Exclusive Interview: FremantleMedia’s Gary Carter

PREMIUM: Gary Carter, FremantleMedia’s COO, tells World Screen Newsflash about the company’s pact with Fuji, along with sharing his thoughts on what’s driving the gains within the digital-content division and the challenges of rolling out scripted formats.

While perhaps best known for its mammoth entertainment brands, FremantleMedia is the biggest producer of daily drama in Europe—an expertise that the company is keen to export into other regions. With long-running hits like Gute Zeiten, schlechte Zeiten, which has been on the air on RTL in Germany since 1992, under its belt, FremantleMedia continues to develop its scripted-drama business, most recently announcing a commission for the daily series The Clan to launch on RTL Croatia this fall. Meanwhile, FremantleMedia’s powerhouse entertainment brands—Idols, Got Talent and The X Factor—remain among the world’s top-rated shows. One of the company’s newest hits is Total Blackout, created as part of an alliance with the Japanese broadcaster Fuji Television. Securing top-notch intellectual property from across the globe is at the heart of FremantleMedia’s strategy, its COO, Gary Carter, tells TV Formats. With oversight for the creative networks division—combining the worldwide drama and entertainment departments—as well as serving as chief creative officer of FMX, the digital-content arm, Carter is working to ensure that FremantleMedia builds quality brands across multiple platforms.

TV FORMATS: What led to the recent restructure of your European and Asian operations, and what are the opportunities for growth in these regions?
CARTER: We’ve restructured in order to redirect our focus in regional Europe and Asia Pacific. The growth has been considerable, and our new structure will better enable us to continue developing our business in these regions. The Asian countries are now being managed by our former Australian managing director [Ian Hogg]; he spent a good decade working in television from India to Singapore, and he is now our Asia Pacific CEO. The opportunity for us is a mixture of our own productions [in countries] where we have companies, like in Indonesia, and licensed formats. In particular we see a lot of opportunity for our Enterprises division. The growth in production driven by brand relationships—advertiser-funded programming or sponsorship of various forms—is very big. We’ve already started to explore that in recent years. Thailand’s Got Talent was fully funded by brands and we supervised the production. Their brands were very integrated and the show was very successful for the local broadcaster.

[We’re making a] big strategic push into India [where] we’ve had a presence in various guises over the last 15 years. We’re producing The X Factor and India’s Got Talent, and Idols has also aired in the country.

We believe that scripted [drama] is a big way forward in the Asian region. Most people don’t know this about FremantleMedia, but a significant part of our business is in scripted in Europe. We’re the largest producer of daily dramas across the European continent. We have that expertise. [In Asia] we’ve been pushing what we call soft scripted, the kind of scripted reality shows that have been so big in Germany.

Europe, with the exception of Germany and a few territories like Switzerland and Hungary, reports to me. Our European businesses are very mature, most of them, and very stable, but we have two big important focuses from a strategic point of view. The first is Spain and the second is Italy, where we’re big in drama but we need to move further into entertainment. France is a key European business for FremantleMedia, and one with a considerable amount of corporate focus. The French business has grown enormously over the last couple of years. We have working relationships, not just with M6 but with TF1 and with other broadcasters. Shows like Farmer Wants a Wife and the French version of Idols have been very successful for us. We have The Price Is Right on air. The French operation, led by Monica Galer, is an important company for FremantleMedia. We are proud of its performance in recent years, and we will be focused on further growth in the next few years.

We’re very focused at the moment on the Scandinavian territories. We’ve been doing a lot of format licensing successfully all across Eastern Europe and into Russia and we’re launching a daily drama for one of the Croatian broadcasters in October, and that’s important for us because we want to introduce more scripted programming into Eastern Europe.

