Cohen said Endemol UK's talent show suffered because its TV and web offerings were too similar. The talent format ran for five weeks online, auditioning contestants in glass boxes, before transferring to television.
Asked at a Royal Television Society event on 360-degree commissioning about cross-platform projects that had not worked, Cohen said: “I don't think it [Upstaged] worked as an entertainment experienceÉ the web experience was too like the television experience, and it didn't sufficiently direct web and TV usage.”
Wild West
Cohen said that it was ultimately valuable to the BBC as a learning experience. “It pushed the BBC to break a lot of its own rules - that's a good thing [and] learn new expertise. We've got to embrace failure because there's a Wild West feel to this. We're making it up as we go along. There are going to be mistakes if we try out new things.”
Endemol UK chief executive Tim Hincks said that as a project designed to be owned by the web community, Upstaged represented a huge learning curve.
“The digital space is no different to traditional TV in that most things don't work and every now and then something hits home,” he said. “The people who succeed in this space will be the ones with the most failures behind them.”
He said Upstaged was constricted by delivering the whole project within a specific TV broadcast timeframe rather than allowing it to have a longer life online.
Chicken and egg
Meanwhile, Cohen identified multiplatform chat show Lily Allen and Friends as “a success on every level”. He said: “The ratings have been, for studio entertainment on BBC3, better than we've had for years.” The success was driven by its distinctive web concept, he said, whereby fans could suggest content. “The site was as important as the show, and the two influenced each other.”
Peter Cowley, Endemol UK's managing director of digital media, cautioned broadcasters to position their online content on established networking sites rather than try and draw traffic to their own sites.
“There is a chicken and egg scenario if you're a commercial broadcaster. If you are going to monetise the audience you want to bring them [to your site] - but actually you've got to go where the audience is going,” he said.
He argued that lines are becoming “increasingly blurry” between marketing content and editorial, and questioned whether the broadcaster or the website was getting the most value from such commissions. “Should the broadcaster be paying MySpace, or should MySpace be paying the broadcaster?”
New digital post
Cowley's comments come as Endemol UK aims to mirror the management of traditional TV productions for its digital projects with the creation of the role of digital media operations director.
Richard Thomson, one of the indie's UK multi-genre heads of production, has moved into the new role and will report to Cowley, in a reshuffle that also sees fellow head of production Petrina Good become director of production.
Thomson has recently been production manager on ITV1 game show Goldenballs, on Channel 4 factual entertainment series Supersize vs Superskinny and his new role seeks to apply a similar management role to web and mobile content.
Endemol UK will launch reality series The Gap Year on social networking site Bebo next week.
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