Commissioning Focus: Fiver
- Published: 23 July 2008 14:00
- Author: Michael Rosser
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- Last Updated: 24 July 2008 11:56
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Fiver overcame a potentially rocky start to increase its share by 60% with a strategy of targeting men - and a younger audience than channel predecessor Five Life, writes Michael Rosser.
The relaunch of a channel is usually cause for celebration, as months of hard work finally come to fruition on screen. But the week that the curtain fell on Five Life to make way for Fiver, parent broadcaster Five was going through one of the most tumultuous weeks in its history.
Luckily, the departure of chief executive Jane Lighting and managing director of content Lisa Opie has not been reflected on screen and the launch of Fiver on 28 April has been followed by three months of solid growth for the multichannel offering.
Its average all-hours share has grown to 0.59% during that time, up from 0.54% from 1 January to 27 April 2008, and its share has grown by nearly 60% when compared with the same period last year.
This has been under the aegis of Hannah Barnes, multichannel controller for Five, who joined from Sky in April 2007 and previously spent 10 years at Flextech. She explains: "We spent a lot of time looking at the marketplace and what our competitors were doing, before thinking what made better sense than what we currently had with Five Life."
The biggest change is that while Five Life was solely female skewed with lifestyle programming, Fiver targets both men and women aged 16 to 34, more specifically 16 to 24s in primetime.
"I started changing the schedule at the end of last year," reveals Barnes. "We began introducing more male-skewing content from Five, including films, factual entertainment, reality and soaps. So we've taken the channel broader and younger."
This has been done with a team comprising Steve Gowans, head of factual entertainment and multichannel commissioner, Kate Barnes, channel editor, and Karolina Stallwood, head of scheduling for multichannel.
A bold move in Fiver's bid to bring younger people to the channel was the introduction of online teen drama Sofia's Diary. The show, which debuted on social networking site Bebo in March, is the first major web show to air on British television.
"The strategy with Sofia's Diary is to connect with the massive number of 16 to 24s that are on the internet," says Barnes. She recently agreed to take a second 65-episode run of the online show, produced by indie Campbell Ryan.
Barnes hints at more activity in this field and says: "I will be talking about another kind of Sofia's Diary project, which will potentially be bigger."
The schedule takes a mixed approach in a bid to target a broad range of young people. Younger skewing programming airs from 4pm to 7.30pm, when shows such as Sofia's Diary and high-rating Australian soaps Neighbours and Home and Away go out.
Home and Away is Fiver's top-performing show, and regularly records the most viewed programme on any commercial digital channel every week, with around 700,000 viewers, while Neighbours is averaging an audience of 245,000 (1.3% share).
Young men are targeted across the week in the 7.30pm slot. Monday and Wednesday night skews female, Tuesday targets men, Thursday is focused on shared viewing and Friday shows films. Saturday is also more male skewed and Sunday is a compilation of the best of what aired during the week.
Outlining what she is looking for from the indie sector, Barnes identifies the 9pm and 10pm slots on Tuesday and Thursday nights. "Indies are coming to us with ideas that would work really well on Five, but we need to be bringing in younger, male-skewing content," she says.
"If a show like CCTV Cities works well on Five, what is the twist we could give it that would make it work for Fiver?"
Barnes is hunting half-hour and hour-long factual entertainment shows for those slots and is considering four male-skewing shows that "feel very different and original".
But she is also looking for content that can work as a shared viewing experience and pinpoints Generation Sex as "emblematic" of where she is looking to take the channel.
Princess Productions has been commissioned to make a second 6 x 60-minute series of the show, which uses "real people" rather than experts to discuss modern sexual etiquette, explain seemingly bizarre jargon and reveal what young people are really getting up to between the sheets.
"Our programming should be up-front, down to earth and fun - not a BBC-style public service announcement," outlines Barnes.
"With Generation Sex, we know young people are into sex so what we're trying to do is represent that in a very straightforward way. That is key."
She points to another new commission, Best Friend Rehab, as the sort of content Fiver is looking for. "We know that young people use their friends more than their family as their social network and I feel they don't want to hear experts' advice - they'd rather listen to each other," Barnes explains.
"With Best Friend Rehab, we've commissioned a show where friends help each other through particular issues or big events they're going through in their lives."
The 8 x 60-minute series, produced by Monkey, will likely air in the third quarter.
"We don't want to be elitist or too cool for school - we want to connect with our audience."
As part of this bid to speak directly to younger viewers, Fiver is avoiding celebrity-fronted shows. "I do not want to attach a celebrity to everything we do," asserts Barnes. "That's been done to death everywhere else. A lot of what ITV2 and E4 do is more superficial as they find a celebrity that they believe the audience finds appealing. But we don't need to do that. We're about real people and real lives."
