Getting Creative

Faced with increased competition and smaller budgets,
leading broadcast design firms are finding that their business strategies need
to be as creative as their campaigns.

June 2007

By Mansha Daswani

Branding and design firms working in the broadcast media
today have every reason to be optimistic. In an increasingly competitive and
cluttered multichannel environment, a broadcaster’s need to stand out has never
been stronger. Add to that mix the myriad of new platforms—VOD, IPTV,
broadband and mobile—and there certainly is quite a bit of work
available.

“Any entity, any content, still has the same issue of
needing to be packaged and conveyed in a meaningful way,” says Scott Miller,
the creative director of the Los Angeles-based Aerodrome Pictures. “The venues
used to promote programming are changing. So we’re seeing a change in the
variety of requests for how the material will be applied.”

“In the past, a typical deliverable might have had 20 or so
items in it,” notes Chris Turner, the London-based director of brand strategy
at TAG. “Now, it’s probably close to 40 because of the various nonbroadcast
parts of the package.”

Having more platforms to brand, however, has also made
broadcasters more judicious in their spending habits. “Budgets have come down
and they’ve remained down,” says John Sideropoulos, the CEO of 3 Ring Circus.

Elaine Cantwell—whose outfit, spark, recently
completed the Hallmark Channel rebrand with the tagline “Make Yourself at Home”—notes,
“Clients are facing the same conditions we are—they have to be smarter
about how they’re spending their budgets. You’re not seeing airtime being taken
up with just an ID. That airtime is working on a navigational front, on the
image front—you’ve got multiple messages happening at the same time, so
that every second of your airtime is maximized in terms of the message you’re
getting to the viewer.”

STRETCHING THE BUDGET

“Finding the $500,000 branding job around every
corner—it’s not going to happen,” quips TAG’s Turner. “The idea of a very
normal set of branding tools that you create once and then don’t change for
three years—that paradigm really doesn’t exist anymore. Clients tend to
change things much more often than they used to, so they spend less each time.”

A number of broadcasters worldwide are also looking to limit
costs by bringing their design services in-house. Contributing to the downward
trend in budgets is intense competition, which is being spurred by
technological developments. “The cost of the technology to design has come down
by a factor of about ten,” says TAG’s Turner. “So a couple of guys graduating
from art college can set themselves up with some Macs and the software for less
than $10,000.”

Furthermore, according to Juliette Clerc, who oversees TV
design at France’s Dream On, some channels “only work with agencies from
Argentina or Eastern Europe or India—the price they [charge] is one-third
of the price we can do in France,” she says. Business in Europe, however,
remains steady, Clerc notes, citing recent clients such as Germany’s MDRtv and
the new French interior design channel Du Côté de Chez Vous TV. In addition to
the TV campaign, Dream On has been enlisted to work on the channel’s
accompanying magazine and website.

For Turner, the key to competing with the operations that
can charge lower fees for their campaigns is a focus on strategic thinking. “If
you are a client that just wants to have the latest cutting-edge design,
whatever it is, then that’s the type of person you might go to. We pride
ourselves on our strategy and being able to link design to business results.”

David Connor, the business development director at TAG, adds
that the company is particularly proud of its individualized approach. “When we
go up against big companies and we pitch, one of the things clients like about
us is the fact that we are very personal. From start to finish the creative
director or the producer that is going to be on the project will be involved.”

Aerodrome is proud of its own personalized, boutique
approach to clients. Launched in the late 1980s, the Los Angeles-based firm has
done the packaging for the Idols format in more than 30 countries, and worked
with Oxygen on the main titles to The Bad Girls Club. “We have essentially been
a team of creatives who partner with television network executives to help them
figure out their marketing issues with respect to packaging,” Miller explains.
“Our preoccupation is with creating the right answer for the brand, not with
promoting any particular style.”

