ProSieben at 20

 

During the 1980s, the winds of deregulation swept through Europe. Major TV markets like Germany, France, Italy and Spain, which had been dominated by public broadcasters, were seeing the emergence of privately owned commercial channels.

 

While they provided more programming options for viewers and greater inventory for advertisers, these first commercial networks were merely new-and-improved versions of the pubcasters, offering similar general-entertainment schedules that appealed to the broadest audience possible. That is, until ProSieben launched in Germany in 1989. It was the first station to target its program offering and its audience—feature films for the young demo. Viewers’ positive response was immediate, and ProSieben forged a solid bond with the 14-to-29 set—a relationship that has lasted two decades.

 

This year marks ProSieben’s 20th anniversary, and the channel has much to celebrate. It is the most profitable of the stations in ProSiebenSat.1 Group’s stable of free-to-air channels, which also includes Sat.1, kabel eins and N24. And it continues to attract those otherwise easily distracted young viewers with a mix of movies, the best of U.S. series, and hit entertainment shows, many of which are offered on demand, online, as well as on the linear channel.

 

Andreas Bartl, the managing director for German free TV at ProSiebenSat.1 since 2008, has been with the group since 1991. In 2005 he became the managing director of ProSieben, where he oversaw the launch of some the country’s most successful entertainment shows, including Germany’s Next Topmodel—by Heidi Klum and Beat Your Host!

When Bartl was promoted last year, Thilo Proff took his place as managing director. He joined the group in 1998 and had been deputy managing director at the channel since 2006, where his responsibilities included its programming strategy.

 

Together they talk to TV Europe about the reasons for ProSieben’s continued success and discuss what the channel must do to maintain its relevance in the digital age.

 

TV EUROPE:Twenty years ago, when ProSieben launched, what was the TV landscape in Germany, and what did ProSieben want to offer viewers that they couldn’t get from other channels?

BARTL:The landscape was much different. There were the pubcasters, ARD and ZDF, and all their regional channels. There were only two commercial channels, RTL and Sat.1 in 1989, but their technical reach could not be compared to the 100-percent coverage of today. But still, it was an evolving market that was very interesting financially.

 

When ProSieben launched, managing director Georg Kofler’s idea—and it was a good one, among others—was to have a channel whose positioning was unique and different from RTL and Sat.1, which started as general-entertainment channels offering all program genres possible, reaching for the broadest audience. RTL and Sat.1 [skewed] younger and were simply more modern versions of the pubcasters. Kofler said, “We need to be different. We need to position ourselves as a quality channel for young audiences, and the best way to do this is to be a feature-film channel.” So when ProSieben started, it was mainly a feature-film channel, but it was a hit because there were not a lot of feature films that you could watch on TV in Germany at that time.

 

But the market back then was very, very different, compared to the overcrowded and fragmented market we have today. And for the last couple of years, we’ve been heading more and more into being a market that is similar to the U.S.

 

TV EUROPE: Are there specific competitive challenges that ProSieben is facing today? And how is it maintaining its market share?

PROFF:The challenge for ProSieben today is being and remaining competitive among a very young and demanding audience. ProSieben, by far, [skews] the youngest of all the free-TV stations. We have almost a 12-percent market share among the audience [most coveted by advertisers], which is 14 to 49. We are number two within this age group, but we are still number one in the younger demographic of 14 to 29, with an 18-percent share. We are very focused on that target group. And the younger the audience is, the more it demands new programs and highlights every day. That, indeed, is the challenge—to find programs that are long-running enough to be economically reasonable, while at the same time being the talk of the town and reaching your audience.

 

TV EUROPE:ProSieben originally focused on feature films. How did the strategy for original productions come about?

BARTL:It all began in the early ’90s when we launched a talk show called Arabella. At the time, RTL and Sat.1 dominated the talk-show genre and ProSieben made its version for the young generation and it was very successful. So our original productions started with Arabella and then we had a daily news show that is still on the air called Taff. It’s more of a [tabloid] news show—the kind of news you find in People magazine. We wanted to offer a broader portfolio of programming in order to attract more viewers. After being on the air for a few years, we knew that we had found all the movie fans in Germany and they were watching the channel, so our original productions were about further growth to reach new audiences. And also it had something to do with getting [carriage on] the then publicly owned cable operators because only if you had a variety of programs and offered news were you able to be on every cable provider. So it was also about gaining technical reach.

