FremantleMedia’s Gary Carter

April 2007

By Anna Carugati

As the president of FremantleMedia Creative Networks and chief creative officer of FremantleMedia New Platforms (FMX), Gary Carter oversees a wide palette of development and production—from drama and entertainment to new media such as mobile, broadband, games and IPTV. While keeping track of new platforms and devices, his eye is on fostering creativity—working with people and ideas and turning those ideas into entertainment viewers can enjoy.

TV FORMATS: What are the challenges of establishing a brand in today’s multimedia environment?

CARTER: We’re living through a period of huge change. There is no doubt that television is going to remain the mainstay of entertainment for some time to come. And even when the Internet and mobile have built themselves up into big powers, which FremantleMedia has no doubt they will, television is still going to be on the scene even though it may change its nature. We’re trying to explore two things. First, how do we take our existing television brands into the future? And secondly, how do we develop new brands, which start as new-media or mobile propositions and have got nothing to do with television at all?

In the case of television properties going to new media, the central idea [of the show] must be easily and clearly expressed across all media. It’s clear that the central proposition of Idols is that you can be a national singing hero. And that can be expressed across a variety of platforms. Everything from the television program itself to programming about the show to records that come out of it to mobile downloads to the distribution of material on the web to harnessing the community on the web and to Idols summer camps in America, where the experience goes totally off the screen.

The development of those kinds of properties is a very important part of our current worldwide slate. But it’s only a part of it, because not all properties can be expressed coherently across all platforms. There are always some that are only television propositions.

If you look at the longer-term future, and now I’m shifting to look at what FMX is doing, FremantleMedia believes that one of the places where its future lies is [perhaps] outside of television. That’s because so much of the world’s entertainment is migrating from television programs—that is to say, audiovisual material in a box—into other kinds of entertainment. We’re trying to explore those across [many] areas. If you look at Atomic Wedgie, for example, which is our Sprint video-to-mobile proposition in America, there we are making programs and commissioning them specifically for what we see as a new medium, the handheld screen. We’re not just taking American Idol clips and putting them on mobile phones. We’re trying to explore what it means to develop serial drama in this area. We have, for example, an unfolding narrative called Secret Girlfriend, which is shot like a mini sitcom. And the reason why she’s important is because she’s integral to the medium that you experience her on. The central setup is that you’re a guy and your secret girlfriend sends video messages to your mobile phone. Through those video messages you understand that you are the male protagonist in this unfolding sitcom.

We’re also trying to develop formats that give a logical sense and coherence to user-generated content. In �America, we have Love Rush, which is a dating game, played girls versus guys, on the web, using user-generated material so that the boys are playing by different rules from the girls.

We have a game called Report Me, which is a kind of news satire show filmed on mobile phone. And FMX is just about to launch [in the U.K. and the U.S.] an experimental, performance-driven, fragmented sitcom called Project V, which involves artists from America and England working together to create a kind of mosaic story line that you can experience through any of the characters.

TV FORMATS: At this point, what offers more opportunities for revenues, broadband or mobile?

CARTER: At this moment, the industry’s bet is probably on mobile. But certainly it’s short-term. America is at a very interesting crossroads because there are technological hurdles that need to be crossed before it can truly maximize the mobile space. But that’s coming pretty quickly. Once you have one or two breakout hits in America and once you’ve solved the technological [issues], mobile will become a much bigger industry. It’s pretty clear that on both broadband and on mobile it’s going to be an advertising-revenue-driven model, eventually.

TV FORMATS: More so than pay-by-program or subscription?

CARTER: Yes, if for no other reason than the ad model is so common. We all understand it and there is a well-developed industry around it. And it’s a powerful industry that wants to see its own continuance. That’s always an important driver. It’s like the monarchy in England. It exists to make sure it continues to exist! All mature industries have that thrust to them. The advertising industry will not disappear—it can’t afford to disappear. So it must find a way to work this one out.

