Red Arrow’s Creative Approach

Michael Schmidt, the group director of creative operations and business development at Red Arrow Entertainment Group, tells TV Formats Weekly about how the company has developed creative pacts with the likes of Dick de Rijk and Omri Marcus.

With an eye toward boosting its international activities, ProSiebenSat.1 Group set up Red Arrow Entertainment Group at the beginning of last year. The mandate was clear: acquire and launch production companies, and partner with leading creatives across the globe. As the idea for Red Arrow was first coming together at ProSiebenSat.1, its founding team was already in discussions with Dick de Rijk, the creator of the format megahit Deal or No Deal, who was just getting out of his contract at Endemol. That partnership with de Rijk would become a cornerstone for the strategic development of Red Arrow, notes Michael Schmidt, the group director of creative operations and business development at the company.

“The relationship with Dick is very simple,” says Schmidt, who oversees all content development and acquisition activities at Red Arrow. “He has great ideas, we look at them and then we look each other into the eyes and say, Well, let’s go for this one. And then we put our development money behind it and start to develop. There are not that many creators in the world who can say they created a worldwide hit that still is contributing to Endemol. That spoke for itself quite frankly. Dick is very creative; he has a very high output and it’s about identifying the ideas that can work for the global market but also help us as a group to grow and further the broadness of our producers and their capabilities.”

The pact with de Rijk has already resulted in the rollout of You Deserve It, a feel-good format that SevenOne International—the distribution division of Red Arrow—has sold to ABC in the U.S. and Antena 3 in Spain, among other broadcasters. There are other ideas in active development with de Rijk, Schmidt says, and three others are in the presales phase.

Red Arrow also has a development deal with Omri Marcus, a creative director and comedy writer based in Tel Aviv. “While with Dick we focus on broad properties, things that can travel far quickly, with Omri we are focusing on the more edgy ideas: [concepts] that fit to what the cable space needs, that are interesting for the U.K. market and also the German scripted reality shows that dominate German daytime programming.”

The company also has a co-development partnership with U.S. producer Phil Gurin, and a first-look deal with another U.S. outfit, Genetic, founded by Lincoln Hiatt, David Wyler and Curt Northrup.

Schmidt notes that Red Arrow takes a sensible approach to its creative partnerships. “We as a group don’t want to shock our producers with a big broad pipeline and force them to pick things out of it. When we look at production companies and partners we align ourselves with, it is important that they are creators themselves and are a personal fit to the group we already have assembled. So it’s a little bit different than the big other conglomerates who more established and have a setup and a system for everything. Our group is considerably younger and therefore has a bit more flexibility in growing and discussing the ground rules of our internal collaboration.”

What Red Arrow can offer producers, Schmidt says, is the benefit of being part of a broadcasting group. “We have a certain reputation, having been, especially in Germany, people who picked ideas up early off paper even from American producers. That’s a little bit of the spirit we want to continue with. We respect the idea, we respect the creativity. We are not trying to hide what we acquire in a drawer, we put it out there. We do not necessarily buy as much as others. We focus on things we believe in and we can put on a pedestal. It’s helpful that we have a broadcasting group that’s backing us; you can make clever and intelligent deals across all genres, not only in the format space. But in the end it’s that we have a very good distribution engine [in SevenOne International] where things don’t fall through the cracks.”