Barnes cites terrestrial spin-off channels such as BBC3, ITV2, ITV3, ITV4 and E4 as its direct competition but classes Sky One and Living as "slightly different because they're on different platforms, and Living is more niche." She adds that despite all these broadcasters being general entertainment channels, targeting 16 to 34s, Fiver is differentiated by "our tone, our brand and the way we talk to our audience".
She explains: "E4 is more about entertainment, being cool and getting people to come into a particular gang, and ITV2 is about celebrity, unashamed entertainment and is more female. But we are aggressively targeting men and are more inclusive, rather than exclusive."
Five was a late entrant to the digital channel landscape, but Barnes doesn't concede that the competition stole the march on the broadcaster. "There is a huge benefit to Five launching the channels when they did, which is the benefit of hindsight," she says.
"We can see a lot of mistakes that have been made [by other channels] and we hopefully won't repeat them. But we can also learn from the successes of our competitors.
"We have taken both channels to a 1% share within 18 months, but it's taken those other guys a long time to get there."
Barnes hints at commissioning "something around music" and will continue to order fashion-themed content, having already aired Glamour's Best Dressed, produced by Target TV, and US reality series Fashionista Diaries.
Other US acquisitions include Sex and the City as well as Dirt, starring Courteney Cox. On the latter, Barnes admits: "I was disappointed with the performance of Dirt and would have liked it to have worked harder. It had a good 16 to 34 profile and the slot average was up but I don't think the second series was as good as the first and can understand why viewers didn't come to it."
Also ahead will be more spin-offs of shows from the flagship channel, such as Hotel Inspector Unseen, currently airing on Fiver.
"From my history of working in multichannel, I know how difficult it is to make a brand stand out and punch above its weight," adds Barnes.
"But we're making an impact and that young audience is coming to us. I want to provide instant gratification from a channel that's not up itself."
Schedule slots
The brief: "We want up-front, down-to-earth, fun shows for 16 to 24s. At the moment, we are looking for male-skewing, factual entertainment shows."
Tuesday/Thursday, 9pm and 10pm
"Younger skewing male content that is fairly tough and fairly noisy."
What they say
Andrew O'Connell, Sky One commissioning editor: "They should be applauded for taking a risk with the rebrand as it seems to have paid off. It certainly created a talking point and gave the channel a personality that was lacking under the former moniker. They need to consider their content proposition if they're going to cut through and live up to the brand promise."
David Clarke, channel controller, Challenge and Trouble: "Five has had success recently with the blokey areas of their schedule - Ice Road Truckers, Warship, Gadget Show etc - so it seems logical to try to shift some of those audiences around their portfolio. However, on a channel currently skewing comfortably north of 60% female, it could run the risk of confusing the audience. Whatever the strategy, Fiver's male-skewed commissions will need to deliver cut-through in the male marketplace to give non-Fiver viewers a reason to sample and scale to make it worth their while - which is easier said than done."
Steve Regan, head of programmes, Target TV: "The best commissioners know what they want and what they don't want at the beginning. With Fiver, Hannah Barnes and Steve Gowans give just about the clearest steers possible. This ultimately makes for a much better show."
Coming soon
Best Friend Rehab (8 x 60 minutes), Monkey Kingdom.
Generation Sex, series two (6 x 60 minutes), Princess Productions.
Fiver budgets
Every deal is different, but for an hour-long factual entertainment show at 10pm on a Monday or Thursday, the tariff is £60,000.
Up close: Hannah Barnes
CV: Joined Five as multichannel controller in April 2007, having spent a decade at Flextech (aka Virgin Media). Barnes joined Living in 1996 as a production assistant in promotions and rose through the ranks as programme scheduler, senior acquisitions and programming executive to deputy channel controller of Living 1 and 2 and FTN. She joined Sky as managing editor of Sky One, Two and Three in May 2006 before leaving for Five.
Top TV: "The OC, The Apprentice, Flight of the Conchords, Gavin and Stacey, Never Mind the Buzzcocks, Generation Sex, Grey's Anatomy, Charlie and Lola, Twin Peaks, Sex and the City - the list goes on. I'm obsessed with telly."
Career highlight: "Refreshing Five Life into Fiver. It's rare that you get an opportunity to give a channel a full makeover."
Websites: "Ocado, Perez Hilton, iTunes, Broadcastnow."
Why work in TV? "It's always changing, creative and exciting. You're only as good as your last successful show."
Top Fiver shows so far this year
Programme TX Start Audience Share (%)
HOME AND AWAY 30/04 6.30pm 980,000 5.4
FILM: XXX2: THE NEXT LEVEL 02/05 9pm 429,000 2.6
FILM: 13 GOING ON 30 04/05 6pm 396,000 2.2
NEIGHBOURS 07/07 7pm 379,000 2.2
FILM: CHARLIE'S ANGELS 2 23/05 9pm 285,000 1.8
Source: Barb/TNS Infosys. Figures are consolidated and include timeshifted viewing
