Endemol’s Cathy Payne Touts Strength of Broad Slate

NEW YORK: Cathy Payne, the chief executive of Endemol Worldwide Distribution, talks to World Screen about the company’s diverse catalogue, which features some 29,000 hours of content that ranges from scripted dramas and comedies to factual programming, from reality shows to kids’ and family fare.

It’s fair to say that Endemol Worldwide Distribution (EWD) has something for every broadcaster or channel and every budget. After the Hollywood studios and BBC Worldwide, EWD is one of the largest distributors in the world, “and we’ve grown so much in the last couple of years,” says Cathy Payne, the company’s chief executive.

Payne was the chief executive of Southern Star International prior to the Endemol Group’s acquisition of the Southern Star Group back in 2009—a deal that significantly bolstered Endemol’s output of scripted fare. Payne saw the integration of both catalogues, Endemol’s rich in successful formats such as Big Brother, Deal or No Deal and Wipeout, and Southern Star’s, which was full of scripted series.

Almost four years later, Payne and her sales team have a vast selection of programs to offer buyers. “Fifty percent of the catalogue is produced by an Endemol entity and 50 percent is acquired from a third party,” she explains. “As part of that we are very active in looking for product. We want broad-audience non-scripted and scripted programming, but we are focusing on product from North America and from the U.K. We like all the non-scripted factual, anything in the food area. The U.K. is a really rich market for good factual programming for prime time. We produce a lot for Channel 4 and they are great properties for distribution.”

Among EWD’s new titles are Peaky Blinders, a Tiger Aspect drama for BBC. “People loved it,” explains Payne. “They said it doesn’t look like a British drama, it looks like HBO, premium pay product, and there is a lot of interest in that. Hell on Wheels, which we share with Entertainment One, our co-production partner, continues to do well. No doubt, titles like Extreme Makeover continue to rack up the sales for us. Leverage is entertaining, it’s a modern-day Robin Hood in an urban environment.”

Just as important as the new shows are the evergreens in the EWD catalogue. “You’ll notice in our catalogue we always have our new releases and then we always have our catalogue highlights,” notes Payne. “We always try to think, OK, we are launching this, what could be a good companion piece, what’s good to bring back around to people’s attention?”

That deep catalogue is especially useful when EWD approaches the many digital channels launching around the world. As Payne explains, EWD has a number of key franchises. “In the factual genre there are about ten really strong franchises, including Wipeout, Fear Factor and Extreme Makeover. In the scripted area, we’ve got Wire in the Blood and McLeod’s Daughters. So when we go to digital terrestrial channels that are starting up, they can get a couple of key franchises from us that have multiple episodes and we’ve retained access to the language dubs. That was always part of our philosophy. We started encoding material over ten years ago so [now] nearly all of our catalogue is encoded and for some shows we own 18 different language versions. With McLeod’s Daughters, even though it’s an older series, it’s still 224 episodes. So a channel starting in Germany might only be paying a small amount of money per episode, but when you multiply it, it’s a lot of episodes.

“Your catalogue sustains you,” continues Payne. “It’s great when you sell something the first time, and as I say, it’s always great when you get a hit show—we all get one of those now and then. That’s easy to sell, it’s how you keep refreshing and using your catalogue that will really get you that extra margin.”

Payne has not only grown the EWD catalogue, she has expanded the reach of her sales team. This has proven to be a good move—mining opportunities in markets whose economies are doing well to offset disappointing sales in countries that are struggling. “In markets like Italy, Spain and Greece over the last three years, our sales have definitely been dramatically down and we’re not forecasting for a great year next year,” she explains. “However, other parts of Europe and the rest of the world have really held up very well for us. Our expansion into some markets, like putting someone in Moscow and being able to reach out to the Baltics and all the Russian territories, it’s amazing the amount of business we have been able to secure from those markets.”  

Payne has also placed a sales person in Miami. “Having local people on the ground just helps so much,” she says. Asia is also doing well and, of course, rich markets like the U.K. and Australia are providing ample sales opportunities, as are the many cable outlets in the U.S., which are also looking for product.

What everyone is looking for, obviously, is a hit show. “When you ask buyers what do you want, everyone says, I just want a hit,” continues Payne. “If it were that easy to find and make one, we’d have them all the time! So you use your best judgment to pick a few things that you think will work and invest wisely and take your time. But as I say, no one sets out to make a program that doesn’t work and no one sets out to invest in one, so you hope you pick more winners than losers and with a little bit of luck on the way, when you get that hit, negotiate—negotiate wisely because remember, hits come very few and far between.”