Interview With Mark Young, President & CEO of BBC Worldwide Americas
By Larry Jaffee
LONDON—Not taking “no” for an answer, my persistence paid off and yielded an interview on October 14 with Mark Young, who serves as president and CEO of BBC Worldwide Americas.
A man with several titles, Young is BBC Worldwide’s managing director, GMBD (Global Marketing & Brand Development) and managing director, EMEIA (Europe, Middle East, India and Africa).
Our meeting of more than an hour was cordial and frank. As you will see from the following, I asked the tough questions, and while Mr Young’s answers may not have been always satisfactory, at least he responded.
I accomplished what I set out to do—have someone of authority at the BBC hear me out.
WG: I think it is very important for us to establish a dialogue. I realise reversing the cancellation now is a very difficult thing to do, but I can’t not try. I don’t know, maybe it’s the American way. I think it’s something that has to be done. After all, everything I’ve done is to support the BBC, really. I just wish that they maybe the Bethesda office consulted with me a bit more about promotional opportunities. For example, EastEnders’ current cast includes two actors who were in Bend It Like Beckham, which has been a huge hit in the U.S. That was a great promotional opportunity that just passed. I wonder if it wasn’t done because the cancellation decision had been made quite a long time ago, maybe in February when the commercial spots stopped. Bend It Like Beckham was a hit late spring theatrical release. Did someone in Bethesda think, “EastEnders, it’s history. There’s no point in promoting it at this stage.”
MY: That’s not how it happened. It is a recent decision and it was off the back of the performance of the programme from January onward.
WG: Well, that’s my point. In February, the spots stopped, according to [BBC America vice president of programming] David Bernath in the on-line chat. How could the ratings increased if there was not some promotion after February—between February and, say, September?
MY: I think you have to look at what happened in the previous six months. We did promote the shows at the beginning of the year, and there was absolutely no uptake in audience as a result of that promotion. You know as well as I do that if you try your best to promote the show, you spend money on it and nothing happens, then you probably have got to come to the conclusion that that form of promotion is not going to raise the audience awareness that you want.
WG: Well, we didn’t see very much evidence of promotion to begin with. I mean I recall seeing a couple of spots, but it was certainly not the type of attention that Ground Force, What Not To Wear and So Graham Norton get on a continuing basis. Could you please be more specific regarding exactly what weeks and how many spots ran in January and February.
MY: We ran 500 spots around our highest-rating shows, things like, Changing Rooms, Absolutely Fabulous, Monarch of the Glen and What Not to Wear. So it was a fully-fledged promotional campaign using the best programmes that we have to try and drive the ratings.
WG: Getting back to the cross-promotional opportunities that I think were missed. Why didn’t BBC America run commercials for the Murder in Mind episodes that starred Steve McFadden and Michael Greco, both popular EastEnders actors? Red Cap, which stars ex-EastEnders actor Tamzin Outhwaite was promoted quite significantly in the summer, but EastEnders was never mentioned. Do you agree that kind of cross-promotion could have been done?
MY: No.
WG: Why?
MY: I think in working with talent, you’ve got to be really careful about how you use an actor to promote a programme. And they go through life whereby they establish themselves in EastEnders and then they decide that they want to change. They come out of EastEnders and go into Red Cap, or they go somewhere else and they’re trying to create a new persona for themselves. And so from a talent point of view, they don’t always want the audience to be harking back to them as whatever that character was in EastEnders. And so it becomes difficult to do a generic promotional campaign around an actor or an actress who has moved on from EastEnders. It proves really difficult to do.
WG: I mean I hate to sound crass, but at the end of the day doesn’t BBC own the actor in the sense that they could basically do what they would like....
MY: That’s not crass. That’s wrong. We don’t own the actors; they are, in fact, free agents and we’re grateful for the work that they do for us and we work with them and we pay them a decent whack for the job that they do and then they go off and they do another job.
