A network chief's
take on the upfront
Imagine what it's like being on stage pitching to buyers
By Diego Vasquez
May 13, 2011
Come next week, the Big Five network presidents will be on stage trying to sell their new schedules to a large group of media buyers, advertisers and media. It's a crowd that from experience knows better than to believe all the hype. And for a network president, being on stage before that crowd is no small challenge. On one hand, you want to sell your new schedule and sell it hard. On the other, you realize that what you're being judged off of isn't the real big picture. Pilots offer only a taste of what a new show will develop into; the fall schedule is only part of the overall picture for the networks, which program for a full year. It's a position Jordan Levin knows well. As the former CEO of the WB, he gave numerous upfront pitches. He's now on the other side as CEO of Generate, a multi-platform studio and management firm that has a number of clients vying for spots on the fall schedule. Levin talks to Media Life about when the network schedules are set, the gamesmanship between networks and buyers, and the fake schedules that often float around during the craziness.
What is the most important thing for a network head to convey during an upfront presentation?
I think direction and consistency from the standpoint of "this is where we've been, this is where we are, and this is where we're going."
It becomes a little more complicated because you're expressing that with the brand of the network and the value that brand creates, as well as that expectations get created by the programs, and the programs ultimately create the brand, so it becomes a vicious cycle.
Can you tell how receptive advertisers and buyers are to your schedule as soon as the presentation is over?
You know, there's a certain amount of gamesmanship where buyers don't want to cede to much leverage and networks can succumb to buying their own hype a little bit too much.
Ultimately you get a good sense of it based on the ultimate results of the upfront market in terms of your success as defined against the other networks. How much have you been able to drive CPMs? How quick did the buyers move compared to the other networks?
So there's a lot of hype, a lot of positioning, and ultimately the actions of the buyers within the context of the larger marketplace really tell you how did.
What's the most nerve-wracking thing about the upfront, from the network's perspective?
I think the one of the more nerve wracking things about the upfront is the over-emphasis on the pilots themselves being judged as fully complete, finished programs, rather than as a step in the overall development process. I think there's often times too much judgment and too concise a critical eye placed on pilots as a complete entity as compared to looking at them on whether or not they display potential.
If you go back in time and look at a number of pilots for series, you remember the series over time, and the pilots have a nostalgic value to them that when viewed with fresh eyes often reveal a lot of early thoughts. So the intense focus on the pilots as standalone entities is very nerve-wracking.
And to a secondary degree, and somewhat related, is the overwhelming focus on the fall schedule as compared to what plans look like for a full year. That can also be very nerve-wracking because when you're at a network in a programming position you understand that really you not only have a 36-week season, but really a full year. And with fixed resources you need to figure out how to keep the audience and advertisers' needs met.
And yet there's a disproportionate amount of attention that gets paid to simply what the fall schedule looks like in order to shape the year. It would do everyone good to de-emphasize the importance of the fall and, again, think about audiences and advertisers' needs across the full course of the year.
Somehow with the proliferation of media outlets there's been real judgment placed on pilots and upfront presentations and fall schedule that are often times given a grade, either thumbs up or down, or a number of stars, a kind of a snap poll, and it can become very distracting if you react to it.
Many forces internally within a network are vulnerable to being impacted by those snap judgments and grades.
How long up until the presentation begins are you still tweaking the schedule? The last minute, the last hour, the last day?
I don't think it is a last-minute thing so much anymore.
In the past networks kept schedules as confidential as possible because once you locked it into place it was often times viewed as sign of weakness if you made a change. But in the past decade it's rare to find a fall schedule that is left intact.
Often times, in my experience, we would generally lock down a schedule about three business days ahead. We usually announced it Tuesday morning, so we tried to lock down a schedule by Friday morning. But we did take some time to come back together that Sunday and say, now that we've slept on it, are we definitive on this? And usually there were only one or two open questions.
What is the most difficult thing for the networks during upfront week? In other words, what's the biggest challenge?
You know the biggest challenge--there are a lot of logistic challenges. There's so much up in the air in terms of what's going to get chosen and what's not, both returning and new shows, that you have so many contingency plans that get created. Every pilot has a trailer cut. Everybody has contacts for every single show, every piece of talent, etc.
Once you decide this is what we're going to do, it becomes a business affairs issues—there are talent affairs that need to be managed, there's other people who are sort of fighting to have whatever remains on the table kept on the table. So more than anything just the logistical challenges.
What goes up on the walls, what gets handed out, the press materials, there are a lot of masters every department has to service and it all has to be done very quickly with common, cohesive talking points. A lot has to happen very quickly, and there's not a lot of time to do it. And once you actually set that schedule and make and field a tremendous amount of calls, you have to sit down and write your presentation.
It's the closest I ever felt to that sense of having finals at the end of the semester. It just becomes a sort of last-second bit of endurance marathon. You have to dig deep because you don't get a lot of sleep.
Is there an advantage to having your presentation be first, last or in the middle? How much tweaking goes on when you have a day or two to ponder a rival network's schedule?
I think in the past there was maybe some reaction and tweaking, but I don't think as much anymore. There's always the risk of being last because you have certain people burn out perhaps. Perhaps parts of the upfront start to break early.
The only disadvantage of going first is you have fewer days, you have to move everything up. So at some point it tightens the development process a bit.
And the other thing that happens immediately after, the next day you're back in a room with the senior staff thinking through the strategy of how do you now start to put the plan you announced into place, from publicity to marketing to talent relations to affiliates.
And on the creative side, pilots are a step in the development process, so you have to start evaluating and communicating with your studio partners and showrunners where you came out on the pilots and what it is that you want to now develop further, which means perhaps changes in casting, potential re-shoots, maybe a bit of a change in direction. And your programming department is also busy trying to fight with everyone else for the best writers, locking down directors, etc.
Do you think (accurate) schedules tend to leak out in advance with more or less frequency over the past few years? Why?
I think more frequency now, which is largely facilitated by social media.
In the past it was harder to disseminate information. We used to run around trying to desperately get other people's schedules, and you would sometimes float misleading schedules to confuse the competition. NBC would notoriously have a fake schedule out there.
And a lot of people would use the desire for information to suggest they have privileged information, and suggest they have accurate schedules, which they didn’t. Going back into the '80s and early '90s, it's really changed a lot. Bu that was a big part of the game.
What we used to do was spend a good half a day trying to put on the hats of the other networks and try to guess what their schedules were going to be based on role playing. And more often than not it was fairly accurate.
But at the WB we were also not competing as directly with the bigger networks. We were going after the younger audiences.
What's your favorite memory from the WB upfronts and why?
I was plagued with a number of production gaffes in which certain actors didn’t get cued properly, or were missing, and it left me having to vamp a large number of times.
I think in three instances myself, and in some cases Susanne Daniels, were up there. The first time it happened I ended up dancing. Another time I showed pictures of my family. In another instance I ended up impersonating one of the actors whose lines were supposed to be read by him. In each case it was a loose and unscripted moment that made me feel sort of more comfortable.
And I think it let the personality of who we were come through more playfully than a script. The camaraderie we had with one another and our talent really came through too. There was real laughter and it bonded everyone in the moment. So those come to mind.
Also, the last upfront we did was at Madison Square Garden, and that was an exciting venue to do it in. That the network that was at one point only an idea 10 years later was presenting to thousands of people at Madison Square Garden, that really struck me in terms of how far we had come.
|
|
|
