Key executives
Dan Gopal
EVP, Sales - EMEA, International Distribution
Dan Loewy
EVP, Sales - Americas, International Distribution
Joyce Yeung
EVP, Sales - APAC, International Distribution
eOne digs into data to learn buyer mindsets
eOne had begun 2020 strongly, having cemented its position in the UK distribution landscape by posting £293.4m revenues in the 2019 Distributors Survey, a growth of 15.8% from last year and the second highest in the top 10 distributors.
Its status was further buoyed by the £2.9bn takeover by toy giant Hasbro in January, which added an IP library of some 1,500 brands to its more than 6,000-hour sales catalogue.
The deal was the pinnacle of a change in strategy in recent years, which has seen the producer-distributor looking to fuel its distribution arm with in-house productions to retain IP ownership and have greater exploitation leverage in the global market.
“Pure distribution entities depend on other people creating the shows, are less creatively involved and don’t fundamentally own the underlying IP,” says Stuart Baxter, eOne president of international distribution. “Five years ago, that was a big part of eOne’s business. It’s a much smaller part now and after the Hasbro acquisition, it’s going to become even smaller.”
As such, new president of global television Michael Lombardo is overseeing the development, creation, and ownership of programming, drilling down into the Hasbro library and tapping IP for projects.
Furthermore, Baxter says he now spends less than 25% of his time on pure distribution and more working with creatives on the international value of their shows.
One change he has identified during lockdown, however, is that the lack of new content has meant an “uptick in distribution”, with eOne seeing particular interest in library content that is “pertinent for the times”.
Another consequence of the coronavirus lockdown has seen the distributor become more forensic in its client engagement. Without the option of face-to-face meetings, Baxter says eOne has beefed up its online screening system.
This allows sales execs to see exactly what buyers have viewed, how much of a programme they’ve watched and if they went straight on to another episode. “We’re becoming, dare I say it, a little more data-centric, and we’re seeing lots of clients are fully engaged,” he says.
The system will have the added benefit of informing eOne’s development going forwards – though it does not ask clients to rate shows, as there were internal concerns this could be considered as a negotiation tactic.
“We were trying to understand the different motives for buyers – should we do a thumbs up, thumbs level, thumbs down system, or something more sophisticated? Ultimately, we haven’t asked them to rate shows and our thinking is the buyers prefer subtlety.”
However, in this extraordinary time, eOne is further tailoring its distribution to changing buyer behaviours. With more buyers able to watch shows at greater length, Baxter and his team are supplying more episodes, uploading more and offering programmes from older seasons.
While this results in more work for the team, the benefits are clear, says Baxter: “At home, buyers are less prone to pure sales fervour and more focused on their own evaluations. When we engage in discussion, what we’re seeing is they’ve watched more, they know the show better and they’ve done more research.”
Contact
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Website
eone.internationaldistribution.com
Hot Picks
Nurses
Type: Drama
Length: 10 x 60-minutes
Producer: eOne; ICF Films
Broadcaster: Global (Canada)
A sales renaissance for procedural drama Saving Hope is a coincidental foil to Nurses, a drama that came out of eOne’s Toronto development team, and greenlit back in 2018. At the time, the company had been looking for a medical drama for several months, Stuart Baxter says, but wanted a twist to the conventional focus of previous examples in the medical genre.
Putting nursing staff “front and centre” rather than doctors piqued eOne’s interest, with the company also anticipating that the subject matter would make it “skew younger” in viewership, which is key for the company’s sales strategy and buyer demands.
The series, produced with Toronto-based ICF Films, is an ensemble drama following five newly appointed nurses who navigate the traumatic and emotional whirlwind of modern nursing, while trying not to let their personal lives seep into their life-and-death work.
With a “tentative plan” to begin pre-production and production on a second series soon, and a US home for series one currently being discussed, Nurses has created a buzz.
Lead actor Tiera Skovbye, at the head of a young cast, is also a draw, given her recent work on The CW and Netflix’s youth-skewing series Riverdale.
“At a time when we wanted to show strong female characters on screen, this youth-skewing take on medical dramas works really well,” says Baxter.
Interest from the US has come from both traditional linear players and streamers, with its story-of-the-week arc making it attractive to broadcasters and its “little bit of the soapiness” promoting its credentials for on-demand, binge-watching.
The series is an example of the strong, premium drama emanating from Canada, at the expense of US material, according to Baxter, who says scripted from the country is “more European than US”.
While Nurses is “clearly very US-centric”, he adds, culturally it is “a little softer, which works in Europe”.
La Garçonne
Type: Drama
Length: 6 x 60-minutes
Producer: Mother Productions
Broadcaster: France 2 (France)
The significance of La Garçonne to eOne is more than simply a high-end, glossy period piece with socially relevant themes wrapped up in a detective thriller. The drama, which airs later this year, was eOne’s first non-English-language acquisition.
“We needed to find projects that were high-quality and with which the stories were universal-themed,” says Baxter, noting that marrying the vision of a show’s writer and producer with eOne’s was the critical element to investment.
The pedigree of La Garçonne is apparent. Mother Productions had achieved global success through Netflix’s acquisition of comedy Call My Agent (Dix pour Cent).
Set in Paris in the 1920s, the drama follows Louise Kerlac (Laura Smet), who witnesses a murder and joins the police disguised as a man to hide her identity and investigate the case.
To that end, it offers buyers the familiarity of a period crime series along with themes of female empowerment in a male-dominated world.
Baxter sees the subject matter and the period setting as something audiences would have to “buy into” and therefore presents a “bingeing, book-type” experience, apt for a streamer. However, with more traditional broadcasters investing in non-linear viewing, pay-TV is also a viable option for the drama.
“In each market, we’re more looking at the genre and who’s in the period world,” he says. “A lot of broadcasters are careful just how much period drama they have.”
Baxter suggests they may run up to two period dramas at a time and would likely air no more than four per year, but that if one channel successfully launches a show, competitors are likely to look for their alternative. “Our sales team are targeting that,” he adds.
Team
Senior Management
Stuart Baxter
President, International Distribution