Will ‘Hamish the Hammer’ McLennan smash production houses?
The production community has little reason to feel optimistic about the arrival of Hamish “the Hammer” McLennan at Ten, an adland commentator has suggested.
In a column for the Australian Financial Review, Rowan Dean – former executive creative director of Euro RSCG – points to how McLennan masterminded the creation of WPP production house Plush, a move which coincided with “numerous independent production companies closing their doors”. Dean said that McLennan’s adland nickname was “Hamish the Hammer”.
McLennan was named as the new boss of Ten after James Warburton was ousted on Friday.
Ten is currently a heavy commissioner of independent production companies for their TV content. Its shows include Can Of Worm, Bondi Rescue and the forthcoming Shock Of The Now from Cordell Jigsaw Zapruder; Offspring and Puberty Blues from Southern Star; MasterChef and The Biggest Loser from Shine; Neighbours from FremantleMedia and The Project from Roving Enterprises. Unlike rival network Seven, Ten currently creates little of its non-news output in-house.
TIL Plush also has an awesome Flash website, circa 2004.
Makes sense doesn’t it? Not saying that I think it’s great for the production houses but as a business decision it would be sound and a sure fire way to keep profits in house.
I don’t think this is an issue in the short to medium term. They need a hit, then make some money then maybe you invest in some gun producers to make content. Unlikely would be my guess on TEN building production infrastructure and increasing the head count.
Thor, the landscapes changing… we will see how well you adapt. This business is still about people… good people. You might find your “Hammer” replaced with something else in post.
Well, this makes sense, except that that strategy was attempted under Warburton/Mott with the creation of the internal development unit at a cost of about $1m.
It was quickly discovered that unlike ad production where you can crew up and down very quickly, that model is not translatable to TV.
Plus, you take a small loss on a quick failure in ad production – you can’t do the same for a TV show. Not only are the startup and infrastructure costs massive, the institutional experience and memory have to be there. Ten’s got great in-house people who can make quick-turn around small projects, but it lacks the factilities and people to put something together of the scale of either MasterChef or Bondi Rescue – which is what it would require to make the standard of television that our audiences now expect. Particularly the over 40s.
Taking production in house is an expensive and usually bad idea. Full time production executives and crew are expensive so why pay them when you can screw the majority of independent companies. Further television is a small club, reluctant to fire people until they are way beyond their use by date. If you have a deeper pool of ideas and a decent executive or two you’re much better off. But saying that television exectives are always afraid to stick their heads too high out of the trenches for fear of being sacked. Ten has bigger problems thatn to waste a breath on this issue.
Outsourcing production is the best low risk model because you can screw them down and they take all the risk in delivering. Why would you bring that in-house? Unless it’s something cheap to make like Video Hits? (another show TEN scrapped that was making money…)
I was a small cog in the wheel at Y&R and the rules were always that Plush had to be allowed to bid on all TV jobs and surprise surprise, they usally won.
Many times, the client had no idea that Plush was a Y&R company, so that all the profit stayed inhouse.
As usual Mr Clennan gets the accolades for someone else’s work. Y&R were simply followers in the Plush set up. It was led by Singos in their desire for even more margin improvement for their publicly listed entity. Hamish was just along fo the ride like in most cases.
Just don’t mess with Offspring!
Agree with comment number 9