AT THE 2013 Canadian Telecom Summit, just a day after the CRTC released its Wireless Code of Conduct, Commission chairman Jean-Pierre Blais told delegates, essentially, what’s good for your business should be good for the customer – and vice versa.
In his June 4 speech, he quoted Mary Kay Ash, the enormously successful founder of Mary Kay Cosmetics – a brand built on direct personal relationships who said: “Everyone has an invisible sign hanging from their neck saying, 'Make me feel important.' Never forget this message when working with people."
Blais went on to note: “Mary Kay understood that paying close attention to customers’ interests and making them feel valued builds loyalty… Her company’s success underscores that the convergence of public and private interests is good for the bottom line. What’s good for Canadians—citizens, creators and consumers alike—is every bit as good for you. These are your clients. The people you need to please to succeed in business.”
While he was speaking primarily to telecom folks about wireless service, the speech is completely applicable to the TV business as well – and thanks to the Commission’s first phase of its Television Policy Review, there is now tons of feedback from people TV companies need to please in order to succeed available on the CRTC’s Talk TV web site.
Is the chair happy with the level of input thus far? What does he hope will come next? He often talks about a focus on outcomes and less on individual rules, what does he hope the outcome of this might be? How can the industry itself help their clients talk TV to the Commission? Is it hard to communicate to Canadians? The chair sat down with Cartt.ca editor and publisher Greg O’Brien when they were both at the International Institute of Communications' Canadian conference last week on Ottawa to go over those and other questions. What follows is an edited transcript of his responses to our queries.
On the level of input and interest in the TV Policy review so far:
“Well, we have over a thousand people registered on the forum, which is significantly more than we had on even the wireless forum. So from that perspective, I’m satisfied that we’re reaching people who are online. One of the lessons we learned from the wireless form is maybe we didn’t do enough for the people who are less tech savvy and – that’s why we have this notion of these flash conferences. I understand it takes a little while for them to get organized, but I am hopeful because we’ve heard others putting them together. We’re experimenting a little bit on that, so it’s hard to say we were expecting anything particular… but, so far, yes, satisfied.
“The fact that we have three streams of questions that are a little higher level brings all kinds of comments to the table, which are good – and sometimes people are comparing the level of engagement with the wireless code. But I think there was a lot more frustration in the general population on the wireless side than on television. I think right now – and that’s why, sometimes I refer to these dark clouds on the horizon – they’re not present. People don’t realize exactly what the potential trade-offs that are coming down the road and it’s still early days. I mean we’re only in phase 1A of a 12 month thing.”
On how the industry is helping and can help. Should the Commission have done more of a marketing push?
“I’m not sure we need to. Somebody from Shaw showed me a PSA they decided to put together and I was listening to your panel and the conversation about the wireless media battle that we saw over the past months. It reminded me the battle we had to “save local TV”… When (companies and government) start duking it out in public, I don’t think it’s to anybody’s advantage, whether their own or the general public interest.
“So I think on ‘let’s talk TV’, I’m seeing more realization that everybody has an interest in this. And a bit like I said in my (Telecom Summit) speech, this new convergence of what’s good for business should also be good for their ultimate customers and Canadian citizens. I’m actually seeing it play out better this time around.
“…Don’t assume what we have now is what we’ll have forever, because there are dark clouds on the horizon that may put in peril what you value. So that’s one thing. I think I’m glad that there is interest like yourself and others to help explain to people this is going on.
“… I think the companies, the industry at large, which includes writers, creators, producers, all those folks, could help, perhaps colleges or universities that wanted to organize these events, but sometimes it takes a little bit of financial assistance. So I can see the media companies helping out or the distributors helping out in financing that. I think there are plans on the way and there’s a little bit more time around that. So I see that coming on.”
On the current level of choice in TV packaging available to Canadians and their oft-stated desire for more pick and pay and less bundling – much like how consumers shifted towards buying single songs and not full albums.
“It’s interesting to me that the direction we seem to be going, and I don’t know if this’ll be in one year, two years or 10 years – is choice is on a micro level. In other words, I see a day when… you’re not choosing channels, you’re actually choosing individual programs. We went from the album where you’re buying the whole package and then moving to individual songs – which hasn’t impacted creativity.
“As you know there have been some great albums developed as a whole concept. There was a theme – perhaps more in the ’60s and ’70s – less so in pop music because you usually had a few tunes that were good and the rest were part of the package. But there is a growing trend. It’s still mass media, but it’s being consumed on an individual, personalized basis, which is quite a different thing about how the whole model works.
On the federal government’s demand for a report on pick and pay/a-la-carte in Canada.
“You picked up upon that – that there’s a distinction to be made between the entire order and council as opposed to what the media coverage might have been or how the government positioned it.
“There’s a wiser realization that if you look at it, there are trade-offs. There are consequences, perhaps even unintended consequences from a public policy perspective you have to look at. I get that that’s not easy to communicate in a press release, and I guess, in a sense, that’s why you have an expert broadcast regular so we can bounce those out and give people a chance to talk about it. As you know, the Act requires them to consult, so in a sense we knew, before others, that it was coming.