PROFF:Out of this obligation, we created one of the strong points of our schedule. With our original programming we are offering something for everybody. Andreas mentioned Taff, which is a little more female-oriented with its content. We also have Galileo, our daily science show, which is for everybody—males watch it as well as females, younger viewers as well as older viewers, and a lot of families sit in front of the TV when Galileo is on. We also have a weekly [tabloid] magazine called Red! Stars, Lifestyle & More, which airs after Germany’s Next Topmodel and is quite an important show for us. We also have Popstars, so there is a whole bunch of factual and entertainment programming that lives beside the original marketing core of U.S. Hollywood productions.

BARTL:Today it’s really a mix and you can say that the original productions are at least as important as the licensed programs coming from the U.S., which are still very important for the ProSieben brand. Even today, the Hollywood blockbusters get very good ratings, as do the standout series Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy. But the channel is also made up of popular original programming like the shows with Stefan Raab, who is ProSieben’s number one host; Germany’s Next Topmodel and Popstars.

 

The channel has changed a lot but its positioning among its core demographic has stayed very, very stable.

 

PROFF: From a demographic standpoint, ProSieben has remained in the same spot for almost 20 years now.

BARTL:And that is amazing.

 

TV EUROPE:You mentioned American imports. You have always been quite open to them and they’ve played an important role on the channel.

BARTL: True. This is another element that distinguished ProSieben from RTL and Sat.1, who introduced U.S. series in prime time long after ProSieben did. In the ’90s, U.S. series in prime time were rather rare. ProSieben was the first channel to start this with ER and The X-Files. The only other channel that had U.S. series was RTL, but they aired them after 10 p.m. and it was only one program and it ran seemingly forever—almost 15 years, and that was Quincy, M.E. And that was it—a situation totally different compared to today. So for ProSieben’s brand, which became a very strong and popular brand among young people, U.S. licensed product has always been essential.

 

TV EUROPE:ProSieben is also known for high-quality mini-series and event movies. Do those continue to be important, or because of the advertising decline, is it harder now to finance big-budget shows?

PROFF:No, not really, those highlight event programs are still very important for the ProSieben brand because, as I mentioned, the younger audiences demand programs like these. On Mondays, we have been running a strand called Thrill Time, which offers a lot of German TV movies of very high quality, like Töte mich, wenn du kannst. These movies have budgets that exceed $1 million, which is quite a lot for the German market. They look really good and are successful. We always get between a 15- and 25-percent market share with these kinds of programs, so we will continue to do them and will offer them in 2010 as well. On the international co-production side, we will offer major events as we have in the past, and the next big co-production will be Ben Hur.

BARTL:There is an economic crisis, but our viewers don’t want to see the crisis on-screen. They expect us to continue to offer strong programming and we cannot disappoint them. Therefore, even facing a crisis, we are producing TV events that draw automatic attention from the audiences because we cannot let go of these programs.

 

TV EUROPE:More and more people are deciding how and when to watch movies and TV programs “anytime, anywhere.” Tell us about maxdome, the on-demand broadband portal, and what you are learning about how your viewers want to see their programs and films.

BARTL:TV on demand is a very important trend among viewers and will continue to be so over the next years. It’s not as big in Germany yet as it is in the U.S. But viewers, and especially young viewers, have grown up with the Internet and have become accustomed to having what they want immediately, anytime and anyplace. This is also something we are dealing with and will continue to do so in the future. We are anticipating this trend, and we are actually pushing it. Maxdome is number one in video views online by far, and we call this concept TV 3.0, which means that TV content will be watched on three screens: the big TV screen, the laptop screen and also, and this will be very important very soon, the mobile screen on smart phones like the iPhone.

We are ready for this development, and we take it very seriously. And as a TV group, we see it as a chance to grab some share of the online advertising business by [extending] our core business, which is showing movies and programming [to the online and mobile worlds].

