Sparks Network Eyes Latin America, Asia for Expansion

Ahead of NATPE, Sparks Network’s president, Nicola Söderlund, tells TV Formats Weekly about the company’s plans for expansion in Latin America, Asia and other developing markets.

Early last month, Sparks Network made two key moves to expand its reach in the global formats industry. First, it signed a representation and co-operation agreement with a new joint venture set up by its Madrid-based member, Zebra Produccions, and Luis Villanueva’s Somos Distribution. And a few days later it announced a new division, Sparks Network Asia, based in Hong Kong.

“There are no dead zones in the world anymore,” Söderlund says of the company’s international expansion strategy. “Every market is important, every market needs special care and attention and energy.”

In Latin America, Somos Distribution will support the sale and adaptation of titles from the Sparks catalogue throughout the region and in the U.S. Hispanic market, as well as seek out Latin American series for Sparks Network to represent globally. For Söderlund, the alliance is key as Sparks works to build its business in the region, where as yet it does not have a local member. In Latin America, he explains, “the broadcasters are mostly producing in-house and they have considerable market dominance, which makes it more difficult to make business deals. The independent sector is not well developed there.”

In Asia, meanwhile, Gary Pudney, who is heading up the regional office, will be looking out for new properties. Exporting quality Asian concepts to the rest of the world is one of Söderlund’s key priorities for Sparks’ business.

“The sales of Asian formats to Europe in the last year have been quite modest—I think they have been declining a little bit. The Japanese formats, they had their highs two or three years ago, but since then not very much has happened. But there is content out there. We are currently negotiating a strategic development alliance with a Japanese broadcaster which I think is a very exciting project.”

To boost its library of formats from Asia, Sparks is also angling to increase its membership base in the region, which currently includes outfits in Korea, Japan, Indonesia and China. India, Thailand and Philippines are some of his next targets.

Söderlund is also keenly focused on using Sparks Networks Asia to boost the company’s distribution to Asian broadcasters. “I think the broadcasters are so much more open [to formats],” he says.

Another area that is ready for growth, Söderlund says, is Eastern Europe, where, he believes, broadcasters are “taking more risks, they are more competitive, it’s virgin territory—they are more open to ideas.”

Discussing Sparks’ well-developed business in the rest of Europe, meanwhile, Söderlund explains that the challenge today is adjusting to the position of being a “packager of brands…. We connect an advertiser to a format to a producer to a broadcaster, with some online extensions. The advantage is that the budgets are healthier—that is the real benefit—and you’re closer to the source of the money. The flipside is that it takes longer, it’s harder to satisfy a client who is not the broadcaster, who doesn’t really know about formats and TV shows. So it makes it more complicated. And it’s a more complex deal in itself.”

Also key for the company is finding the elusive next big global hit—a goal that has become the holy grail for the industry as a whole. And he’s optimistic that that idea could come from outside of the traditional markets of the U.S., U.K. and the Netherlands. “I think we’ll see formats coming from other countries, the monopoly of the U.K. and the U.S. will be broken down. We’re already seeing that with Israeli formats or Swedish formats. It’s become very much a global market.”