Tom Fussell, CEO of BBC Commercial, the commercial arm of the U.K. public broadcaster, has ambitious growth goals. He and his team have acquired production banners in various countries, bought full control of streamer BritBox International, and are targeting to double the business’ 2021/2022 revenue and profit by 2027/2028.
On Tuesday, BBC Commercial, which is mainly driven by BBC Studios, reported its latest fiscal-year results, which took a hit due to “softness in the commissioning and advertising sales markets.”
However, the company also touted the growth of its hit kids and family franchise Bluey, and the strength of other content brands, including Doctor Who.
Its CEO, who focuses on ensuring financial and creative planning and success, is a former CFO of production firm Shine who previously also worked for Harper Collins U.K. in various commercial director roles and as finance director for Random House in the U.K.
Fussell talked to The Hollywood Reporter about Bluey as the gift that keeps on giving, the importance of franchise management, how the Hollywood strikes and content spending cuts have affected the company he runs, and how the UKTV networks unit and streaming have surprised his team.
In unveiling your latest fiscal year results, you highlighted a soft commissioning environment. What’s that driven by?
If you see all the analysis that independent people do, I think they would say that the content demand peaked in late 2022. I certainly remember that [around] Thanksgiving 2022, everybody was talking about cuts. I think that’s still happening. You’ll have the West Coast studios reporting their results over the coming weeks. And each time people happen to talk about profitability and therefore having to cut content costs, that’s what they are talking about. Then you’ve got linear services in decline in many areas, and you had an ad recession last year. People’s top lines are under pressure, so as a content studio, you have that softness in the commissioning market.
How have BBC Studios and BBC Commercial reacted to this?
I think we’re well suited. I can see the strongest pipeline we’ve ever had. And we’re recruiting for a chief creative officer as well, which will bring us more heft, more muscle to enable us to to grow even further.
We see our growth in the content studio coming from three parts. We’re going to grow internationally. In the year we just had, we bought Brutal in Spain, we bought STV in the Nordics, we bought Werner. We have got kids and family. Now, on the strength of Bluey, more and more people want us to come and invest in their content and their IP. And we’ve invested record sums in deficit financing, financing other people’s shows and our own shows. So that will pay dividends in the future.
So I see a very strong pipeline of us growing market share, but no doubt it’s tough. And we’re in a very fortunate position because we’re the biggest seller of British content in the world and half of what goes into America, we sell. We just had a record haul of our Emmys nominations announced, with Baby Reindeer, with Planet Earth 3, with Dancing With the Stars, and with [Netflix’s Prince Andrew film] Scoop by Voltage. All of those we produced. We also own the minority stake in Moonage, which got four nominations. So I see us growing in the future.
What kind of impact have you seen from the end of the strikes in Hollywood?
No doubt, that has helped. And it was fantastic when everybody came together. But it doesn’t change what happened in November ’22. The strikes didn’t change that. The behavior of the streamers to focus on free cash generation and profitability, and not just subscriber growth, has meant that content budgets have come down.
People are focusing on various genres. We work in all three genres: scripted unscripted, and kids and family. Among our unscripted titles, Dancing With the Stars is one the biggest shows around the world. Also in unscripted, with documentaries we have nearly a decade’s worth of business with some of the streamers. Coming up, we have The Americas that we’re making for NBC, which Tom Hanks is narrating. We’re making Asia, and Walking With Dinosaurs is coming back around the world. So we can see all that huge pipeline coming.
How about scripted shows?
We’ve got a great schedule of scripted coming through as well. Baby Reindeer has opened a lot of doors for us. The Jetty [starring Jenna Coleman] has been on for the BBC show, Outrageous [about the famous 1930s British socialites the Mitford Sisters] is coming, we did Renegade Nell for Disney, and so on. And then Bluey. Bluey is such a global success. It has been in the Nielsen top 10 for most streamed shows all year. Last year, it was the second most streamed of all shows. Let’s see where it ends up this year, but it’s got to be up there. And we’ve got a fantastic relationship with the writer and the studio, and we’ve got a great relationship with our partner around the world in Disney, our streaming partner.
Bluey consumer products sales grew in the latest year. What can you say about the multiple platforms and touchpoints the brand has and is there any upside left in it?
I’m always out of date with Bluey because of the rate of growth. But the last time I checked, we had nearly 6 million followers on YouTube. With the consumer products, we’re very judicious about who we select as partners because we care about the brand so much. But the number has increased and we’ve been doing experiences. Camp Bluey in Los Angeles was a huge success. You couldn’t get tickets, it was fantastic.
