Exclusive Interview: John de Mol

After reaching extraordinary levels of success at Endemol, a company he founded with Joop van den Ende and other investors in 1994, John de Mol found himself in an executive position he didn’t quite cherish. In his heart he is a creator and producer, feeling most at home in the studio, not sitting behind a desk shuffling profit-and-loss sheets. So in 2005, de Mol set up Talpa Media Group, where he can once again immerse himself in what he does best—creating hit formats. De Mol talks about running a format company in today’s competitive marketplace.

WS: When you first came up with the idea for Big Brother and your other big formats, what challenges did you face in trying to convince broadcasters to try a new programming concept?
DE MOL: There were so many challenges and there was so much resistance that I find it very difficult to give you a short answer. From the moment we had the basic idea of Big Brother, to the moment we finished the format, it took us one and a half years. In the meantime we had been talking to numerous broadcasters, first of course in Holland, but nobody even wanted to discuss it. They said, This is impossible, you cannot do this, nobody wants to see it, we will have bad press, blah, blah, blah.

The resistance was huge and at the end of the day—but this is a pretty well known story—we sold Big Brother in Holland to the network Veronica, where we had to take full risk for the whole show for them.

Actually, over the last ten years, nothing has changed because every time you offer a format that is different from everything before it, you encounter resistance, because most broadcasters [would] still rather have a safe choice, as far as a TV show can be safe, with something they know, than go for the unknown.

My vision of this business is that the next really big thing will not come from a genre that we already know, it will be something that will find a lot of resistance, but in the end will have millions of viewers.

WS: Today the format business is established. Are broadcasters still very risk averse when it comes to trying something new?
DE MOL: My theory is that the bigger the market, starting with the U.S. and the U.K. and then Germany, France, Italy and Spain, the more risk averse they are. That’s why I am absolutely not unhappy that I operate from a small-sized country, because the smaller the country, the lower the risk if you try something new. If something doesn’t work, it’s not the end of the world. So I am very happy to operate from a country like Holland, where the willingness to try new things is much, much bigger than in countries like the U.S. or the U.K. or Germany. Holland is a market that is important enough that if you have a hit, everybody looks at it and wants to have it right away.

WS: When you are creating your shows, do you think from the very beginning, I want a mega hit, or do you just try to produce a well conceived and well executed show, and if the mega hit comes along, well, that’s all the better.
DE MOL: My answer to this question is somewhere in the middle. Every concept, every idea we work on, we must be as convinced as possible that it will lead to a show with successful ratings. We are a production company that delivers prime-time shows to networks who expect good ratings. I have been brought up in this business with that sort of mentality. So every format, every show, every idea, we work on, if I don’t think it will [result in] a program with good ratings, I will stop it immediately. So basically my goal is, every show we produce should be a success.

Now that’s step number one. You cannot run a company with 24 people who are working on new ideas with only the goal that every show has to be the new groundbreaking format. You don’t always know that beforehand because an idea can develop in a certain direction and [eventually] become groundbreaking, but not in the beginning. The good thing is that when we feel we have programs that push the boundaries and are crossing barriers that we haven’t seen before, that is reason enough to invest in it further and work on it further, even if networks say, No, we would never air that. That has been the reaction I’ve had to basically every big successful show. And it’s not going to stop me from further developing a show. If necessary, I’ll make my own investment and make pilots to convince at least one station to air it.

WS: If it’s true that an idea can come from anywhere, how do you work with your team to foster as good a creative environment as possible?
DE MOL: That’s very difficult because companies like Talpa Content don’t have a lot of examples from the rest of the world we can learn from. We are sort of inventing the wheel ourselves, so what we try to do is this: picture a pyramid and turn it upside, so the point is down and the wide side is up. Every month 50 to 100 one-page ideas come in to the top of the pyramid. Most of the ideas are developed internally. We also have a whole network with all kinds of relations both in Holland and outside Holland with people with different creative backgrounds who send us ideas, never a format, because there is a long way from an idea to a format.

We have weekly meetings every Monday evening at six o’clock till sometimes two or three o’clock in the morning. We present all those new ideas and discuss them and out of those let’s say 50, we throw away 40 that are not good enough. We keep ten and say, Well, there might be something in there. And then we take those ten to the next step. Then in development meetings, three or four weeks later, a few of them come back and have grown from a one-page idea to a basic format with four or five pages of description. Then, again, 70 percent or 80 percent of them are killed; they are not good enough. By the time you get lower and lower in the pyramid, out of those 100 ideas you put in, you are very lucky and very successful if, at the end of the day, you have one successful format.

WS: Over the last year or so, Talpa Media Group has established several joint ventures or programming alliances with other companies. Why have these been important and what’s been the strategy behind them?
DE MOL: The strategy is basically the same one I had when we set up Endemol. My philosophy about this business—and I believe in it so much that I even have it printed on the back of my business card—is, it’s all about the content. I don’t care what new technological developments we are talking about, or whether it is traditional broadcasting networks or cable or satellite channels or Internet platforms, it’s all about the content. The only reason you switch on a device, whatever the device is, it’s because you want to see content you want to have. I consider myself a content driver. If you want to create new content nowadays after 60 years of traditional television, it takes a lot of money, a lot of people and a lot of brains, to come up with, in a structural way, a flow of new ideas and new formats. In the way I set up Talpa, the creative unit is the heart of the company. That’s where it all starts—with new ideas. We spend a lot of money creating new ideas. We have 24 people on the payroll in Holland alone who are working daily on new ideas and new formats. If we have an idea we think is worthwhile, we test it, we make pilots, we throw it away and start over, and that is quite a heavy investment. And the only way you can make a healthy investment is if you have a good infrastructure for international exportation. So doing it on a case-by-case basis is not the right way.