PROFF:Speaking about ProSieben and TV 3.0, we labeled it internally “everytainment,” which is to offer our programs anytime and anywhere. To give you an example, we started [streaming] video on the Internet about 18 months ago and it was a huge success right from the beginning. We started with Germany’s Next Topmodel and about 20 percent of the total views of the program are online video views, so this is quite a lot, about one-fifth. And we also are usually number two or three among the top five mobile podcasts, with our comedy programs and with the science show Galileo. ProSieben is the number-one-rated station in the ProSiebenSat.1 Group among young viewers. We can consider the different ways the younger audiences view programming either as a threat or we can view it as a huge chance to convince younger viewers to watch our programs on every platform.

 

TV EUROPE:Are distributors and the studios willing to give you VOD rights and Internet rights to movies and shows?

BARTL: It’s a new business for everyone. When we talk to the studios, we agree on being eager to [pursue VOD and new media], but as we cannot really know what the size of the business is, the discussion sometimes becomes a negotiation. But they started with Gossip Girl on prosieben.de and it was a great success.

PROFF:Yes, quite good. It actually did better on the Internet percentage-wise than it did on the air. That’s because Gossip Girl attracts a very, very young audience, as it does in America. The younger the viewers, the more they turn to different platforms, and as long as we can push these platforms as well, then the business stays in hand, and that is what we are talking about with the major U.S. studios.

 

TV EUROPE:How does Prosieben’s programming complement the offering of the other channels in the ProSiebenSat.1 group?

BARTL:The complementary nature of our brands and of their schedules is part of the recent success of our German free-TV channels, which have been dynamically growing their ratings this year. And it partly comes, from my point of view, from the fact that the general managers of the channels are working closer together than they have in the past. We have a much higher coordination of our strategy in our programming, and many departments are centralized now, so we are working much more like a team. So it’s much easier now to bring the brands on to the screen in a complementary manner.

PROFF:If you could see us now sitting together, you would see that we are sitting in Andreas’s office, which is right next to the office of Jürgen Hörner, who is the managing director of kabel eins. The next office is my office, the managing director of ProSieben, and in the next office is Guido Bolten, the managing director of Sat.1. Also, all the programming planning people are sitting right around us. So even in times of e-mail communications and BlackBerrys, nothing can beat the geographical proximity of people.

BARTL:It makes life much easier, I’m telling you!

 

TV EUROPE:It’s a very tough ad market everywhere. What are the forecasts for the German market this year? Some channels have been offering discounted advertising rates. Has some of the discounting bottomed out or is it necessary given the tough market now?

BARTL:The ad market will decline as the whole German economy will decline. TV is holding stronger than print, but TV will also decline this year. It’s a sign of a crisis and the pressure that comes with it that prices sharply go down. But there is the common-sense element in our business that we want to sell our advertising at prices that are fair and reasonable. Plus, our product hasn’t become less valuable. So our strategy is to keep the prices constant.

 

TV EUROPE: Let’s look into the future. What will be the key to ProSieben’s success in coming years, even as the market changes because of technology and the ways viewers want to watch their content?

BARTL:If we imagine that the market in the future will have more possibilities than today, and that technology will offer many platforms that will be used more than they are today—like online and mobile, as well as hybrid TV sets that are able to receive broadband signals so you can see online content on your TV screen—there will be many more possibilities to see TV content than only on linear channels. And with ProSieben being the number one channel for the under-30 audience in Germany, it is the channel that is best prepared for the future.

If we are able to stick to our brand proposition—which has remained attractive for 20 years, and I think will be attractive for the next 20 years because there will always be a need for a young channel that is different from broad generalist channels like RTL and Sat.1—then ProSieben will be fine. We also need to be able to have enough ownership of content and be present with our content on the several platforms we just talked about—TV 3.0. This will be decisive, but in my forecast, ProSieben will still be around in 20 years.

PROFF:In the future, in order to be seen, you will need to shine brighter with your brand than today. The success formula for ProSieben should be: being sexy and providing the-talk-of-the-town formats. [If we do that, we will be able to meet whatever challenges the future will bring.] And if our programs, our highlights and our events are on every platform, I’m sure we’ll succeed.