Bluey, I believe, is among the top 15 IMDb most-rated shows ever. Now, whether you have kids or don’t have kids, I think you can assume that two-year-olds aren’t filling in IMDb, and their parents have got better things to do. So who’s filling it in? Teenagers, young adults, us guys, me old man? I don’t know. But I love the show. And some of the show is the most highest-rated in TV history. So we are really looking forward to carry on with that relationship with the writer and the studio. And we commissioned some mini shorts, some of which we just just coming onto Disney now.
It seems like you and your team really manage franchises longer-term. How key a focus is that?
The history of our organization has been working with partners on how to manage their brands and their franchises. We weren’t the IP owner of Top Gear, we weren’t the IP owner of Strictly Come Dancing. We aren’t of Bluey either. But what we do know is how to do exactly what you’ve just said: how to get the best people to focus on content licensing, to focus on broadening the reach on YouTube, to then focus on the different consumer products and licensing experiences, be they live events, gaming, education, merchandising – always sticking to the BBC’s values of how we do that and the quality threshold. So it’s in our DNA.
So, it is strategic. I think what makes us different is we have a mandate to grow long-term, sustainably for the BBC – not [a] quick buck. Therefore we get the opportunity to do things that others don’t. We can think long-term for the long-term success for ourselves, but crucially, also our partners. If I go back to Sherlock back in the day to Bluey now – it’s the same sort of thing. Or look at taking Strictly Come Dancing and turning it into Dancing With the Stars and putting it in 50 markets as a long-term brand and making sure we got live events and all sorts of things like that.
Anything that has been particularly surprising over the past year for you and your team?
I sound like a broken record, but Bluey does keep surprising us, not in terms of content quality – that doesn’t surprise me, It’s just fantastic. But the demand keeps going up. The growth in YouTube was astonishing to me.
BritBox International for us has been a crucial investment. We spent £255 million ($320 million) on buying the 50 percent we didn’t own. It is a real success story and it’s going to enable the best of British storytelling on ITV and the BBC to be taken to people in North America and Australia, and then we’ll see where else it goes. It’s a specialist service where the people who want it really want it. So let’s make sure they get all the content they really want in an easy way.
And the other area that I’ve been surprised by is one of my favorite businesses, UKTV. They are really well-known channels in this country [such as Dave and Drama], but UKTV as a brand is not known. So the fact that we managed to migrate so many people who are watching those brilliant channels onto its VOD service, now rebranded as U, has been astonishing to me. We’ve seen the monetizable views really grow, double year-on-year, which we’re really thrilled about. There is a very good management team doing a great job down in Hammersmith on UKTV, and in New York in Britain looks nice.
How do you think about more acquisitions of more production labels and in which regions or language areas are you most interested?
Because we’ve been selling British content for so long, we know the markets that take our brands, but in localized formats, and unscripted. Those territories, those markets – we haven’t been in enough of them. So we’ve gone into three more. We are already in South Africa. We’re already in India, we are already in Germany, in France, and more.
I think we got other areas we want to grow in. What is surprising to us is shows like Ghosts, which is a top 10 CBS show. We’re having a really enjoyable time taking those scripted formats around the world. The Split, Doctor Foster, India, Korea, Turkey – this is what I didn’t expect. I expected unscripted formats, but scripted formats is another area. A number of our labels around the world have got the ability to do scripted formats. And that’s something we’re going to carry on looking at.
In the U.K. production market, it’s still brilliant talent here. It still feels like a market in which the prices are very high. Our focus at the moment is is really just making sure we are bringing the right partners in at the right time for the right price. And if we can grow in the U.K., we definitely will do but we’re looking at international expansion.
Anything else you’d like to emphasize?
We are putting down record levels of content investment now in spite of a tough market because our ambition remains to double the size of the business from where we were in 2022 to where we want to get in 2028. And we double it so the BBC as our shareholder, as our sister company, gets the benefit of that to help boost [its funding from] the licence fee.
So, in spite of the market, we’re putting those bets down, and those investments down to double in size. The key thing for me is to really make sure we carry on investing. We have the BBC brand. We have some fantastic brands and program brands, in scripted and non-scripted and now in kids. With those things, it’s a joy to have the mandate we’ve got for long-term investment.
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