Meetings With Stakeholders

This is a phrase you hear a lot about in Canadian Broadcasting. You hear it when discussing the CRTC, and a review that's being done here or there. You hear it when talking about the Canadian Television Fund or Telefilm.

What's significant to me, and always has been, is exactly who those stakeholders are. And who they're not. The Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television is non-political. They don't take stands on things, mostly. They just sponsor the Gemini and Genie awards. Things like that.

The private broadcasters in Canada have something called The Canadian Association of Broadcasters. They lobby on the Broadcasters' behalf. Usually for things like, oh, we want to ease restrictions on foreign ownership, or sell more ads, or not have to do so much for our licenses.

Producers in Canada have the Canadian Film and Television Production Association. They negotiate with representatives of the Directors Guild of Canada, Writers Guild of Canada, and ACTRA, the performers' union, on labor issues.

There used to be a Canadian Cable Television Association. But I think it disbanded. Richard Stursberg used to run that too. Before he bounced to Telefilm, then the CBC.

There are Friends of Canadian Broadcasting and Our Public Airwaves, who mostly complain about the CBC.

Stakeholders, stakeholders, stakeholders.

The problem with the whole stakeholders thing is that the biggest stakeholders in all of this mess are the ones who really are never consulted.

They're called The Audience.

The problem with not consulting the audience is that you start to have people speaking for the audience, which runs into all sorts of problems. You have squeaky wheels saying they're the audience.

Justin, who's a hardworking guy I know and like and have met on several occasions, posted this below in an ongoing thread about Canadian TV. Basically, his contention is that shows Like Canadian Idol are not Canadian shows...just ripoffs of American shows. Justin's speaking for a point of view that would like to keep the CBC "pure."

I don't consider the Office an American show, it's a cheap rip off and not done very well.

Elitist or not Steve Martin isn't the pink panther and I don't consider Canadian Idol, Canada's next top model or 'the One' to be Canadian shows regardless of where they are made.

Now this is, in actuality, a pretty radical view. I mean, most critics have come around on The Office, and I know a lot of people love these kinds of Reality shows. I don't watch any of the Idols, If I watch The One at all it'll be to see how George does. (On the other hand, flipping around last night I caught fifteen minutes of "Hell's Kitchen" for the first time, and I howled. My God that man is entertaining.)

Now, Justin's engaging in a fine old tradition of stating a taste that's contrary to the mainstream. We all do this. People who hate Pop Tarts talk about Radiohead like everyone should listen to Radiohead. Jazzbos sniff at rockists. Classical music fans look down on all of us.

The problem is, in Canada, the only "audience" view that ever gets through is the skewed, likely-to-write-a-letter-to-the-CRTC-or-Globe kind. Essentially, Private TV in Canada has been allowed to just chase eyeballs using cheaply purchased (because we're an ancillary market) U.S. shows, and Public TV is being fought over by a small, elitist group that doesn't really represent the audience at large. That's a big problem.

Now -- here's another view from the audience, direct from a meeting of a lot of the stakeholders. This might be the most devestating thing I've read about Canadian Television all year.

Now that I'm motivated to at least be aware of what's out there in Canadian television so that I'm not overlooking programs I might enjoy and programs that might reflect stories I wouldn't otherwise see, I find that Canadian television does not seem to see me as its future.

At the Banff festival, I attended a town hall session on the future of Canadian TV with representatives from funders, regulators, content producers, and broadcasters, talking to an audience of the same. Now I think I understand another layer of the invisible networks problem. Listening to executives talk about my own country's product, I felt completely invisible. The discussion was focused on everything but the Canadian television viewer.

I'm not necessarily the typical viewer. At this point, I'm probably more motivated than average to seek out Canadian programming. Unfortunately, the reason for my recent motivation is not a reproducible marketing strategy: I got addicted to the blog of a Canadian television writer who's insightful, passionate, and funny about a wide range of subjects, but particularly the industry he works in. And he kept talking about shows I'd never heard of, like Jeff Ltd., Billable Hours and The Jane Show.

I started to be conscious of the fact that all these Canadian shows were appearing without a blip on my radar and wondered why. Was I just not paying attention? Or was the industry not paying attention to me?

Now -- Diane, of course, is a friend of this blog. I've plugged her site a lot, and even interviewed her about her viewing habits, in an attempt to try and formulate what exactly we are all doing wrong here in this great big country that's not the United States but might as well be for all the homegrown culture that is not on our airwaves. So yeah, she's not exactly the average viewer. But I'm going to guess that there are actually way more Dianes out there than there are Justins. (And I'm not picking on Justin. He and I agree about things -- including TV -- more than we disagree. The difference is as a working writer, I recognize that the health of my industry depends on having things out there that do not appeal to my personal taste, and where my personal taste conflicts with something that's good for the health of the industry, I swallow my bile and move on.)

There are Dianes out there who sold out the Bloor Cinema in January of 2005 to meet the Trailer Park Boys. There are Dianes who did grow up watching Degrassi, and there are Dianes or Daves or Stews who were the ones who caught the CBC flatfooted when they almost got rid of Ron McLean from Hockey Night in Canada a couple years back. The CBC was surprised by the reaction. Why? They don't know what the audience really cares about -- because they never talk to those people.

The reason why the Dianes aren't being listened to? I think it has to do with the defeatist meme that's rife in the industry: "Canadians don't want to watch Canadian shows."

That's an article of defeatist faith among a lot of "stakeholders" in this country. I have an alternate theory. "Most of the shows we've done thus far simply aren't good enough to hold an audience."

I've seen numbers. Lots of Canadian shows premiere big. People tune in because they're curious. And then they go away. If, as Diane suggests, the audience is invisible, that's only because it's actually easier to blame the audience for not watching, than it is to look inward and ask if the product is really good enough.

So if you're going to Meet with Stakeholders, pretty please guys, can you try to get a few more Dianes in the mix? Cause right now, the Diane's aren't feeling the love:

Listening to executives fretting about international markets felt a little insulting. What about me? Wouldn't they like to make a TV show I might want to watch and then let me know about it so I can watch it? I heard "let's protect Canadian content in the scary new world of the unregulated Internet, but let's not make it too Canadian or we can't sell it."

I heard it suggested that successful shows like Corner Gas and Trailer Park Boys might be too Canadian for international markets, despite the fact that the former had just signed a US distributor, and the latter is broadcast on BBC America. Not to mention the apparently unimportant fact that Canadians like to watch them, too.

I had to wonder if, in their hunger for the secondary markets of the future, they'd forgotten their primary audience of the future, an audience that in the past made shows like Degrassi, Slings & Arrows, and DaVinci's Inquest successful within our borders before they were embraced outside them.

The future of Canadian television also seems to overlook the primary product in the zeal to create secondary products. The suits talked about how to entice viewers through means other than television – that is, how to use new technologies and media to drive people to programming and vice versa. They talked about audiovisual content on the web, cell phone videos, and the need to train and support more Canadian artists to produce this new multi-platform content.

..

The Banff panel threw around the word "quality" a lot: "We have to make a quality product." But I didn't hear how the Canadian television industry plans to meet that goal of creating more quality shows, strategies to overcome barriers to making quality shows, or what happens when a quality show falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it.

Diane's full article on the Invisible Canadian Audience can be found here.