David Ellender Exiting FremantleMedia

LONDON: David Ellender announced today that he is stepping down from his role as CEO of FremantleMedia International. He recently spoke exclusively to World Screen about how he has expanded the company’s portfolio and global reach.

Ellender, who has been with FremantleMedia for 12 years, will be leaving the company at the beginning of August "to pursue new challenges." During his time at the company he served as managing director of FremantleMedia International Distribution and then global CEO of FremantleMedia Enterprises. Following a restructure at the company he was named CEO of FremantleMedia International.

In announcing his departure, Cecile Frot-Coutaz, CEO of FremantleMedia, noted that Ellender “played a significant role in shaping and growing FremantleMedia into one of the world’s leading independent media companies. We would like to thank him for his vision, leadership and the huge contribution he has made to the company. We wish him continued success in all his future endeavors. The announcement of a new head of FremantleMedia International will be made in due course.”

WS: You have been with the company for quite some time. What has been your strategy in diversifying and growing the catalogue?
ELLENDER: You’re so right to point that out! I’ve been with the company for 11-and-a-half years! It has gone quickly and it’s been so much fun. Part of that fun has been trying to plot a course for the distribution group and our content gathering.

When I joined the company 11-and-a-half years ago, the catalogue was U.S.-drama heavy. This came at a time in 2001 when there was probably an oversupply of programming for the free-to-air channels, due to the growth of commercial channels and of pay TV, which we had seen in the ’90s. So at that point, all of those channels had maxed out on output deals, volume deals and content creation. All of the pay channels had bought a lot of content and put it on the shelves and there was just an oversupply in the market. What was just very apparent when I joined the company was that they were in U.S. drama in a very big way and really didn’t do much else in the distribution space. Of course, when you are in oversupply, it’s difficult to get output deals or volume deals. It was difficult to sell product because there was an abundance of it and obviously the channels and the platforms at that time could pick and choose. The company then had quite a big deficit: it couldn’t sell enough to make back the advances that it had put down acquiring content.

Secondly, at the time, FremantleMedia had 11 sales people, ten based in London and one in New York.

So for me it was really about two things: first, we needed a broader portfolio in terms of genres. We needed to be in drama, but not in the volumes we were in, we also had to have a point of difference, so not just U.S. drama, it needed to be U.K. and Australian—English-language drama from three different regions of the world. And that complemented what Fremantle was doing in the soap opera and telenovela space—it didn’t conflict, it was complementary. Second, on the distribution side, we took a look and said, we’re a global company, we’ve got production offices around the world, what we need to do is restructure ourselves and get people on the ground in the regions. So in addition to pumping content out to them and getting market intelligence back, with local people you get a better sense of what’s working and how it’s working and can feed that back to your producers.

We really looked at what the market opportunities were. We looked at growth in thematic and niche channels and that’s where we could see the opportunity for factual programming, lifestyle, food, fashion, travel and documentary series. We could never be the BBC doing Planet Earth, big landmark documentaries, but we could still provide good quality high-end factual content that would work for commercial channels, or some of new niche cable players. This was content that could fit their needs.

And our own company had huge success in the reality space, with Idols at that time, and then with The X Factor and Got Talent. We were looking for other similar entertainment shows that we could take into the market. So by having a wider portfolio of content, particularly with the catalogue of 20,000 hours we already had, we knew we could be a relevant supplier, particularly to cable and satellite channels that had a voracious appetite for good quality content in various niches.

WS: You also started establishing relationships with talent.
ELLENDER: For me it was very much about building talent relationships, like the ones with Martha Stewart, with Jamie Oliver, with also a number of Australian—primarily in the food area—talent as well. We would take their franchise, and try to grow it as a television brand, which would aide their ambitions to grow their own brand and ancillary rights on a global basis.

That was really a focus for us. And we learned a lesson from 2000 when we had all our distribution eggs in the U.S. drama basket and we got burned. Even though the company was particularly good for quite a number of years in drama, coming off the success of Baywatch and the ACI catalogue of TV movies and mini-series, you can’t put all your eggs in one basket. So we tried to have quite a broad portfolio of genres and not just be a distributor, but really look for quality content in each of those genres. Quality above volume was always and remains a consideration. On the drama front, we got back into drama in about 2006, 2007 with first-look deals with producers and/or writers in the U.K., Australia and the U.S. and with some acquisitions, where they were appropriate, we’ve taken a lot of content. In 2009, at MIPTV and MIPCOM, we launched more than 25 different drama series from the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia.

WS: What are some of the partnerships you have made with drama showrunners and writers?
ELLENDER: The TBS drama series Wedding Band, which played last December, came out of Tollin Productions and Michael Tollin of One Tree Hill and Smallville fame. We have a partnership with Barry Josephson, known for Bones, and in the U.K. with Paul Abbott, who is known for Shameless & more recently Hit and Miss, which was a big show here for Sky Atlantic, it was their first original drama series. That was one of the first acquisitions that Netflix and DIRECTV made in the U.S. and that was based on a script and they made a very big commitment very early on.

We’ve got a relationship with Pukeko Pictures in New Zealand, a television company co-founded by Richard Taylor, who is the head of Weta Workshop, which is Peter Jackson’s creative workshop. Peter uses it for all his big theatrical pictures: Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, Master & Commander. All those big CGI franchises were made at Weta Workshop in New Zealand. We made a deal about 18 months ago where we have a development person based in Los Angeles, who is developing U.S. cable dramas that will be made in New Zealand using the Weta studio.

WS: Do you look for a certain balance between scripted and nonscripted programming?
ELLENDER: There is sort of an imbalance. It’s partly because when we’re looking at nonscripted we’re in five or six different genres. And invariably we’re feeding cable and satellite thematic channels that are volume driven. So we are looking for volume. The turnaround on those properties is relatively quick. Whereas drama, depending on whether you are in a limited run series or in a returning drama, the development process is obviously much longer and the way you put funding together is becoming a little bit more complex. So you might put equal effort in, but it may take longer to get these properties out because you’ve got to write scripts, you’ve got perhaps a second write on the script, or maybe even a third, that just takes time. You’ve then got to find your broadcasters, and broadcasters these days very rarely will wholly commission a drama property, particularly one that is likely to travel. So you have then got to find either co-production partners or a co-financing partner. That whole process is lengthier in the scripted space than it is in nonscripted.

Also the other thing for us, once again, it’s about quality but it’s about finding those projects that [have not been done before]. And obviously we’re really looking for returning drama.

If there is an unbalance between scripted and nonscripted, it’s really based on those reasons rather than we’re driven to one rather than the other. Those are two very different processes, two very different business models.