IMG Media’s Alastair Waddington

October
2006

By Mansha
Daswani

With two
big acquisitions this year—the leading British independents Darlow
Smithson Productions and Tiger Aspect Productions—IMG Media is rapidly
changing from a sports and live-productions specialist to a multigenre producer
and distributor. As executive VP and COO of the company, a division of sports
representation giant IMG, Alastair Waddington is charged with overseeing a
diverse business that today spans high-end documentaries, light entertainment,
kids’ fare and IMG’s traditional forte, large-scale sports events around the
world. He speaks to TV Europe about how he and his team are transforming the company.

TV EUROPE: Can you describe the activities you oversee at IMG Media?

WADDINGTON: IMG Media is a group of companies [with diversified
activities]. IMG’s media business, which was known for many years as TWI, has
traditionally been a hybrid between producer, distributor and rights broker. We
continue to do all three of those activities.

Under the IMG umbrella, we have, if you like, the
record-label model of specialist [companies]: TWI being the sports and
live-events specialist; Darlow Smithson being the high-end factual, docudrama
specialist; and Tiger Aspect being the everything else specialist, inasmuch as
they’re involved in a number of genres. We are now a multigenre, global-content
company.

TV EUROPE: Why were Darlow Smithson and Tiger Aspect companies you
wanted to acquire?

WADDINGTON: We’re owned by a private-equity firm, Forstmann Little,
and one of the reasons they bought IMG was to grow our business. The sports
business is something that we have been relatively dominant in, but the room
for growth within sports was limited. We felt that if we were going to get
involved in certain areas, we were impatient to grow organically, so we felt
that we needed to grow acquisitively. We considered a number of companies that
would [provide a] complementary fit, in terms of what they were doing today and
what they wanted to do tomorrow. Darlow Smithson and Tiger Aspect represented
the perfect buys. They’ve got great reputations, great relationships. It’s
about building a jigsaw rather than buying companies and having them compete
against each other.

TV EUROPE: Are you looking at other acquisitions?

WADDINGTON: We’re always looking at other opportunities. Once you
make one acquisition in this market, then you will be named every single time
[as a possible buyer]. Lots of opportunities come our way, and if we’re
interested, we will pursue them.

TV EUROPE: How much are you doing in the U.S. market?

WADDINGTON: We are an American-owned company and we have been a New
York-based company, mostly involved in sport. One of the interesting things
about Darlow Smithson was that, although they’re based out of North London, about
65 percent to 70 percent of what they are doing is for the American market. In
a similar way, Tiger Aspect has had a certain amount of success delivering
things to the West Coast. In theory, you can’t be a serious world player in the
media business without paying direct attention to the United States. It would
be fair to say that we, as a television production company, have
under-performed and not grown as fast as we should have over the last few years
[in the U.S.] That’s something we intend to put right. Though the accent of
what we do in the U.S. certainly is very much focused on new media.

TV EUROPE: What are your plans for new media?

WADDINGTON: We want to be platform agnostic. We want to be creators
and distributors of high-quality content for television, radio, broadband,
mobile and DVD. We were quite early in the game producing content for mobile,
as much as six years ago. But in terms of new initiatives, for the first time
this year we streamed [a number of] shows from New York Fashion Week live to
mobile. Since then we’ve done a similar exercise in Australia. We take the view
that it’s just another outlet for content. And “new media” is a misnomer,
frankly—the Internet is about as interesting as electricity. It’s there.
It’s not going away.

TV EUROPE: How important is the Asia Pacific market for you?

WADDINGTON: It’s a very important part of our business. We’ve had a
strong production business in India. And certainly China represents great
opportunities for us. We have always been a global company. From a content
perspective, London is the epicenter in terms of the number of people and the
creation of content, but we don’t produce for the U.K. and then try and flog
things around the world. We are genuinely creating content that we believe is appropriate
and has applications wherever [consumers] are.

TV EUROPE: I understand you got your start in the television
business as a producer.

WADDINGTON: I’m a slightly rare breed in this
business inasmuch as I’ve been a producer who didn’t like anybody in a suit
because they wanted me to stop spending money, and I’ve also been the guy in
the suit who understands that producers love spending money. Being able to
understand the sensitivities of both is helpful.

TV EUROPE: What do you love most about your job?

WADDINGTON: No [two days are] ever the same. I’m working in a company
now that is a really exciting place, there’s a real spirit about it, there’s an
adventure about it, there’s a desire to grow and make something really special
happen. It is about growth at the moment, it’s about building assets.