Lee Bartlett

February 22, 2010 World Screen

This article originally appeared in the MIPCOM ’09 issue.

 

 
Lee Bartlett joined ITV from FOX Broadcasting last year, and as managing director of ITV Studios he is in charge of all of the broadcasting group’s British and international production-and-distribution businesses. In this very difficult economy, Bartlett’s divisions are considered growth areas that can generate revenues to offset ITV’s decline in advertising.
 

TV FORMATS: You have said that ITV needs to monetize its big brands better and make them more relevant. How have you done that?
BARTLETT: We’ve made a lot of progress in this area. We have a successful daytime show called This Morning, which has been on the air for many years. It has a very loyal audience and had a lot of potential for the network, which we hadn’t developed before. It hadn’t had a revamp in a long time, so we re-created the show. We brought in a new presenter and divided it up into segments. We changed the graphics and made the look and feel a little lighter. It now has a very strong nonlinear presence and the website is very relevant to the show. Let’s say there is a gardener on, you see him working in a garden, you can go onto the website and find out how you can save this plant, what are the best seeds, and if you want the seeds, click here and you can buy them. It’s not rocket science, but we made the brand more relevant and more practical to the people who watch it.
It’s not so much revamping the show that is important, the brand extensions are. So it’s taking a well-known brand that we had only exploited in one form and are now exploiting it in three or four other ways. We also did this to drive revenue because, when I put my plc hat on, I know a plc needs to earn revenues from more than just advertising, it needs revenues from many other sources in order to stay alive.
Another brand we’ve worked on is Coronation Street, which is one of our biggest. It now has one of the best websites of any show in the U.K. We are producing special [content] for DVD: a 90-minute movie where the story line is set up within the show and then you can go buy the DVD or you can download the movie.
We have a lunchtime program called Loose Women. We created a version for the German market, which just got an order for 30 episodes. That is really quite remarkable to take a brand that is so domestic and be able to create instant international value out of it.
Among our international brands, we looked at shows that we’ve had some success selling internationally and we changed the way we sold them. We put a lot of effort behind them and I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! is really a good example. It has been on the air in the U.K. for eight seasons. It’s always done really well, but it hadn’t been particularly exploited internationally except in Germany on RTL. So we made a concerted effort and we are currently shooting I’m a Celebrity India for Sony, I’m a Celebrity Sweden is coming soon, and of course the U.S. commission on NBC, which is now airing around the world as a finished series. In fact, in one of President Obama’s speeches, when he was referring to Arnold Schwarzenegger, he used the phrase, “I’m a celebrity, get me out of here!” That’s manna from Heaven!
 
TV FORMATS: You’ve made partnership deals with Shine and 19 Entertainment. Can you tell us about the projects you are working on with them?
BARTLETT: Absolutely not! But I can tell you there is one project from the Shine deal that we are really keen on and there is another one we are really keen on with 19. What is interesting is how we did it. We took a couple of development people from Shine and a couple of people from ITV and we put them in a room. And over a period of time, they came up with a number of ideas that were truly developed jointly. That’s different from the way joint ventures normally work—it’s usually one party or the other coming up with ideas. Obviously, I’m only going to be happy if they are successful, but I think the formula is new.
 
TV FORMATS: Are you looking to make more partnerships?

BARTLETT: The short answer is yes. I don’t believe that any one company, no matter what its reputation or how creative it is, can have a lock on creative talent. I am interested in creative talent, and as long as it makes financial sense, whether it’s through partnerships, joint ventures, housekeeping deals, any name you want to put to it, I want to have people present ideas that we can then turn around and develop and produce. I don’t care where they come from. And I’m not a big believer in having a giant staff of creative people, because I think creativity is best done in small groups.            