Fifteen years ago with Endemol, we acquired companies and bought stakes in companies and added them to the Endemol Group country by country. So when I set up Talpa Content, I started looking in the same direction. I was looking at all the important markets where I wanted to be present and found out that in nine out of ten markets, there were no opportunities to buy the right companies anymore because they were just not there. Which is also something that proves how valuable a company like Endemol is because it is almost impossible to copy it.

So with Talpa, I decided to go for a different model. Instead of buying companies or buying stakes in companies, I said, why make it difficult? There are still a lot of good production companies. They are just not for sale or they are already part of a bigger group. So country by country I looked at the markets where I wanted to be present and picked the production companies I considered to be ideal partners for each territory. I didn’t have to buy a stake in the company. All I had to do was propose a joint venture, which [gave] them the opportunity to exclusively represent the Talpa formats in their market, create a joint venture, produce together for that market and split the profits. The moment we changed to that model, in seven or eight months we had joint ventures in a dozen countries.

WS: The U.S. studios got into the format business very late, and now they are aggressively trying to catch up. Do you think they will encounter problems establishing networks of local production companies like Endemol and FremantleMedia have?
DE MOL: I don’t think there is any difference [between the studios’ attempts] and when we were checking out all the markets in detail and came to the conclusion that the right companies were not for sale anymore. Because Endemol is not the only inter-national production company, there are also FremantleMedia, Zodiak Entertainment, and Banijay Entertainment. There are three or four, not all the same size, but there are a few. Even if you are Warner Bros. or Disney, if the production companies are not available, then they’re not there for the studios either.

WS: Some format companies feel they must have 10 or 12 new formats to present to buyers at MIPTV or MIPCOM. Do you share that view?
DE MOL: My slogan is it’s more about quality than quantity, so I don’t think the numbers count. Quality and originality count and if there is a market where you are lucky enough to have six, seven or eight new shows, which in our case is not an exception, you could even consider the question: Do you want to pitch them all at one market or do you want to hold back a few? For example, we are now in the process of preparing for MIPCOM and I think we will probably only present 50 percent of the formats that are in production, because for some of the formats it is too early. If a show starts in Holland in September, three weeks later at MIPCOM it’s too early to bring that show. I’d rather wait eight or nine weeks to make sure we have a success and then, to be quite honest, you don’t need MIPCOM anymore to establish quick sales in 20 territories.

WS: Are there any new shows you’d like to mention?
DE MOL: One show that is going to be important for us at MIPCOM is a new music talent show called The voice of Holland. It has a few new elements compared to other music competition shows, which I think make it really new and fresh. The basic idea is that instead of the shows we all know, like The X Factor or Idols, where a jury judges people from behind a table, we start this show with five very successful, well known music artists in Holland, who are [offering their know-how] to unknown talent to help them become successful. And the level of quality at the beginning of The voice of Holland is equal to where shows like The X Factor and Idols get to in the semi-finals.

We are creating a show that leads to a winner that will be a successful artist for the next five years in the country in which the show airs. In Holland we’ve had ten years of music competition shows, we started with Idols, Popstars and The X Factor, but none of the winners of any of those shows play any role whatsoever in the music business right now. They were famous for six months, they made one hit record and then they all disappeared. What we are trying to do, together with the music industry and five very successful Dutch recording artists, is create the next generation of pop stars in Holland.

The very interesting element is that this is the first talent competition show with blind auditions. The five established artists are going to only hear the voice of the contestants and not be distracted by looks—whether they look great or look bad—it’s just about the voice.

Another show is in a totally different area. It’s called Ten Ways to Turn You On and it’s based on the fact that we have discovered that there is now equipment for sale that can scientifically measure how much a woman or a man is turned on sexually—we can show that. So we are casting 25 good-looking young men, who think they are very cool. And we cast 25 very good-looking women who can choose men from the audience. The men get $1,000. They go into a special room—sometimes it’s dark, sometimes it’s very romantically lit—and the woman gets three minutes to see if she can turn the guy on, which is very clearly shown on the equipment we have. If she is successful, the guy has to hand over the $1,000 to her. If she is not successful he can keep the money. I think that this could be a very surprisingly, funny and talked-about new program.

WS: Years from now, if someone is looking back on the history of television of the late 20th century and early 21st century, how do you want to be remembered and what do you consider to be the greatest contribution you have made to the TV industry?
DE MOL: First of all, I’d like to be remembered as a good person, as an honest person. As a professional, I think that in the next 15 or 20 years, I will never stop working. I will have a constant level of creativity. If you look at the list of programs I have been responsible for over the last 20 years, including Big Brother, that is a long list of very successful shows. So I would like to be remembered as the guy who has been creative for many decades and who has been able to have the creativity keep pace with every new decade and has not been stuck in old-fashioned creativity, but has grown with the times.

WS: Are you still having fun?
DE MOL: I am once again very much enjoying it. There was a period in my life when Endemol was listed as a public company when I wondered, where did it go wrong? Where did my life go from being a television producer in the studio producing programs, to suddenly sitting behind a desk between all kinds of people with grey suits and talking about business plans and margins and profit-and-loss statements. That was my most unhappy time. Now at Talpa, I am once again doing what I like most and know how to do best—I create new ideas, I produce them, I make pilots, I’m in the studio, I’m there when we are casting and that is something I will do 80 hours a week if necessary.