Jan Frouman

This interview originally appeared in the MIPTV 2011 issue of TV Formats.

 

With investments in TV production companies and partnerships with leading format creators, Red Arrow Entertainment Group has already, in the little more than a year that it has been around, offered a number of hit shows to the international market. As part of the ProSiebenSat.1 Group, Red Arrow also has access to stations across Europe and can benefit from SevenOne International’s distribution expertise. Jan Frouman, Red Arrow’s managing director, talks about his growth strategy for the company.

 

TV FORMATS: What has been your strategy for finding formats from many different territories?

FROUMAN:We tend to have three primary sources for formats. The first would be the production companies within our group. We have looked for partners and production companies where local development is very much a part of the company’s DNA. We are not simply interested in having an execution house in a territory that waits for new shows to get delivered. We want to see ideas come out of those companies as well.

 

My Man Can is a perfect example. It was created by our German production company, and it has now been sold to 20-plus countries, and we’re going into production in three of our own channel countries. When I say channel countries, I mean the ProSiebenSat.1 Group’s countries where a Red Arrow company will be producing the local version of My Man Can. So that’s a great rollout story for us, with its roots in the local development of a group production company.

 

The other place we’ve been sourcing product is with exclusive development deals, primarily the deal we did with Dick de Rijk [the creator of Deal or No Deal]. We’re finding creative partners who we believe can really put some gas in the tank. We’ve now sold the first of Dick’s latest creations to ABC in the States. And Kinetic Content [run by Chris Coelen], our company in the U.S., will produce it. So that’s great news for us. That’s a big step forward.

 

We also have a development partner in Israel, a very young, creative, comedy-focused executive named Omri Marcus, and we’re seeing that some of his formats are already generating discussions among our production companies—i.e., one or more of them is getting excited about them for their local territories. I expect to see his formats being taken to networks this year.

 

The third source is from third parties. Our distribution house has a nice footing in both camps. That is, formats that we own and control and then formats we represent. So, if I take something like Benidorm Bastards, it’s a Belgian show that was brought to our attention via our network in Belgium because it was airing against them on a competing network. And we got into a discussion with the producer and reached an arrangement to distribute the show around the world. That’s only possible if third-party producers know that they are going to be well treated within a distribution house. I think SevenOne International, under Jens [Richter]’s leadership, has been excellent at doing that. Producers don’t get buried in our catalogue. They’re taken care of in a proper way and they don’t bump into our agenda elsewhere, whether it be in the production space or the broadcast space.

 

TV FORMATS:Having a station group behind you and a distribution company in place must be very convenient.

FROUMAN:Yes, they underpinned a lot of the strategic thinking from the get-go. When we launched the company, we said, we’re no longer just a German group. We’re a 12-country, 25-channel group. We are already in the distribution business. We are already, to a certain degree, in the production business. Does it not make sense to start making more strategic moves with respect to development, production and distribution?

 

And that’s why we set up Red Arrow. We basically took SevenOne and brought it into Red Arrow. It’s the sales house and the anchor for the group. We also took our existing production companies and brought them under the roof, and then started to build out. I would say we’ve built from the inside out. The inside being the channel territories and the outside being those territories that we really thought were must-have to put us on the map. So, the [investment in] Kinetic in the U.S.—great partner, great team, just the right point of time in its life in an absolutely must-have market. We’re going to do the same thing in the U.K. We’ve already partnered with two very seasoned executives there and we’re going to build out a non-scripted and scripted presence. That’s another territory where we really think we need to be active.

 

We did a co-production deal with Granada in Australia, a territory that we think is very important. In other territories, like Scandinavia, we’ve already launched, rolled out from Sweden into Denmark, and then the next step would be to add Norway to the group’s footprint. But again, that’s channel territory and also a fantastically interesting creative territory.

 

We’re in “evaluation mode” in a number of [other] countries. I think Israel is on a lot of people’s lists as a really interesting creative market. We see it from our development partner there and, who knows, maybe we’ll do something more substantial in that territory just because it’s so creatively vibrant.