Risk aversion leading to copycat commissioning – Banijay’s Patrick Holland
Patrick Holland, Banijay UK’s CEO and executive chair
CONTENT LONDON: Risk aversion among broadcasters and streamers is leading to copycat commissioning, according to Banijay UK’s CEO and executive chair Patrick Holland.
Holland, a former channel controller at the BBC, was speaking on a panel at Content London on Thursday titled Back on the Front Line: When commissioners return to producing what do they bring back with them?
“What I see across scripted and unscripted, and a massive issue for me with commissioning, is risk aversion,” he said.
“Everyone is terrified… people are scared for their jobs; commissioners don’t want to commission something and then lose their job over it, so people do copycat commissioning.
“And what happens is the process is very slow because everyone is then pushing things towards a decision. That moment of… where you just think: ‘I don’t care what anyone says, we’re gonna make this show’ – it’s harder for commissioners to be in that position now because of that risk aversion.”
Holland also pointed out the ‘fewer, bigger, better’ mantra many commissioners are currently following means less chance to rebound if you fail, since there are fewer other projects to fall back on, which results in less opportunity to create a hit.
“The spend might be the same, but you’re commissioning fewer projects. If you’re commissioning fewer projects, you can’t fail. I mean, you can fail, you have to fail because you will not come up with a show that’s a success all the time, but if you used to have 10 smaller shows, and one of them was a success, you could build on it and [it could] become a bigger show in the old system.
“That was a way in which you could grow a hit. It’s much harder to grow a hit now, because you have to land fully formed. There’s a lot of money being spent on that show, and the data comes in over 28 days, and if it hasn’t covered its marketing spend, you’re finished.”
Warning that fewer commissioning opportunities mean there will often be someone trying to “kill” your idea in favour of something else, Holland urged other producers to ensure the shows they pitch stand out in a crowded market.
“If you’ve got fewer opportunities, and you’ve also got an area of some services where there are shared pots of money that could go to this genre or go to that genre, not only is your commissioner actively fighting for your idea, there are voices within that service who are actively trying to kill the idea. You have to recognise that this is a good competitive battle that’s going on within these different commissioning places, and it’s in lots of people’s interest to kill your idea because they want someone else’s idea,” he said.
“Your idea doesn’t just have to survive first contact with the commissioner, it then needs to survive first contact with that commissioner’s boss and their boss and their boss. It needs to be something where everyone goes: ‘This is great.’ You’ve always got to think about: ‘How is this going to fly through the system?’ Because for a scripted show, it can be a two-year journey where there’s vulnerability all the way along where someone could just go: ‘Do you know what? I think we’ve got something like that’ or ‘It’s not that distinctive. Let’s kill it.’”