TV FORMATS: As television becomes more personalized and we can watch programs on laptops or small portable devices, will this affect the power of a huge show like American Idol or the Academy Awards or the FIFA World Cup?

CARTER: I’ve been doing lots of work looking at the history of mass-communication technology. Because the future is so unknown, I wondered if there were clues in the history of it all. And in my research, which has involved quite a few professors of communications and media studies, three things are clear. First of all, no technology replaces another—they continue to exist alongside each other. History proves that. The second thing is that the people who develop a technology never understand the uses to which it will be put—the public decides that. And the third is that one of the biggest barriers that both producers and consumers bring are the expectations of one medium to the next one. People criticized the movies because it wasn’t radio and they criticized television because it wasn’t the movies.

There’s no doubt that we’re living through the personalization of media. All media has moved in the same path. It starts in the public domain: a phone is in a public booth, then it moves into the house and it stands typically at the threshold between the public and the private—it’s in the hallway or the living room. Then it moves to the bedroom and becomes finally personalized, like my little mobile phone. So there’s a huge drive towards personalization of medium and content.

On the other hand, the function that [traditional] media has in this new environment is to highlight those big, mainstream experiences. So there’s a two-way pull—one towards the niche, and the other towards the big, binding experiences. Events like American Idol, the Academy Awards, the Super Bowl, the death of the Queen, to use another English example, a declaration of war—those will always be driven by �television. We’ll see the rise of more global experiences. We’ve been doing some work inside Creative Networks, my division, looking at American Idol as a global brand. Not Idols, which we know is a global brand, but at what point does American Idol become big enough to make it a global event? Particularly in Europe, public broadcasters will be built around those big, binding events.

TV FORMATS: FremantleMedia has had such success with serialized dramas and more recently with telenovelas. Did you expect European audiences to take to telenovelas as much as they have?

CARTER: About six or seven years ago, we started to look seriously at the telenovela, and specifically at programs like Betty la fea, and I have to say, yes, we did expect it. FremantleMedia has a global network and we are very skilled at moving things around very quickly with a degree of coherence. Where we haven’t always succeeded—�and this is my personal view, maybe not so much the company’s—is in understanding how to bring that distinctive quality that is the telenovela through the ones that we’ve produced. By this I mean we pioneered long-form serial drama across Europe. We have about 16 of them in the major European territories. They’re built on a very long, venerable, largely Australian-U.K. tradition of daily drama. A telenovela is a mix of a heightened sense of comedy and a heightened sense of drama. I’d hoped stylistically that we would be able to capture these heightened qualities. We haven’t done it in all territories as successfully as I might have hoped. That’s a cultural thing and it’s really difficult to do. If you were to look at our Spanish version of Betty, it’s �absolutely brilliant. You don’t even have to understand Spanish to know that. You just have to watch it for five minutes to understand that they just get it. They’ve got the history, they’ve got the culture that deals with this kind of thing in a very witty, slightly heightened, but very entertaining fashion. We haven’t quite managed to push those buttons in some territories.

TV FORMATS: Has reality television changed the relationship between producers and the audience?

CARTER: Oh, I really think that [it has]. It’s changed the audience’s expectation to control the outcome of a program. Above all, reality television has democratized the media in a very profound way. For the first time, members of the public not only were the subjects of the camera’s gaze, but they also had a relatively neutral platform on which to parade their own agendas, as opposed to the director coming in with an �agenda, or the documentary-maker coming in with an agenda.

People in these shows are [for the most part] appearing as themselves and saying things, by and large, that they wanted to say. And that’s very important. It’s also important from a different point of view. A lot of the material that is starting to be incorporated into reality television, a lot of the �material in the programming around reality television, is made collaboratively between the audience and the producers. That’s going to be a growing trend. The question that FremantleMedia asks itself is, In ten years’ time, what portion of video on the web will be made by Fremantle? What portion will be made by the audience? And what portion will be made by the audience and Fremantle together?