What were your missions when you arrived? Accelerate the volume of activity? Relaunch cult brands?
I didn’t have a specific mission. I had two main objectives: for this company to grow again and find good profitability. As soon as I arrived, before even thinking about a commercial strategy, I decided to review the company’s editorial line to allow us to have our own place in the market. I had two words in mind: authenticity and proximity.
With these two words as a leitmotif, we worked on our catalog, on our strong brands to make them evolve towards more authenticity and proximity. We wanted to show that these shows that make Endemol unique are in direct contact with the daily lives of viewers. That’s why we create TV games with candidates from all walks of life, we create a competition with real bakers, we create “Star Academy” with passionate young singers or “Secret Story” with authentic candidates. Even when we create “Les enfants de la télé” with celebrities, we show them images from their beginnings when they were absolutely unknown.
Did you want to erase the reality TV and slightly “trashy” image that Endemol had at the beginning of the 2000s?
The image of Endemol was above all that of a very important company, sometimes omnipresent among certain broadcasters. What I wanted above all is for us to be authentic, in the truth of who people are and not to be suspected of manipulating. Because often on television, on social networks, we hear this little music ‘it’s production that decides’, ‘it’s production that manipulates the images’.
What we’ve been trying to do for three years is cast, select people as they are and show them on screen as they are. We are very kind to the people who make our shows and especially to the viewers who watch us.
To achieve all this, we have developed processes to better inform candidates, for example. We communicate much more with them than before. Even before the start of an adventure, we tell them what is going to happen. Their loved ones too. That way, there are no surprises.
How does this translate into practice?
Today, support for people who participate in our shows is done very early on. For example, I saw all the participants in “Secret Story”, one by one, before the start of the adventure and I see them all after their exit to explain to them what will happen to them . This is something that wasn’t done before. They are also supported by psychologists before, during and after the show. This is also the case with coordination and communication teams, for example to protect themselves from social networks.
In this assessment of your first three years at Endemol, is there still a failure that sticks in your throat?
There are always audience failures. A career as a producer is made up of failures and successes. We are in a profession where there is extreme resilience. There aren’t many jobs where you can screw up so much. We have to be super resilient because I’ll mess up on a show and the next day, I go back to the broadcaster and say ‘I have something else, it’s going to be really good, buy it for me’.
I think we haven’t really had any failures but the only show where I tell myself that things could have been different, if the competition had been different, is ‘Masterchef’ on France 2. When we facing ‘Mask Singer’ on TF1, it’s more complicated than facing an American series. I think “Masterchef” would still be on the air if we had been facing an American series on Tuesday evening on TF1.
