which it would have done with RTL [Group, the parent company of Five].
 
Channel 4 felt that philosophically we were in very different places and didn’t quite see how the partnership would work. But I think it’s quite ironic that one of the things that Digital Britain set out to do was to solve the funding problems of Channel 4. And it actually hasn’t proffered any solution. There may be a deal with BBC Worldwide, I don’t know.
 
I think it would have been a really good solution for public-service broadcasting because the synergies of putting Channel 4 and Five together were so significant that it would have more than dealt with the funding gap that Channel 4 stated it has, and it would have resulted in more programming in key public-service interest areas.
 
WS:Do you see Five remaining a stand-alone channel?
AIREY: I sit at my desk with a big crystal ball on it! We’ve always said, and I do believe, that consolidation is going to happen. And if consolidation happens, the smaller players tend to consolidate, and we are a smaller player, so yes, I think we will consolidate. When, where and who with, I cannot say.
 
WS:Well, more importantly, are you still having fun?
AIREY:I come to work every day never quite knowing what’s going to happen; the only thing I know is that it’s going to be fun, exhilarating and exciting. I work with a really lovely team of people. And I’m in a very fortunate position. We are not a plc. Our finances don’t bear the scrutiny on a daily and monthly basis as a plc’s does—as, for example, at ITV. And I have an incredibly supportive shareholder in the RTL Group. I don’t want to be anywhere else; I am very happy at Five. I wouldn’t have gone through the pain of exiting ITV to come back here if I wasn’t really, really clear that this is where I wanted to be.
 
I never thought in a month of Sundays—and this is the joyous thing about life—that I would end up back at Five. But I am, and I’m very, very happy to be dealing with an interesting set of commercial and creative challenges, with people I admire and whose company I enjoy, with a fabulous supportive shareholder. I have every confidence in the team’s ability to put Five back on track as a fun, entertaining, challenging brand that is admired and successful.
 
WS:Are you satisfied with the performance of Five’s family of digital channels? Do they allow you to accommodate advertisers in different ways?
AIREY: I’m never satisfied! I’m sort of the Oliver Twist of chief executives when it comes to performance, “Give me more!” I always want more! But like the main channel, Fiver and Five USA are doing spectacularly well. And they are hedging combined audience shares of 1.6 percent, which is the highest that they have ever been. As for advertisers, clearly digital channels continue to give them really effectively priced, good quality impacts. Advertisers continue to spend billions on spot advertising. But we’re currently growing our video-on-demand inventory and we put pre-roll and mid-roll commercials in there.
 
WS: What have you learned about how your viewers are watching Five’s programming?
AIREY:The rump of it is still free-to-air—it’s still in the broadcast space, which is good, because that is where we charge a premium for our advertising. But audiences increasingly expect their content, “whenever, wherever, on whatever,” and that is usually online. But 95 percent of the viewing is still from the old-fashioned broadcast stream—some of it is recorded on DVRs and played back the same day. There is a small percentage as well that is picked up seven days later. But our on-demand streams are rising.
 
WS:Tell us about the soap portal you recently launched.
AIREY:We’ve got two of the best soaps—Home and Away and Neighbours. There is a huge tradition of viewing soaps in the U.K. You’ve got Emmerdale, Coronation Street, EastEnders and Hollyoaks. The soap portal is clever because it allows our customers to come in and catch up on our soaps, but it also allows them to interact with other soaps. So it’s a strategy that is beneficial to everyone: to us because it reinforces our brands, to our viewers because it gives them another opportunity to see the soaps, it’s great for advertisers, and also for people who are interested in the broader soap community.
 
WS:Why did you enter the Canvas partnership?
AIREY:Project Canvas delivers broadband Internet content to the TV in the living room. It’s a hugely important step forward because it creates even greater choice for viewers. We’re big supporters of anything that’s going to improve free-to-air television because we are a free-to-air television provider and, quite frankly, it helps to be inside the tent helping to make and form those decisions about the future of the medium with other people in the industry rather than standing on the outside. But Canvas is interesting on another front, too. Potentially, it opens up a swathe of new commercial opportunities for networks and content providers, for instance, with the technology capable of instituting a system of micropayments. But I think that will be an incremental business for us, not the main game.
 
WS:If we think back to when we were young and watched TV—it’s come quite a way, hasn’t it?
AIREY: I remember when I started out in the business, there was a guy called Richard Creasey, the head of documentaries at Central Televisionin the ’80s. He said one day we will be carrying around what is now the iPhone—a beautifully stylish device that you can slip into your handbag, that can give you video on demand and will be your phone and can store all your pictures and music, and I thought, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, what have you been smoking?” And actually it’s what’s come to pass. It’s a great thing, it’s wonderful, you just see a complete utter blossoming of the broadcast industry, because at the end of the day, all these devices ultimately require long-form content. That’s the business of television producers, broadcasters and distributors. What it is all about now is how you get your content out to as many people as possible, because eyeballs equal money. If you’ve got the eyeballs it’s not beyond the ability of broadcasters to figure out how to monetize them. Demanding times, but interesting. It’s like discovering a new world. It’s exhilarating, it’s treacherous, there are pots of gold for some and there are deep ravines for others and we’ve just got to navigate this new world, which we are doing pretty well.