Earlier this year ITV Studios, which reps shows ranging from “Love Island” to “Schitt’s Creek,” revealed it was merging its global distribution and entertainment arms. On Tuesday afternoon, Ruth Berry, the woman who was appointed to lead the now joint arms, set out the strategy behind the move during a keynote discussion at Mip TV in Cannes.
“I think we’re bringing together the formats and the finished programming businesses to create a singular multi-genre multi-brand multi-dimensional commercial business to the heart of the studio,” Berry explained. “Be that deficit financing and licencing rights to brilliant scripted slates, rolling out new formats like ‘My Mum, Your Dad’ and ‘Scared of the Dark,’ merchandising ‘Schitts Creek’ products, selling ‘Love Island’ water bottles, moving into the metaverse, you know, all these things, having them in one place.”
Berry’s new role, she added, is to “to try and get my arms around all of that as much as I can and married up and align it to our buyers and the market and the needs and the trends and all of those things.”
With such an array of hefty TV brands on the roster, including “The Voice” and “I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!” Berry also expanded on how to reach new audiences as social media and the internet continues to chip away at linear and even streaming ratings. “I think we’ve learned an enormous amount actually from ‘Love Island,’ which sits largely in that 16-34 bracket,” Berry said. “Where those audiences are finding their content is not through EPGs, it’s definitely not through reading [U.K. TV guide] the Radio Times. It’s through social media and other things.”
Examples of ITV Studios’ foray into non-traditional marketing and merchandising includes “The Voice” and “Hell’s Kitchen” experiences in the metaverse and an “I’m a Celebrity” bushtucker trial on Fortnite. “I think we’re starting to look at how those brands live and breathe beyond the TV screen,” Berry said.
She also revealed that Plimsoll, which ITV Studios snapped up last January, had given the business a way to crack open the difficult natural history market. “For us as a distribution business accessing natural history has been quite tough,” Berry admitted. “It’s a pretty closed genre actually. So this seemed like a brilliant opportunity for us as a business to be able to enter the natural history space, which we’ve seen go from strength to strength over the last few years.”
