SO THE CBC IS GOING to pursue ratings after all.
After years of downplaying its ratings (and sometimes lack thereof) in favor of talking about an overall strategy as a public broadcaster that offers programming of value to the Canadian public – and not necessarily ratings blockbusters – the CBC has decided to change course.
With executive vice-president of CBC television Richard Stursberg firmly at the helm now (he had barely begun his tenure during the run-up to the fall 2004 season), the shift at the CBC has begun, where ratings mean far more than they had.
Shows on the CBC can’t just be about “public value” any more. They must also entertain and/or inform. That doesn’t mean the CBC is going to move into Fear Factor-type programming in search of ratings wins (in fact, there are no reality programs on the CBC schedule) but it has overhauled its schedule and decided to improve its marketing and promotions (it fired a number of promotions personnel in May).
CBC’s executive director of network programming, Slawko Klymkiw (right), has seen strategy shifts before. This one, however, maintains the network’s commitment to Canadian programming, it’s just going to be better and smarter and decisions on the shows that air, a but more ruthless. Some programming has been cut, with the bulk of the savings being used to pay for new dramatic programs.
Plus, when the ratings come, so will more ad dollars, increasing the resources for more Canadian drama.
Klymkiw chatted with www.cartt.ca’s editor and publisher Greg O’Brien last week after the CBC unveiled its fall lineup to the media. What follows is an edited transcript.
Greg O’Brien: I was curious – this morning, you talked about a shift in strategy – is this a real strategy shift or more of a modification of what CBC already does in terms of Canadian content?
Slawko Klymkiw: I think it’s a pretty significant shift. On the issue of audience, we’ve always wanted audience, but we had a list of conditions. We always had to do public value, we had to do this and that. Now what we’re saying is that ‘yeah, we probably still have to do a lot of that but first and foremost, we want to build a popular prime time schedule.’ And that changes things in a very interesting way.
It opens up in some ways the definition of what kind of drama and comedy you might have on CBC Television. It inevitably creates the conditions for a lot more entertainment programming in prime time. It forces us to make harder decisions, to be honest with you, about what we’re going to keep doing and not doing.
I think that’s pretty fundamental because again, it’s a real tricky proposition as a public broadcaster to deal with the audience issue and with the public value issue. The other underlying assumption on this is that no one here is thinking that money is going to fall from heaven or from government to create increased budgets for public broadcasting, so one of the things we have to do is create our own ability to generate revenue which is going to go back into Canadian television shows.
You can do that a few of ways: You can increase your ratings and get morre people buying ad time; you can get more money from the CTF (Canadian Television Fund), which we’ve asked for; and you can find money by making harder decisions about what you’re going to keep and not keep and really, those are the three ways that you do it.
GOB: What have you decided to not keep?
SK: That is the million-dollar question. We made two decisions last year which you’ll see in the schedule. One is we’re doing a little less amateur sports and we’re doing a little less Zed. That’s saving us some money. We’re also not doing some of the big high profile one-off entertainment specials we used to do. We’re going to put that money into drama.
We’re going to have a very haard look at what we do in terms of arts. We’re going to have a hard look at the shows that have been on the network for some time and see if there are other ways of doing them.
GOB: What happens to Opening Night?
SK: Opening Night this year continues as a half-season program beginning in January.
GOB: There’s no reality programming on the schedule, correct?
SK: Right.
GOB: Was that a conscious decision or was there just nothing good enough for you.
SK: We didn’t develop anything or see anything that we thought would resonate. We were very happy with The Greatest Canadian last year and we were less happy with Making the Cut.
Really, those were there last year to help us to get to this year where we’ve been saying to people for a couple of years is our dream is to have Sundays and Mondays go all season with high-impact Canadian mini-series’ and movies and we have finally got to that point.
GOB: Do you still find yourself bumping up against the negative attitudes towards Canadian programming. I still hear it in the industry, we see it in the media, and I still hear it from consumers. How do you combat that or counter those attitudes?
