On Growth: Alex Connock

Let's Pretend

Alex Connock

Hold the front page. 

Actually, don’t hold the front page, because print newspapers are dying out, people get their information instantly from the internet, no one goes to the newsagent to find out the news any more, and that analogy is more or less meaningless. 

So anyway, let your browser auto-refresh or something. 

Because I’ve started a new company – in TV and in Manchester.  It aims to tap into a whole new generation of Northern talent, to produce TV formats, to make an impact internationally.  It’s called PRETEND, I’m working 15 hours a day on it, it’s fast moving, there are tons of opportunities on every front; I’m loving it.

But that’s the easy bit.

The tough bit is that the landscape has completely changed.  The last time I did this (I started a previous company, in factual TV and radio in 1998, which eventually reached over 500 staff) the model was recognizably British.  The initial idea was to mimic, albeit in a small way, production companies like the granddaddy of Manchester TV businesses, Granada, with output that sat on broadcast TV and radio, principally in the UK market.

However nowadays, that’s just not how the industry works.  TV, like every other industry, is being upended by the internet and social media. (I love the French word bouleverse as a way to describe that.)

For a neat summary, take a look at the Vanity Fair magazine survey of who and what is hot in the global media right now.  It’s Facebook, Zynga (who make Farmville), LinkedIn (who are registering two new users per second), Google+, and Spotify.   Twenty years ago, it would have been a list of executives at the main US TV networks.  Now, they barely feature.

Of course, producers do, and the traditional linear media is still huge.  On the list are people like “Lost” creator J.J. Abrams and comedy producer Judd Apatow.  But the balance has shifted so markedly to social media that you can’t ignore it.  To make a great business in TV that is going to be relevant for the next decade, you’ve got to build it as much around YouTube and Twitter as a script and a TV treatment.

Yesterday I gave a speech to the creative courses in the fresher year at a big northern university.   Of 300 students in the class, not a single one was not on Facebook.  A business which barely existed five years ago and which was founded 4,000 miles away across the ocean by a guy still at college, has succeeded in capturing significant information about the lives of every single one of an entire class of 18 year olds.

Is there any other company that has achieved that?  Would they all have a Mars bar in their pocket, or a Nokia phone, or Fairy liquid beside their sink?   I guess the BBC might have impacted all their lives in the past 24 hours one way or another through TV, web or radio – but they won’t have given the BBC photos of their birthday party, or the name of their dog, like they have on Facebook.  And many of them won’t have even bothered to pay their license fee, because they only watch TV on their laptop.  (By the way, I don’t approve of that.)

So that’s what we are dealing with today. 

TV production in the UK was a £3.2bn industry last year.  It generated £560m in revenues from programmes and format sales.  Britain is actually the biggest exporter in the world of TV formats.    “Broadcasters around the world have outsourced the risk of formats to the UK,” says Tony Cohen, British-based boss of global TV producer Fremantle.

And yet – this is still an industry in transition to the social media age. 

Starting a new production company in the middle of all that is as exciting as you can get.  It’s about securing YouTube channel status while trying to think up the next great format.  It’s about talking to Americans as much as potential commissioners in Manchester.  It’s about marketing on Twitter, through blogs, and through search optimization.  It’s about talking to students about how they’re live their viewing lives, and putting them on screen.  And hopefully, it will be about everyone involved having a lot of very creative fun.

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Alex Connock has founded PRETEND [http://www.pretendtv.com] and is also Governor of MMU, and Visiting Fellow at Oxford University, Reuter’s Institute for the Study of Journalism.