Paul Heaney on the Factual Distribution Business

Paul Heaney, founder and CEO of BossaNova Media, discussed meeting the needs of buyers and maximizing returns to producers as day one of the TV Real Festival wrapped today.

Heaney launched BossaNova Media in October 2020 and has spent the last five years scaling the business, bringing Night Train Media on as an investor in 2021. That move helped to accelerate the company’s co-funding and co-development efforts and provides a wealth of other synergies, Heaney said in his keynote conversation with TV Real’s Mansha Daswani that you can view here.

Heaney previously built up TCB Media Rights and Cineflix Rights; by the time of BossaNova’s creation in 2020, “the business had changed so much. You need money and you need to embrace the fact that most projects are going to need some form of risk on your side to get them over the line. That should have bothered me more, really. But the team that we put together is more than good enough to navigate what we’re going through right now. You have to be extremely resilient. You have to know that even though you might have a track record of doing something this way, you know you might go and do it that way.”

The company’s Development Days, bringing producers and buyers together, have been paramount to BossaNova’s success. Last year, the company brought in almost 50 buyers from around the world to hear 50 project pitches. Apps allow buyers to vote for projects they like, “which then informs our whole greenlight process. That breathes oxygen into what we need to do. It’s a crucial part of the business now. We have to do what the buyers want us to do. They’ve got to sell projects up as well. We have to make sure that the projects we pitch are absolutely of the level. And when they give us their briefs, we have to make sure we’re not letting them down. Every minute that they’re there, their inbox is being filled up with people looking for meetings or pitching them something. So, they’re giving us their time, and that is massively valuable. We have to make sure this is on message. We look to greenlight about 20 percent of those 50 projects.”

On what the market needs now, Heaney said, “People want one- to four-part crime shows as well as returning series. The bar is getting higher. So, single strong docs on one side, and we’re looking for long-running series we think can develop into franchises. If we’re delivering royalty checks and those shows are no longer in the red, they’re in the black, it means that we chose well.”

Delivering a show “on time and to brief and to budget” is key, but so is the marketing effort. “We want to have all the deliverables because we want to exploit them as much as we can on as many platforms as possible.”

Diversity within the slate has also been key, Heaney explained. “We don’t want to load our slate with too much of the same. You’ve got to carefully curate it and put it together with content that looks like it’s not just there to make up the numbers. Buyers are not buying like that anymore.”

Discussing trends within the still very popular true-crime space, Heaney referenced the importance of access. “You can’t second-guess the market with true crime. If it’s been done before, you’ll want a new slant on it.”

As the session came to a close, Heaney discussed the importance of having the backing of Night Train Media and the synergies possible with the company’s digital and scripted teams. “It’s energizing. Night Train is very supportive. On the operational sides, my colleague Charlotte [Johnson, operations and finance director] works across all the businesses within Night Train now. That means the back offices are coming closer together, providing real benefits for the businesses. I feel as though we’re only just getting going. We are getting used to the idea of being a group.”