John de Mol

The creative force behind so many unscripted megahits, from Big Brother and Deal or No Deal to The Voice, John de Mol is perhaps more productive now than he ever has been in his prolific career. Since selling his company Talpa Media to ITV last year, Talpa operates as a separate business unit within ITV Studios. As de Mol tells TV Formats, he now has more time to dedicate to what he really loves: brainstorming sessions, creating pilots and selling formats.

TV FORMATS: What benefits have you derived from ITV’s acquisition of Talpa and what benefits has ITV derived from the deal?
DE MOL: After the deal with ITV, we organized our management team in such a way that now I only spend 10 percent of my time dealing with management issues, whereas before it was much more. The good result of that is that I can spend much more time and effort and energy creating new formats with my team, selling them and making pilots. So there has been an immense increase in the pipeline of formats at Talpa. Another benefit of the ITV deal is that we are seeing an increasing number of Talpa formats on ITV channels. We are very proud to announce that the ITV version of the show Dance Dance Dance is going to be produced in Holland. I consider that a big compliment because the ITV executives have all been here and they said, “Well, you guys do such a fantastic job here, we couldn’t do it better in the U.K., let’s produce our version here [in Holland] as well.” Last, but not least, we have created together with ITV a new format called 5 Golden Rings, a very original quiz show that will be broadcast on ITV early next year. It has also sold in Holland and probably will sell in Germany. We are going to produce it in Holland in a sort of hub, with all the international versions made here. As for the benefits of the deal for ITV, Talpa is doing extremely well financially and is contributing in a very healthy way to the profits of ITV. In addition, we’ve decided to team up in a number of important markets in which the local ITV Studios labels produce our shows.

TV FORMATS: How much has the TV landscape changed since Big Brother launched and has your process for looking for new ideas changed?
DE MOL: The television landscape has changed immensely. In each country, you see so many new smaller TV stations that focus on smaller audiences [and consequently] have smaller budgets to spend. At Talpa, we are always searching for the next big thing, but for the last four or five years we have also been looking for smaller formats. I can give you a few examples of very successful shows we have developed over the last few years. We recently premiered a new talk show called The Story of My Life. We have been looking for a talk-show format for a long time and we have succeeded. In The Story of My Life, a celebrity couple is interviewed by a host. The couple is 30 years old in real life and after ten minutes makeup artists turn them into 60-year-olds and 20 minutes later we turn them into 90-year-olds. That has such a huge impact when you have a talk show because it creates a whole new atmosphere and a whole new discussion. The show recently premiered in Holland and was a huge success. The format was sold to a key territory before its official debut in the Netherlands, with more countries likely to follow suit.

TV FORMATS: Talpa has had great success in China. How did that come about?
DE MOL: Success always has to do with a little luck and the little luck I’m referring to is the fact that The Voice in China is so incredibly successful that it put us on the map in such a way that every Chinese TV broadcaster wants to be in touch with us to see what else we have in our creative catalog. We have signed a new deal for The Voice in China for three years with a new partner, Zhejiang Tangde, who has made a huge commitment of $50 million for three years to develop and produce at least three to four new formats in the Chinese market, of which Dance Dance Dance will be the first one.

TV FORMATS: Are there other territories where you would like to have a partnership or a joint venture?
DE MOL: When we started to think outside our borders in Holland, the expertise and experience I gained at Endemol had taught me that it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have subsidiaries or joint ventures in small markets. The amount of work and attention you have to give them is the same as having a joint venture in a big market, but as far as the bottom line goes, they hardly pay off. So we have decided that in the main markets we try to have wholly owned subsidiaries and we have succeeded with that in the U.S., the Middle East and in Germany. In other big markets, like the U.K., France, Italy and Australia, we have joint ventures with very good local producers with whom we work exclusively. We have minority stakes in production companies in Russia and Africa.

TV FORMATS: The Voice in the U.S. keeps going strong. The business in the U.S. continues to work well for you?
DE MOL: Yes, absolutely, the U.S. is our biggest and most important market, although China is really very close, and [our performance in the U.S.] is based on the huge success of The Voice. Season 11 feels like it’s the first season—it’s so good, so fresh and so fantastic. We have a relationship with NBC that led to the sale of another program for the network. We have sold a game show to the U.S., which is in preproduction and we are close to two other deals with other broadcasters. So the U.S. is still our number one market. But I’m curious to see when, for us at Talpa, China becomes a bigger market than the U.S.

