The production of local content for the SABC has more than doubled in just a few years. Surely this means that there is money to be made out of producing programmes for the SABC?
You bet, just go and ask a few Beemers who patronise Auto Bavaria on the regular commissions they have been receiving for years.
In the past few years, the SABC’s local content has gone up from 30 percent, and is now heading towards 80 percent. The Content Hub must be spending in excess of R500-million a year (exact figures are about as public as the president’s sex life).
Between the SABC, e.tv and M-Net the local industry must be looking at a cool billion a year. If that’s shared between 100 producers, that’s a turnover of R10-million each. Of course the 80/20 Pareto Principle always applies and 80 percent of the work goes to 20 percent of the producers. Naturally.
If you are paying for a product, you need to get your money’s worth, and the people who can best be trusted to deliver fresh and risk-free content on time and below budget, always get into the queue first.
Of course “fresh, new, exciting, innovative” and “risk-free” are contradictions in terms (like Military Intelligence, Business Ethics and Sports Personality).
Herein lies the dilemma for all broadcasters and all producers. How do you come up with something new, fresh, unprecedented and exciting, and still involve minimum risk? As any old show business hack will tell you, you can apply every risk management ploy in the book, and you still have an 80 percent chance of disaster.
This is fundamentally where the producers and the broadcasters get their roles. And it’s no different from retailing FMCG. The producer comes up with the product and dedicates himself to the finest quality at the lowest price. It’s up to the distributor to know the market.
It’s the same with broadcasting. A producer has enough worries with coke snorting prima donnas and technology that speeds towards obsolescence like a runaway train, without having to worry about audience research.
However, word from the inner sanctums has it that all broadcasters are struggling to find good producers. That’s not to say the ideas for fresh and innovative content aren’t there. They are. There just aren’t the people who can carry it through and deliver their outstanding ideas in a form that is usable.
Every one of us is an armchair producer. How many times do we sit back in the chair, beer can in one hand, and say, “I could write better than that”, or “Now if you left it to me, I would have made her beautiful and disabled instead of an ugly athlete?”
These may be really valid comments, but real-life producers are really a lot more special than that (although if you tramp round the TV markets, it’s sometimes hard to believe).
Producers have to see it through. Producers, to adapt Thomas Edison’s words are, “Ten percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration.”
Inspiration is cheap. Anyone can come up with fantastic ideas. All it takes is a little spiff and some good company.
The production is the hard part. Getting it right, on time, on budget, and to the elusive thing called “what the audience will want”.
If there really is a shortage of producers in a highly lucrative market, then why? Let’s discuss that next month.
Howard Thomas is a media business consultant, trainer and specialist in audience psychology.