Germany's Mediakraft Thrives on Local Content
German public broadcasters ZDF and ARD and commercial rivals like RTL face declining audiences. According to The Guardian, young Germans are deserting Lagerfeuerfernsehen or "bonfire TV": entertainment shows that could bring together the entire family.
Instead, they turn to YouTube, which according to newspaper Bild is used by 86% of 14-year-old Germans.
“For 14-34 year olds there is no first or second screen,” says Ollson. “They have largely turned away from traditional forms of media. Our networks provide exactly the content that match their viewing and usage habits. Our advantage is that we don't have to focus group our target audiences—our target audiences make the programmes.”
The Magnolia network, for example, features content related to fashion, lifestyle, and beauty. while TIN offers news and content oriented towards education and science. The Hometown is all about hip-hop and the urban lifestyle.
There's another reason for Mediakraft's success: it's thriving on local language content. “In order for content to be relevant to the German market it needs to provided in the German language,” he says. “Some international markets are well served by English language content but the central Europe market is far from saturated and is in fact underserved by great local content.”
Comedy channel Ponk was formed as part of You Tube's original programming project and brings together the best online video entertainers in Germany, operated by Mediakraft subsidiary Kultframe. Ponk is also the umbrella brand for Mediakraft's full range of German-language comedy, which also includes Y-Titty, ApeCrime, Funpexel and DiggesDing.
Going forward, Mediakraft has pinpointed news as a key area, investing “heavily,” says Ollson, in the way information is packaged and delivered—although it is some way from following Vice and putting its own correspondents on the ground.
Again, these will be culturally tuned: “Just now, for example, there is huge interest in Germany about internet security, but in Turkey it is not net security but information about net access which is in demand.”
The company is also exploring long-form fictional content and seems prepared to fund drama for online SVOD if the right pitch comes along.
“We are looking at ways of using our relatively significant reach to go out and help content providers on a pay-per-view basis,” he says. It is already signed to fund such content with a German partner due in 2015-16.
Mediakraft and British Pathé
British Pathé recently tapped Mediakraft's growing network and expertise in driving audiences to online content by tasking it with managing 3,500 hours, representing 85,000 films, of historic archive available to view for free on YouTube.
The venture will see Mediakraft repackage clips from the collection, which spans 1896 to 1976 and includes footage of the Wright Brothers' inaugural flight, the D-Day landings, and Roger Bannister's four-minute mile.
Explains British Pathé CEO Roger Felber, “There is significant demand from newspaper websites to use our footage to accompany stories about, for example, royalty, weather, or sports events. It was also a time-consuming process for a journalist to contact us, search for content and enter into a licensing agreement. What's more, by the time they'd done that the newspaper couldn't afford to spend thousands of pounds a minute on footage.”
The bargain with You Tube, he says, is that newspapers now get British Pathé content for free while ad revenue (from pre-roll and banner advertising) that is divided “reasonably roughly” between Google and [Pathe and Mediakraft].
“We are not an audience development company,” stresses Ollson. “We are a content company and a network. Audience development is what we do because we have great content.
“British Pathé is a specific challenge because of the enormous value of its repository and we are very well aware of the responsibility and opportunity. The challenge is that we are going to start producing a number of shows around the concept of history for new audiences to discover the archive.”
He elaborates: “In order to get a piece of content to go viral you have to create something that reproduces, divides and spreads through a population – just how a virus becomes an epidemic. There is no point creating one video and just putting it out there. We create concepts around videos. This is not a question of tricking people into watching but about making content so great that people want to watch it so it becomes a genuine cultural phenomenon. This is what our network does and we tap into that power.”
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