- The big switch I made was to think
about the new competition, Netflix, et cetera,
and to think about how did we hold up our share
and grow against them.
And that required a massive transformation
of the organization.
- Hey, I'm Sarah Franklin,
and welcome to Connections,
where we hear from some
of the most innovative leaders in marketing.
Today, we're talking about innovation in the broadcast space
with Alex Mahon, the CEO of Channel 4,
which had over 1 billion views
on their streaming platform last year.
No woman has ever run a larger channel in the UK.
So, I came all the way to London
to find out how she does it.
So, Alex, thank you for joining us here
on Connections today.
- Delighted to be here.
- Let's start at the beginning.
Do you think that you're the only TV executive
that is a trained rocket scientist?
- Well, I think so, but maybe when people watch this,
some others will come out with of the woodwork.
- I was a chemical engineering major
and you were a physicist.
- I didn't know you were chemical engineering.
- Yeah, I was a physicist for seven years.
I did a degree and then I did a PhD in physics.
- So, what was that like?
- Well, as it turns out,
not as much fun as being in the creative industries.
So, I did physics for a long time and I really enjoyed it.
First, I was a rocket scientist
and then I went on to be a medical physicist.
So, I worked in a hospital with patients
and I really, really enjoyed it,
but in the end I thought science
is about narrowing, narrowing on a smaller area,
and you know, business and running companies,
is about learning lots of things.
And then how you piece them together.
And I realized,
I preferred learning lots of new things
and studying new things
and thinking about how they got put together.
So, I left science and went into business.
- So, what brought you into media?
Well, when I was growing up,
all I did was watch television.
So, after school I just watched television.
My mom was at work and I never went outside.
I didn't do any sports.
I just watched television.
And when I found out
that you could have a job doing that,
where that was genuinely an advantage.
- Like, sign me up for that one.
- Yeah.
- I was like, why would you ever want to do anything else?
So, I got into the creative industries first.
I was in the internet,
from that, I went into the media and the creative industries
and digital and tech,
and I thought,
this is the place to be
because the metadata,
the study of it is so interesting,
and it's fun.
- Imagine when you were a physicist
doing rocket science work,
you had to try things out, experiment.
How does that work in creative?
What do you learn when you fail?
- Well, that's a good question.
First of all, I think you always be alert to evidence.
Like in all business, you should be like that,
but particularly in creative business,
you have to be listening.
You have to be alert to what the audience thinks
and what consumers think and how things land.
But the process
of business is really, really different.
In science, you're always discounting possibilities.
In creative businesses, actually,
you're planting many seeds
and you're keeping lots of things alive
for as long as possible
because you don't know how they'll turn out.
And that's a really, really different way of operating.
- Yeah. Like letting a thousand flowers bloom
and see how it goes.
- Ultimately, the ideas come from in their heads.
When you are coming up with ideas,
you need some freedom and some trust
and people who've got faith in you
to come up with them.
- Because you have to give you a balance.
- To give you a chance.
- Yeah.
- And that's really different science,
which is like knocking things down, facts,
that's not going to work.
So, they're really different ways of managing.
- Tell us about the mission of Channel 4.
- Well, it's really peculiar organization.
So, it's owned by the public.
It doesn't have any shareholders.
It doesn't have to return a profit,
but equally it's there to serve the public
and to do new things,
but it doesn't receive any money from the government.
We receive all our money from advertising,
turns over about a billion,
but it was set up to appeal to audiences
that others don't reach,
to serve the underserved,
to represent the underrepresented.
It's also been set up to challenge power
and hold them to account and represent opinions,
which often gets us into trouble.
And it set out to do creative innovation.
So, we do lots of new things.
We're particularly famous
for all our LGBT programming overtime
to all of our programming,
those for people of color, for overtime.
So, we do lots of things
that are representing audiences that others don't,
but they're also challenging prejudice.
So for example,
we're the biggest broadcaster in the world
for the Paralympics.
And that has changed the face
and the perception of disability in this country.
It's a huge amount of fun.
'Cause it's an organization that genuinely has a mission.
- In 2017, though, it wasn't doing as well
when you took over as CEO.
Tell us about how you'd brought in change
to the organization.
- Well, all television channels are challenged, right?