TV FORMATS: When you are trying to create global hits, do unscripted formats usually lend themselves better than scripted?
BARTLETT: The general rule is yes, for a couple of reasons. You can create a format and get it on the air in a pretty short period of time, because you are not writing anything. If it’s a hit in the country in which it initially airs then you can sell that very quickly. So, obviously, if ITV [programmers are] willing to put the format on the air in the U.K. it means that they think it’s got legs in the U.K. And then once it’s aired here, and its ratings are good, it’s easier to adapt it to the international marketplace—to mount the show doesn’t take very long. And we have producers who go out and help broadcasters do that.
 
TV FORMATS: And what are the advantages and disadvantages of scripted formats?
BARTLETT: The disadvantage to drama is that you have to write the script and that takes several months. Then it takes four or five months to produce it, and by the time you are finished editing it, the whole process takes quite some time before it actually goes on the air. So the time frame for drama is very long. When you then turn around and sell the format, you are licensing the format along with scripts. Only certain countries are going to buy those ideas, and dramas can be very country-specific, so it takes a lot of rewriting the scripts. And the payoff, from a format point of view, isn’t as good when you produce scripted as it is to produce unscripted formats.
On the other hand, with scripted, you start to build up a library of finished episodes of these series that you can turn around and sell as well.
The piece that works better, and I think this is unique to ITV, is we have a deep library of very famous dramas that have been produced over the years. We had three of them on the air last year in the U.S. While selling and producing scripted formats is a slower process, in many respects, it’s more satisfying because drama is the heart of television. Scripted is a little bit harder, but when it hits, it hits really well. If you take a U.S. example, Desperate Housewives, Disney has made a lot of money selling the finished episodes and selling the format. And if you have a production company in a country, then you can make a production fee because you produce it for them. So you have a couple of revenue streams.
 
TV FORMATS: You are a fan of the format business. Why do you like it so much?
BARTLETT: Take a show like Come Dine with Me, which is a U.K. show. It is done in one way and emphasizes a certain group of characters and traditions that are particularly British in their mentality. And then you turn around and you do the same program with the same basic idea of people going to other people’s houses to cook a meal and create a nice evening, and you tailor that to fit how German people would entertain. So you had the basic idea and yet you tailored it to different audiences.
 
TV FORMATS: Why does this work so well as a business?
BARTLETT: The reason… is that you developed it originally for one country and you’ve been able to test it. Then you can sell it to other countries based on the ratings it got in the country of its origin. And you can have a format fee, but again, even more importantly, if you have a production company in the country where the show is being broadcast, you can produce it and get a production fee and you have the finished episodes that you can also turn around and sell. So it’s a very interesting business from that point of view. And particularly nowadays, when broadcasters are hesitant to take a lot of risk because the advertising market is so difficult, if you can give them something that has been proven in one country, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it will work in their country, but the chances are better—you’ve cut your odds, so to speak—so that is why I particularly like formats.
 
TV FORMATS: Even with limited budgets, what are buyers looking for and how can ITV Studios help them fill their needs?
BARTLETT: First of all, as I said, because the advertising markets are so tight, foreign broadcasters don’t want to take a lot of risk. They want something that is proven and they need to be able to see it on tape. We have two pilots that ran in the U.K. that are both game shows. One was called The Chase and the other was called The Fuse. Both of them aired in the U.K. and both rated well. They will be part of our MIPCOM slate.
 
TV FORMATS: And what information about these formats do you provide buyers?
BARTLETT: We have a sizzle reel for them and we have all the demographic information. There will be all the material buyers need and they can actually see episodes of these shows, so they will have a much better idea of what they are going to get than if I just gave them a piece of paper and said, This is what the format is.
We also target the specific networks that buy these types of programs. We know what time slots they work in. If the show is made for late afternoon here in the U.K., we know that by tweaking it this way or that way it can be made as a prime-time show.

Our salespeople and the brochures we have on our website will tell you all of this. We focus on ideas that have worked someplace else, especially in the U.K. or the U.S., and offer all the demographic and ratings information behind them and provide actual episodes that can be seen. This is the best way to sell. We have a lot of formats, but we target them for sales only if we have good ratings information for them.