Banijay Rights’ Cathy Payne to receive Gold Award at the International Format Awards
Cathy Payne
Cathy Payne, international distribution veteran and CEO of Banijay Rights, will be the recipient of this year’s Gold Award at the International Format Awards.
The annual prize recognises a lifetime’s achievement in the formats business and will be presented to Payne at the International Format Awards in Cannes prior to Mipcom on Sunday October 20. For Payne, it is the latest high in a career that has grown in step with the giant Banijay group for which she now leads distribution.
Payne was CEO at Southern Star International in her native Australia where, over 20 years, she was responsible for building one of the largest distributors of English-language content outside of the US.
That company was acquired by Endemol in 2009 and Payne subsequently spent another 10 years there as the company became Endemol Shine following another merger, directing all worldwide distribution efforts as CEO of Endemol Worldwide Distribution.
When Banijay won the race to buy Endemol Shine and form the biggest independent production group in the world in 2020, Payne was retained to lead the enormous group’s distribution efforts. This put her in charge of a catalogue that includes formats such as MasterChef, Survivor, Deal or No Deal, Big Brother, Hunted, Lego Masters and Temptation Island, as well as scripted titles like Peaky Blinders and Black Mirror.
“It’s very pleasing to be recognised; I was delighted and surprised,” Payne says. “It’s a nice thing to be recognised after what has been, let’s be honest, a challenging 18 months for the industry.
“When I look back across the years we’ve been through a lot of huge integrations: Southern Star bought Primetime, then got bought by Endemol, then we merged with Shine and then Banijay acquired us. I’m very proud that in every one of those situations we were able to bring two teams together and do it in a way that really created value, because sometimes two and two doesn’t equal four for all.
“They’re not easy times. You have to give people clarity, be clear in your decision making and do it promptly. Difficult decisions have to be made and it often ends up with people leaving the business. The most recent one, when we were acquired by Banijay, we did the whole integration during Covid, via Zoom. They completed the deal on July 1 and we were operating as a combined team by October 1. I look back with immense pride at how they were handled.”
Payne is just the fifth woman to win the award after Annie Wegelius (2015), Alex Mahon (2018) and Anette Rømer (2021), while Trish Kinane won it jointly with Stephen Leahy in 2008, but she is also a rare recipient from the distribution side of the business.
She highlights the 1999 deal that saw Home & Away switch from its UK home of 12 years, ITV, to Channel 5 as a career turning point, when she was personally chosen by Australia’s Seven to lead on negotiations. “As far as individual deals go, I do always look back at the Home & Away deal I did in 1999. Whoever would have thought a deal done back then would still be going 25 years later,” Payne says.
“That was a really hard deal, it took a long time and I experienced the worst moments of my career and the best moments in my career. It was a hard deal to do because it was a show that had been on one channel for a long time. It was a length-of-series deal and they couldn’t start airing it for another 12 months. It was hard. It made me a much stronger person commercially.”
The International Format Awards, a coproduction between C21Media, FRAPA, the Entertainment Masterclass and Mipcom, will take place from 5pm at ClubC21 in Cannes prior to Mipcom on Sunday October 20.
Previous recipients of the Gold Award
2023: Arthur Essebag, French TV host, entrepreneur and founder of Satisfaction Group
2022: Wonwoo Park, creator of The Masked Singer
2021: Anette Rømer, STV Production
2020: Wayne Garvie, Sony Pictures Television
2019: Peter Fincham, Expectation Entertainment
2018: Alex Mahon, Channel 4
2017: Paul Gilbert, CBS Studios International
2016: Gary Carter, KLOK
2015: Annie Wegelius, former SVT programming chief
2014: Mark Itkin, William Morris Endeavor
2013: Stephen Lambert, Studio Lambert/All3Media
2012: David Lyle, Fox Reality
2011: Dick de Rijk, creator of Deal or No Deal
2010: Reg Grundy, former CEO of Grundy Television
2009: Peter Bazalgette, former creative director of Endemol Group
2008: Stephen Leahy and Trish Kinane, Ludus Entertainment
2007: Merv Griffin, creator of Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy!