TV FORMATS: Is it tougher to roll out scripted-format ideas than entertainment concepts like Got Talent or Farmer Wants a Wife?
CARTER: The way I look at it is, the daily dramas tend to be cousins of each other as opposed to brothers and sisters. Neighbours in Australia and Unter Uns in Germany and Un posto al sole in Italy, all daily dramas produced by us, all have essentially the same starting point. But as soon as you produce a daily drama and it gets beyond the first 100 episodes, things start to take on a life of their own. If you looked at them now you’d say, “What do you mean they’re related?” but if I showed you them 15 years ago you would understand that they were. The key to developing daily drama is to get what the Americans call the precinct right—the circumstances in which it’s happening, the locality, what keeps this group of people together. European daily dramas tend to be far closer to real life than the American big-shoulder, big-hair traditional daily soaps.

TV FORMATS: You’ve been working with Fuji Television in Japan to develop new concepts. How do you negotiate cultural differences and differences in working ethics?
CARTER: It’s really not easy but it’s a fascinating challenge. In the case of the Fuji exchange, the producers work with a translator all the time, as language is the biggest barrier. Additionally, there has to be a sense of mutual creative or professional respect between the individuals involved and that’s very important. When we select the individuals to do this exchange from our side, we are very careful that we match the Japanese side in terms of status and experience. Our experience is that what keeps the individuals in the room working on the idea is their sense of learning and respect in the process. The third thing is that one has to be very precise about what you’re looking for, what the parameters are. We want a clear format. We want one that is repeatable, transferable and scalable.

TV FORMATS: What gains have you seen in your digital-content division over the last year?
CARTER: I think it’s fair to say we were quite far-thinking as a company—we got into digital from a corporate point of view about six years ago and we’ve used our entertainment television formats and our drama formats to capitalize on some of the most important trends in this field. We cemented our relationship in the digital space and in working closely with brands when we acquired @radical.media last year, the commercials and content company based in New York. They’re very strong in branded online entertainment.

Additionally, we’ve moved into other kinds of digital activities, so last year we acquired the Canadian digital games company Ludia, with whom we’d enjoyed a very fruitful partnership developing games for some of our key brands, and because of that we’ve made strong inroads into the world of social and mobile games. Our television game-show brands have shown again how strong they are on any platform. If you look at the Price Is Right social game on Facebook, among others, you’ll see how those brands have started to live again on emerging digital networks. The other activity is really trying to cement the relationship and future-proof the relationship between our big talent shows and their core audiences. The X Factor, Idols and Got Talent are inherently social formats in the sense that there’s a high level of audience control over the outcome and a high level of emotional investment in the shows themselves. Things like [the popularity of] Susan Boyle are very indicative of that connection. So we’ve worked hard to leverage some of the social buzz. On America’s Got Talent and Britain’s Got Talent, we run auditions on YouTube, The X Factor launched a second screen app in a number of countries, and Idols has been the pioneer of Facebook voting and iTunes musical downloads. We also continue to produce web originals; these are shows that have nothing to do with our existing television brands. This year I’m happy to say we won an Interactive Rockie Award at Banff for SORTED, which is a fast-growing cooking community aimed at 18- to 34-year-olds. It’s our second win at Banff—our online drama Freak was named the best online program at the 2010 awards. And we won [an International] Digital Emmy [nomination] for PrintFriends last year as well. We also launched Scoreboard, our first Facebook show/game, and our German subsidiary launched an exciting, truly 360-degree drama on ZDF called Wer rettet Dina Foxx?

TV FORMATS: Can you give us an example of online content that has enhanced an existing television brand?
CARTER: We make Take Me Out, a dating show developed by FremantleMedia France, and in the U.K., the digital team produced an online companion program called The Gossip, which has become an integral part of the main show. It was a shoulder program on digital and online, and it’s been enormously successful in its own right, while also enhancing the fan’s experience of the main program. We’re doing that more and more. Another example is The X Factor U.K.’s spin-off series The F Factor. Where we have those big shows we tend to produce digital [companion] programming so that fans can immerse themselves even further in the experience.