“What we generally exchange on is, ‘okay, how fast do you want this’ because you can well imagine, especially now that we have our three year plan, if you throw at us some big piece of new work, it throws us off. So, the government acknowledged we were already working on something, so they got to dovetail with what we were already doing, which is good – and I think it fits with our own planning schedule of issuing a public notice in the April timeframe.
On the importance of sports to the entire Canadian television system.
I agree that sport is very important. As we were talking about earlier about people picking individual programs, the reality is that in a Netflix-type world, we know Netflix doesn’t have live sports and I don’t know how they could do that. Now, there are other platforms to get it, but the reality is that the liveness of it, especially for over the air television, and specialty to a certain degree is very attractive – it’s a bit like news. Ten year old news is not news anymore, it’s a documentary. That’s why you see a lot of the broadcasters going into these competitions, the dancing talent, reality TV things.
“…the second interesting thing about sports, if you look back at the history of broadcasting in the 20th century, it’s always been driven by sports. The first radio sets were sold because there were these heavyweight fights coming out… In the 50s, same things. The launch of over the air television in Australia was dictated by the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games. They had to get it up and going because the games were starting and that’s a sports crazy city. In Canada, too, with the CFL games in the 50s and hockey games. Look at one of the leading copyright cases, Canadian Admiral… it was all about sports.
“Frankly even when we moved away from pure over the air to specialty, again it was sports that was driving things. I do think sports and programming costs and what that means, longer term is very interesting, – and I’m sure the sports franchises are even asking questions themselves about ‘why wouldn’t we produce our own content? Do we have a trusted enough brand and distribution expertise? Could we be our own aggregator, in a sense?’”
On communicating with Canadians.
“You said earlier the Twitter world is not the real world. I think those are real comments… but they are a subset. It’s a bit like when you do surveys online, you self-select whether you participate and the Twitter world is a bit like the same thing. So, that’s why we were very conscious with Let’s Talk TV to make sure that we didn’t have biases in the platforms we were using to reach out to the general public – that there were other ways of participating. I know people always joke that we still receive faxes, but we still do receive faxes. And why would we take that away?
“… And we sometimes have people whose views get more easily picked up through media clippings and Twitter that are young urbanites who don’t represent the average. I often say at the Commission, both to staff and to colleagues and to myself, ‘be careful, we’re not average.’ Nobody’s average. No individual’s average.
“Sometimes I hesitate to answer questions when people ask me what do I watch, what do I read, because I don’t want people to assume just because I watch and read certain things that I think that’s good for everyone. It just happens to be what I like because of my personal tastes.
“… what we struggle with, what people are talking about here is how do you get people mobilized when they may not know there’s an issue yet. I remember a number of years ago when (Radio-Canada) stopped broadcasting the Habs games. That’s when it became a crisis. But you only notice what’s gone when it’s gone… it’s only when it doesn’t hit your screen do you realize. Then, of course, there were parliamentary committees and… it’s generally too late by then.
“The danger is to not assume that people know about it. I’m always surprised when I’m outside of here or outside the usual stuff and people asked me what do I do and I say I work for the CRTC and they have no idea what it is.”
On what might be the outcome of the TV Policy Review. A consumer “wireless code of conduct” for the television industry, perhaps?
“The third theme, where we talked about providing tools to Canadians to make choices in a competitive marketplace is maybe not quite a wireless code, but that’s the sort of thing which is something that we might come out of this on one level. So yes, (I want to) give people the tools, to enable them
“… what I really want us to focus on outcomes and not individual rules, because we’ve been a lot about individual rules in the past, and those rules are our making. I want to get back to the first principles: What are we trying to get out of this system? Then you deconstruct it and say, ‘okay, well this is the way you could achieve that’, then you work even further backwards and say ‘okay what’s our current rules and how do we morph from that reality to the next reality?’
“But, the bigger problem I’m struggling with – and every day I think about this so sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, not screaming, but thinking even about the word ‘framework’. I describe it as a bit too rigid and what we need to think about is an evolving, adaptable set of rules or non-rules and performance indicators that allow us to constantly readjust course if we need to – but within a framework that’s well defined so there’s predictability, while also making sure that we have an eye on the outcomes. I mean, that’s very policy-wonkish.
On what the Commission learned from the wireless code process which will be applied to the TV Policy Review, given the CRTC’s code is being blamed by some for causing smart phone sales to slump, for example.
“I think some of the lessons we learned, I mentioned one of them earlier, is how you engage. Make sure you’re not just using channels that select people who are more plugged into digital technologies, that’s one issue. I think the industry has adapted as well in saying if they want to come to the hearing and make an argument that this will affect them in one way or another, as they did in the wireless code where they said they couldn’t necessarily redo their entire informatics system, but maybe we could do it with the cap on a billing system basis. That’s a way of doing it. So, there’s an adaptation from that perspective. But it is about outcomes.
But, by the same token, I don’t want to be blamed for things that might have occurred in any event. There was a dip in smartphone sales. Okay, some will argue because it is in their interests that it is somehow linked to our decision. It may very well be. There’s also other hypotheses out there… It’s a complicated equation, a very dynamic marketplace, and I’ve always described the wireless code as one that attempts not to create more competition. I’ve never used that word. I talk always about a more dynamic marketplace, which is somewhat different.