TV FORMATS: When you have a show that has been on the air for many years, I imagine you have to strike a balance between leaving those elements that continue to work while refreshing other aspects. Is that an art?
DE MOL: Unfortunately that is an art and not a science! Because on one hand, as a producer of a format, you are working, thinking and inside the format for 24 hours a day, which leads to the fact that the people who make the show tend to get bored with certain elements of the format much sooner than the viewer, who sees The Voice twice a week. I don’t think the viewers get bored so easily. It’s very difficult to decide what to change and what not [to change]. That involves long discussions; sometimes even testing to make sure you don’t make mistakes.

TV FORMATS: Viewers often have their smartphones or another screen in front of them when they watch TV. Do you try to give them material for their smaller screens?
DE MOL: Yes, I think that’s the tendency of the last couple of years. Almost every format and TV show, at least what we develop, has elements for connecting with digital platforms. Our philosophy is that we want to maintain our position as a forerunner in connected formats and engage both traditional [viewers] as well as millennials. On the other hand, I am still convinced that once in a while, people want to sit down on the couch, relax and just enjoy an entertainment show without pushing buttons, without using their phone, without using their apps. But the young generation, mostly, expects that a TV show has at least a few elements that make it interactive.

TV FORMATS: Are scripted formats more difficult to get right and to execute in many territories than an unscripted show?
DE MOL: Oh absolutely. If you create and develop fiction in the U.S., you create it for a market that everybody knows and in a language that basically everybody speaks. And because we have seen so many movies and scripted series from that market, we see cities and backgrounds that everybody knows. If we create a fiction series in Holland, we base it on local situations and local backgrounds. So the best you can achieve is that the basic idea of your series is something you can transform into a new background, but it is much more difficult than an entertainment format and unscripted formats. Although, we have been modestly successful with a few [scripted] formats that we sometimes sold ready-made and sometimes sold the scripts.

TV FORMATS: Do you agree with people who claim that because of the popularity of drama, the time for reality and entertainment shows is over?
DE MOL: No, no, no, and if you look back at the history of the past 20 years, how many times have we heard that? Take the quiz show for example. The quiz show was dead until somebody invented Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and we did Deal or No Deal and quiz shows are alive as never before. It’s a matter of creativity. If you go back 50 or 60 years, a quiz show was based on [a simple formula]: a host in the studio, a contestant, the host asked a question and the contestant had to answer. Based on [this formula] we have seen 2,500 different formats in quiz shows. And we haven’t seen the end of it because on one hand, all the technological developments that we have seen in the last couple of years are, in some respects, maybe a bit of a threat to traditional TV, but on the other hand, they give us technical possibilities that we never had before. Thanks to technology we can create formats now that were not possible ten years ago. Dance Dance Dance is a great example of a show that you could not produce ten years ago—impossible. Thanks to all the developments of virtual reality, augmented reality and computer technology, we are now able, within a reasonable budget, to create and re-create clips that were produced for tens of millions of dollars and shot for three weeks. We can reproduce that now in a couple of days in the studio. We can re-create famous dance numbers, everything from Beyoncé videos to the dance numbers in movies like Saturday Night Fever. Thanks to computer techniques we create a set and make it look exactly like the set you know from the video clip. And the celebrity couples, together with the best dancers from all over the world, work their asses off for months and train every day for hours to dance at a level of quality that you’ve never seen before.

TV FORMATS: What do you enjoy about the creative process?
DE MOL: We have a great team of roughly 25 people; the youngest I think has just turned 18. We have at least nine women working for us because I believe female intuition is very important. So the whole machine, with the people we have put together, is now functioning so well. It is a joy to have creative sessions with people who understand so well what it takes to create a format, what things you have to think of, what things you should and should not do. That’s why the pipeline is fuller than ever and I love the process, even if sometimes after six hours you have to conclude that you spent six hours and the result is zero. But the following week you have a meeting of one hour and the result is 100 percent. And that is a feeling I can’t describe—the moment you feel, yes, now we have something which is really, really good. I never get used to it! If you get used to it, that’s the moment to stop and get out of the business and do something else!