SK: That’s a very good question. I’ve dedicated most of my life to deal with that issue. I think one would be foolish to underestimate the pure hegemony of American television in Canada. It is so dominant in so many ways and has been with us for a long time and in some ways, Canadians are more in love with American television programs than Americans are.
If you look at the top 20 or 30 shows (in Canada), they are generally American. If you look at CTV’s success, it’s all based on simulcast television. That’s one way of looking at it.
The other way of looking at is in that environment, when you think of the promotional pull and the money they put in those dramas, and you look at the share of networks, where CTV is about 13 and Global is around 8 or 9 and we did a 7.5, without hockey and with all Canadian shows. There is some interesting resonance and traction on the Canadian side.
If you look at our comedy programs and our sports programs and our news programs, people still watch them in sufficient numbers. Where we really have to ratchet it up is in drama. We’ve been very successful on the high impact side. If you look at the numbers Trudeau did or Shattered City and things of that sort, it’s been very successful for us. If we can hit huge numbers six of 12 times or 7 of 14 times in the Sunday-Monday (timeframe) throughout the year, that will build huge momentum.
Then it’s going to take us a lot of work to creatively, financially and in every other way, build the environment where we’re going to create great dramatic series that are going to resonate with audiences. But, I’ve got to tell you I think we’re dreaming in Technicolor if we think we’re going to get the same numbers overnight that Desperate Housewives get or that ER gets. The cost of those shows, the promotional spill, the issues of cultural domination that we’ve talked about before, those are difficult ones to overcome overnight.
GOB: I think Richard (Stursberg) mentioned this would be a four or five year long process during the presentation this morning.
SK: I think it will take that long at the very least.
GOB: Do you need help from the other Canadian broadcasters, where they should produce more Canadian drama?
SK: I think they have a business model that essentially drives them to where they are. The help we need is that we need public policy to say ‘you know what, you’re doing a great job. No one else is going to do that and let’s fund these guys properly.’
We have been cut, historically, more than any other government institution and that’s a problem. Television ain’t cheap and to do the things we’re talking about we’re going to have to look for money and since I don’t think (government) is writing that cheque, we’ve asked for 50% of the CTF dollars.
We’ll look inside and find partnerships but it’s a lot of work, it’s a struggle and it’s not going to come easy.
GOB: Will this shift in strategy towards the (audience success) of Canadian programming also involve increasing your marketing budget to promote or pump your shows in the face of the mass-marketing wave that the U.S. channels are able to do?
SK: I think we’re going to have to do that but I would say more important, we’re going to have to find new and innovative ways of promoting our programs to reach audiences we traditionally haven’t.
We have a great show on the air called This is Wonderland. It’s contemporary, it’s new, it has a great young cast But, we did some research and only 27% of Canadians knew it was on the air.
That’s a problem.
You know, it’s very easy just to blame promotion and communications for this stuff. First of all, the spill of American promotion is huge. There are a million titles out there that people are competing for – it’s no easy proposition to get your voice among the cacophony of voices out there but that is going to be our major preoccupation over the next couple of months – how do you break through on the promotional front.
GOB: Did this have anything to do with the recent cutbacks in the promotional department?
SK: I’d say partly, yeah.
GOB: Moving over to The National, can you tell me how that show is going to be changed?
SK: We’re going to have to wait until September. It’s going to be a gradual change… trying to contemporize some of our notions about lineup, assignments, and the kinds of stories we do and how we treat our programs.
GOB: Is hockey going to get itself together?
SK: Absolutely.
GOB: Do you have confidence that they will have a season next year?
SK: Yes.
GOB: How big of an impact would it be if there wasn’t a season next year.
SK: The truth is we’ll cross that bridge again if we come to it.
GOB: Are you happy with the feedback and the viewership of the movies that you had in place of hockey?
SK: Absolutely, It’s hard building a movie strategy in a four-month period. But, we have a lot of good movies and ran a lot of movies in our inventory that people had seen before. We essentially targeted to get 75 to 80% of our audience between 9 and 11 back. That’s what we did and we inevitably did very well.
As an economic strategy it was fine, as a cultural strategy, it probably doesn’t have the same impact.