GREENER PASTURES

In order to maintain its competitiveness in a crowded
industry, TAG has been building its business in emerging markets. “The Indian
media market is absolutely exploding at the moment,” Turner says. “Some of the
media groups in India are very big and the amount of money they are able to
invest in programming and their channels is getting up toward the kind of money
that Western companies invest.”

Another company that is building its business in Asia is the
U.K.’s English & Pockett. Currently working on the idents for two channels
from the BBC’s Global Channels division, a job that was commissioned out of
Singapore, English & Pockett is set to open an office in the island nation
in July. Business in Asia “has been steady for several years,” says Richard
Wallman, the company’s managing director and head of production. “We see quite
a lot of opportunity out there.”

The company is also looking increasingly to the sports
market, which Wallman cites as a key area of growth, noting that English &
Pockett has been working with UEFA on the Champions League since 2003. Another
key growth area is new media, Wallman says, “specifically IPTV and interface
designs. What with set-top-box technology and so forth, we think there’s an
opportunity to address the actual user interface. We’re well positioned to
enhance that experience.”

The London-based Red Bee Media—it was the BBC’s
in-house branding division prior to its sale to Macquarie Capital Alliance
Group and Macquarie Bank—has also opted for diversification in its
business model. “We are a media content specialist,” says Nigel Cole, the
global business director at Red Bee, whose clients include ITV in the U.K.,
Discovery worldwide, RTE in Ireland and BBC America. “We are experts in helping
media companies—we don’t say ‘broadcasters’ anymore—deliver and
promote content. We make consumers aware, help them navigate through electronic
program guides, we make content more accessible by adding subtitles, and we
also do things like enhance content with our visual sports traffic tool Piero.
It’s a real multitude of different disciplines within one company.”

Just as TAG emphasizes strategic design, Red Bee prides
itself on its team of “strategic planners,” Cole says. “They play a huge role
in providing a consumer or viewer perspective on the work we’re doing. They’re
all ex–advertising agency folk. I think one of the main reasons we won
the Discovery Channel job in America was due to the thinking we had done about
where the brand had come from and the very contemporary challenges that it was
facing at that time.”

At 3 Ring Circus, meanwhile, Sideropoulos is opting for a
different business model—one that aims to tap into the strengths of
various different design firms. He, together with the business development executive
Sean Owolo, has formed Heroic, an umbrella organization that can offer clients
the services of 3 Ring as well as three other firms: Buildestroy, Wondermint
and this is network. Sideropoulos says he wanted to create something that could
serve as “a haven for creative talent. The idea here is we want to offer a
variety of different companies, each with a unique strength, with very little
overlap. Buildestroy has a very urban graffiti style, but beyond that it likes
to work with organic elements. Wondermint is more of a contemporary style, and
this network is run by Alex Dervin, who tries to find more eclectic talent to
come on board to work with him for a period of time. 3 Ring Circus acts as the
anchor. Our main emphasis is launching or relaunching channels. By creating
this boutique offering of a variety of companies, we’ll be a much more
attractive proposition for a client.”

Sideropoulos says that this team effort came into play
recently with the launch campaign for the new Hispanic-targeted network LATV.
“We thought the job creatively would be more appropriate for the kind of work
that Wondermint and Buildestroy were doing. Part of it for us is realizing
there are a lot more resources out there and 3 Ring Circus cannot be everything
to everybody.”

Germany’s Creation Club, owned by EM.TV’s Plazamedia, has
also expanded the scope of its business, which includes on-air promotions,
trailers, design and formats. “We try to combine different skills,” says
Michael Engelhardt, the creative director of the company. “We not only do the
show, we do the design for the show, the promotion for the show, the
commercials and even, if you want, we could do the show for mobile, Internet,
IPTV.” The company’s client base is mostly within Europe and includes Premiere,
Arena and ZDF.

Ultimately, spark’s Cantwell says, the key to survival today
is to be “chameleon-like. You have to be very swift and very nimble to be able
to maneuver through an industry that is constantly changing.”