WG: Well, in the case of Steve McFadden at least, he was moonlighting with Murder in Mind. I mean he was going back to EastEnders. In his case, I certainly think there was a missed opportunity there. I can’t imagine he would have objected to BBC America running a commercial for Murder In Mind saying he was on EastEnders, which is paying his mortgage. Wasn’t there also a chance for cross-promotional opportunities with the public television stations that run EastEnders? When I watch on WLIW in New York, the first thing you see is “BBC America presents...” It seems to me that from the beginning, public television stations and BBC America have viewed each other with suspicion and competition when they should have been embracing each other and using each other for cross-promotional opportunities. EastEnders fans really don’t care who’s putting it on; they’ll watch wherever. Fans took subscriptions with DirecTV and with the digital cable services expressly for EastEnders—not just for the vast array of channels they offer.
MY: I don’t know of any cross-promotion that occurs across rival television groups. So it’s not that we don’t want to do it; it’s just that television is such that it just won’t happen. You’ve got to break the paradigm in television in order to do it. The PBS stations will say, if you go and talk to them, why should they suggest to their viewers that they should watch EastEnders on BBC America? They want to retain as much audience as possible. And so they’re never going to direct you to watch a rival channel.
WG: I have been receiving e-mails from people who are dropping en masse their digital cable and their satellite services specifically because of this cancellation. Does that trouble you that American subscribers are dropping their service because of this?
MY: It troubles me only if subscribers drop the service because of a change that we’ve made, but it doesn’t mean to say the decision wasn’t the right decision. Clearly the reason that we’re making the change is because we believe that the channel ratings will improve as a result of doing it. And, therefore, whilst we may well lose a number of our EastEnders audience, the whole point of doing this is that we believe that we’ll gain more of an audience as a result. I think there are other programmes on BBC America which I think EastEnders fans will find of equal value. So I hope they won’t decide to drop their subscription to DirecTV and the others.
WG: Obviously there’s been a groundswell of support for EastEnders. Did you underestimate the complaints?
MY: No. When we changed the schedule last year, there was an equal level of disquiet at what we’d done. So I think we knew when we decided to pull EastEnders off the schedule that there would be at least as much disquiet as we received last year. So I don’t think we’ve underestimated it. I’ll ask you a simple question. If you’ve got either a television programme or a part of your magazine which is delivering only a tenth of the audience that your best programme is delivering, and if when you go into a programme you lose 70 percent of your audience and when you come out of that programme you go up 80 percent, what would you expect us to do?
WG: Well, it’s a fair question, but I would suggest that BBC America needed to do things differently, such as cross-promote, and perhaps Ground Force wasn’t the best choice to couple with EastEnders (i.e., no synergy between audiences). Another thing I wondered was why EastEnders was never mentioned in the programming highlights distributed weekly by e-mail to the press. It doesn’t cost anything to take a sentence or two in an e-mail that’s already going out and say, “Oh, by the way, EastEnders won Best Soap in the National Television Awards in the U.K. It was an opportunity for television writers to find out about EastEnders. Why wouldn’t that be done?
MY: Because when you supply information to media in that way, your intention is to provide them with sort of material that they’re going to pick up and use. And our experience over the last five years on BBC America is that although EastEnders is a fantastic programme, although it’s got a loyal audience, although it’s won numerous television awards in the U.K., for whatever reason, it’s not a programme that the journalists have shown any interest or inclination to pick up on. And after a while, you know as well as I do, that if you receive information that you believe is irrelevant to you as a journalist, then it reduces the credibility of the balance of the information that you’re passing to them. And so it becomes in a way counter-productive to have something there that they don’t want to receive. We have over the five years tried to create a market for this programme in numerous different ways, and almost whatever we do it does not seem to have an effect on the audience.
WG: Could you please tell me a few of the ways?
MY: [BBC America senior vice president of strategy and communications] Jo Petherbridge has told you a few of the ways. Dave Bernath’s told you a few of the ways. [BBC America president] Paul Lee told you... I do not know the details to the extent that you would want them in order to report them.
