OTTAWA – Turns out it takes more than TV critics to get your series discovered these days amid the multitude of digital choice and platforms out there.
It takes partnerships, between broadcasters and producers, especially at early stages of production, and even between publicity, marketing and digital teams at a broadcaster. So a panel on discoverability at the Prime Time conference in Ottawa said Thursday
Mark Bishop, co-CEO and executive producer at marblemedia, insisted the indie producer routinely meets with sales, marketing and digital media teams at networks to build champions for his series in the organization. However, he added producers can never be certain which network teams are talking to one another.
Bishop recalled one broadcaster recently where they had separate meetings with a digital team on one floor and a TV team on another. "We thought, why don't we get the two teams in one room. And when we brought them together, they'd never met," he recounted.
That's a scenario Christine Shipton, senior vice president, chief creative officer at Shaw Media, says her network has worked hard to avoid. "We've gotten tons better at that (promotion) just by getting all the departments in the same room. We've had to do that too, so even our teams understand our core focus and goals," she said.
Of course, partnerships to promote TV content across multiple platforms and partnerships depends on who owns the audience, who owns which rights, and can the risk and rewards of discovering and growing audiences be shared.
Janet Brown, CEO of Filmbuff, a U.S.-based distribution company, told the Ottawa panel that American film and TV producers are independently financed, as opposed to accessing a myriad of industry marketing and promotion funds, as in Canada – and the incentive to promote TV content can vanish if a broadcaster or SVOD takes all rights to a project.
"The incentive for the producer to market stuff once they know their bread is already buttered is close to zero.” – Janet Brown, Filmbuff
"It's a very different scenario if you're going along and waiting for Netflix or a broadcaster or Amazon to write the cheque and take all rights," as opposed to only streaming rights, Brown said. "The incentive for the producer to market stuff once they know their bread is already buttered is close to zero.”
Successful collaboration between TV producers and broadcasters has occurred, however, to leverage the strengths of both on successful Canadian brands.
A case in point is Vikings, whose fourth season is debuting on Shaw Media’s History later this month. Shipton said her network's publicity, web, social media and marketing teams have worked closely with Canadian co-producer Take 5 Productions, MGM and others to launch the latest season.
Besides the series, Shaw Media created two documentaries, a dedicated website entitled A World Revealed, which provides insights from actors, writers and other behind-the-scenes creative, and entertainment specials for ET Canada.
Shaw also followed up a tweet by Blue Jays third baseman Josh Donaldson that he was a Vikings fan by getting him over to the set in Ireland for a cameo appearance as Viking warrior Hoskuld, perhaps broadening the franchise viewership to include Jays fans. "This will air in the second tranche of episodes in October (2016), which we hope will correlate with the World Series," Shipton said.
Bishop added multi-platform audience engagement beyond linear channels can drive international sales of a TV series. He pointed to Splatalot, which marblemedia was targeting for a first-time sale in France after the kids series sold into 120 markets elsewhere internationally.
"We release a whole engagement strategy on multiple platforms, including YouTube, to generate traffic and we used that data to go to a broadcaster in France and made the series sale there by showing we had an engaged fan base," Bishop explained.
Canadian producers being hard-pressed to secure TV ratings data from broadcasters makes it even more crucial to generate digital traffic data from other platforms, added the panelists.
"Because we talk about doing this collaboratively,” Bishop explained, “we co-manage all of our social media on our brands with our broadcasters, so we can pull our Google Analytics information and use it as we travel internationally.”