WG: The only thing that they’ve talked about recently is the spots that you mentioned in January and February. There also was a promotion three years ago for the 15th anniversary asking viewers for their favourite episodes. BBC America put together a nice press packet for that. Since then, there’s been absolutely no evidence of—as far as I know—any serious kind of marketing push other than what we’ve talked about before.
MY: We’ve tried to promote EastEnders in the most effective way possible and whenever we’ve done it, we haven’t seen a noticeable uplift in the audience. And we’ve come to the conclusion that it is one of those programmes that has an incredibly small, but incredibly loyal audience. BBC America can only stay in business if we deliver an acceptable level of ratings. It’s a commercially funded channel and now that we’re on daily ratings, it’s important that we maximize the rating on the channel, and EastEnders just doesn’t do that. So we know that we’ve got a loyal audience that is upset, and we’re sad about that. But we believe that we will put BBC America as a channel at risk if we didn’t address programmes that were underperforming in ratings terms and put the schedule right.
WG: I’m just curious what the ratings were on the two weeks that it’s been off. Do you have any idea of that?
MY: I don’t. I’m going to America tonight. I’ll go to the ratings then.
WG: In November 2001 there was a press release from BBC America announcing a video-on-demand service that was to launch in the first quarter of 2002, but never did. It’s interesting that EastEnders was selected as the first programme.
MY: It was selected as the first programme because it has a relatively small, but incredible loyal audience—exactly the sort of programme that should work well on video-on-demand. Over the course of the next year we’re going to re-focus our efforts with the on-demand and see whether or not we can create a VOD service that could include EastEnders.
WG: This specific service was supposed to be launched in the first quarter of 2002. What happened? Why didn’t it materialise?
MY: Because EastEnders is a soap that is on four times a week, it is technically expensive to make the full service available. I mean you can watch Fawlty Towers—from memory it’s 13 episodes in total. It’s not expensive in technology terms to make those 13 shows available. If we make 13 EastEnders shows available, then in three weeks’ time you’d be out of date. So you need to constantly renew any soap on a VOD service and that becomes expensive to fulfil and if you don’t get the flow-through, then the video-on-demand provider sees it as an inefficient use of his bandwidth. We’re still working with all of the VOD suppliers in the U.S. to try and get a video-on-demand service for EastEnders.
WG: Is one reason why you wouldn’t try to quicken the pace of the VOD service is because it could be perceived by the loyal fans that it was just a ploy to cancel the programme and get them to pay for it? You probably would gain a lot more revenue through that type of transaction than you would from your current advertising.
MY: Video-on-demand is not yet there in the States in strong numbers. If we were going to do that as a ploy to transfer our loyal audience to a paying subscriber audience, it would probably be in our best interest to keep EastEnders for another nine months, despite being inefficient in the schedule, until the video-on-demand had finally taken off. That’s the best guarantee that we’re not doing this for monetary purposes; we’re doing it because it’s in the best interest of the channel.
WG: Have you heard that numerous tape trains have been established with U.K. viewers recording EastEnders and sending over tapes to U.S. fans? Any reaction to that?
MY: Well, you’re not going to get me to condone what some people would view as piracy. But on this occasion, I think it’s entirely legitimate for a loyal audience to source its programming. I’m not condoning it, though.
WG: I also understand that there might even be a Web site that’s uploading episodes that can be downloaded.
MY: If individuals are having tapes delivered to them by friends in order to satisfy a personal desire, then that’s one thing. If somebody is taking a tape and uploading it and making it generally available, then I’ve got a problem with that. And that does infringe not only on our rights, but also the rights of the actors and the talent in EastEnders. There’s a very fine line. I can understand the audience’s desire to do it.
WG: How about in terms of another broadcast entity in the States picking up the rights to EastEnders? I mean, for example, Bravo is now owned by NBC, so they have deep pockets, and it’s sort of a niche channel. Is that something the BBC would consider?
MY: The fact that it’s been on BBC America does not stop us from trying to sell the programme elsewhere.
WG: So is there an effort going on right now in light of the cancellation?
MY: It’s a continuing effort to maximize the value that we get for all of our programmes.
WG: It also occurred to me that DirecTV, which is now losing subscriptions, might be a candidate since Rupert Murdoch is about to acquire the service. I realise there’s a long contentious history between Murdoch and the BBC. But in one sense, EastEnders might be the olive branch that could put some of your differences aside.
MY: We haven’t got a problem with Murdoch at all. We would treat him not only in relation to EastEnders, but any other programme, as a perfectly acceptable international partner for the programme. Some of our biggest deals were done with News Corp.
WG: How about in terms of the availability of videos? Only three VHS titles were released in the U.K., and there’s the new Slaters DVD. None have been made available for the U.S. market.
MY: We looked at that. It’s the same issue with video-on-demand. In order to satisfy the requirements of a serial, we’ll broadcast two hours of video a week, 104 hours a show, whatever the figure is, and that’s a hell of a big commitment.
WG: I’m thinking in terms of specials. EastEnders’ Christmas specials have always been very exciting, and could stand alone, as have the “two-handers,” such as Dot and Ethel reminiscing about the war. A two-disc DVD set for Coronation Street was released in the U.S. earlier this year and included the first five episodes and a documentary about the show’s 40th anniversary.
MY: If we believed there was a market for an EastEnders video or DVD, then we would do our best to support it. There’s a critical mass of videos that you need to believe that you can sell in order to justify their inclusion in any catalogue. There isn’t a policy of not distributing EastEnders on DVD. There is a policy that whatever we do, we do commercially and we do it in a way that we believe will allow us to be able to sustain the market across a number of years.
WG: As for that critical mass, do you have a number in mind for EastEnders?
MY: It wouldn’t be EastEnders specifically; but we would have to believe that we can sell more than 5,000 units.
WG: The BBC’s lack of promotion for the public TV station is also one of the things that has disappointed me. EastEnders made a decent launch in 1988 initially on 50 stations. They had a press event in New York and brought over a couple of the actors. Fifteen years ago was the last time any kind of effort was made by BBC Sales to instill some sort of awareness or excitement about EastEnders. It bothers me that BBC America has coined this phrase about how the programme didn’t “resonate” across the Atlantic. How could it not resonate if it’s on 15 years later on major cities like in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Houston, Seattle, Minneapolis? I mean obviously, like you’ve said, there has been a loyal audience. Fifteen years sounds like it resonates to me. And these are cash-poor stations that have to make the very hard decisions that you do. These viewers typically pay $75 for four issues of my newspaper.
MY: I’m really pleased that EastEnders works for these individual PBS stations. We’re trying to extend the reach of EastEnders through individual PBS stations this year as much as we were trying last year or 15 years ago.
WG: I hope you’re right about that, given all the recent cancellations.
MY: You can’t force a PBS station, and we wouldn’t want to. We’re grateful when they want it.
WG: Any parting words?
MY: Look, we had to take EastEnders off of BBC America. We know that there’s a loyal, but, we believe, a small audience out there who are going to feel disadvantaged as a result of that. That’s not going to make us put EastEnders back on BBC America, but I think what we should do is try and work with you in the Walford Gazette through direct marketing and look at video and VOD over the next six months.
WG: I know that you’re responsible for things other than BBC America. How much of your day is occupied by BBC America matters?
MY: Well, over the last three weeks, a little bit more than the previous three weeks I probably spend a day a week. I’m responsible for all of our operations in the States, all of our operations in Europe, Middle East, India, and Africa, children, music, and businesses globally. So it gets at that proportion. I’m a channels man. I used to be managing director of BBC World. I launched BBC Prime in Europe.
WG: Thank you for hearing me out. I didn’t necessarily think you would say to me, “You’re quite right, we made a terrible mistake, I’ll put it back on next week.” I just wanted to make sure you see the big picture.
Back to Latest Articles