Because the truth is we're all as consumers
watching loads of video,
the challenge there is how do you compete
with the new competition?
Because most people go to bed 10 o'clock at night,
watch Netflix on a device,
while not talking to their partner.
And you know, that's a joy in many ways,
but that's the challenge.
So when I came in,
the truth is I think we were thinking
about the old competition, the other networks,
and that's like maintaining your slice of the pie,
whilst the pie is getting smaller.
So, the big switch I made was to think
about the new competition, Netflix, et cetera,
and to think about how did we hold up our share
and grow against them.
And that required a massive transformation
of the organization.
- You went all big on streaming.
Tell us about that transformation.
- So, we focused on a few big things, right?
First of all, is except that your linear business is dying.
The old business is dying and stop trying to hold onto it,
grow as fast as you can in the new business.
That means you have to change your programming
to be for young people
because they're predominantly on streaming.
It means you need to change
how you release your programming.
It means that you have to change how you market.
What I would say is fishing where the fish are.
So, we had to switch to marketing on Snap,
marketing on Tik Tok,
but it meant a kind of wholehearted change
across all departments of the business,
because it's also about where we chose to invest our money.
- And you took a chance on different types
of programming as well.
Tell me about It's A Sin.
Everybody else passed it up and you took it on.
- We did this amazing series called It's A Sin
with Russell T. Davis, a fantastic writer,
which was about, you know,
the dreadful reality and shame of the Aids pandemic
in the eighties.
Everyone rejected it.
They felt it wouldn't be popular.
We made this incredible four-part series,
which is joyous as well as shocking,
and is about the reality of coming out
and coming to a big city to have to do that.
But also, the hideousness of how the government
and others avoided and ignored the illness.
And it was a huge success.
And it was scary to do
because I thought even the night before it went out,
is anyone in the pandemic
gonna watch something about another one?
But, that's an example of where we do things
and they challenge perceptions.
And they're fun and entertaining,
even though they're poignant.
And in that case,
it's really important
because it doubled the rates of HIV testing in this country.
- That's incredible.
And then during COVID,
you made other pivots as well,
that made impacts.
How did you pivot your programming strategy
during the COVID lockdown.
- We did some crazy things during COVID.
We had to cut a lot of money
and of course we had the reality
that everyone was trapped at home,
so they wanted to watch television.
But, we had no revenue
because no advertisers wants to advertise.
And we were all scattered working from home.
So, we had this peculiar high demand,
low supply, no revenue.
- Which isn't as a business person
where you want to be.
- While I was trapped at home with four children
who required homeschooling.
The switch we made was to think, well,
how does the audience feel right now?
So, as well as cutting money,
we reinvested money into super fast turnaround programming.
We were all forced to have to cook every night.
So, we had a show every night,
where a famous chef here, Jamie Oliver,
was cooking and he was cooking day by day without crew.
In the end, he was filming himself on his iPhone,
but it was super popular
because it was the reality of what we were all stuck with.
We did a house show
where we put GoPros on dogs and they ran around the house.
So, we did lots of things..
- Not shot on iPhone, filmed by dog.
- Filmed by dogs with GoPros.
But, we did things that reflected how we felt as a nation.
We also did a campaign,
which was the government
and the public need you to stay at home,
sitting on the sofa, watching television.
That's how you can save people.
That's what we need you to do.
But that, that switch to becoming more current,
made us more salient and actually made us more popular.
So we grew audience share,
having been in decline for years.
And last year, our streaming business grew at 30%.
- Wow!
- I mean, that's like crazy levels of growth.
So, the reflecting of your audience.
- That connection.
- Really positive, really positive business effect.
- Wow!
- When you think of these shows with these big topics
that hit 50% of the population,
how important is it to market those shows
to get them out to your audience?
- Hugely, hugely.
Part of the breaking down of taboos
is even people being aware of those programs.
Sometimes you don't even need people to watch the programs.
They need to be aware that they exist.
and that they can vocalize topics.
and that they can challenge,
and they can ask things.
So, a few weeks ago we had a whole day on the channel
where every program was fronted by black talent
and all the crews were black.
So, that's changing problems in our industry
where people say, "Hmm, I'd like to do that.
But those people they're just not available.
They don't exist."
So now it's really clear, that it's a choice.
- [Interviewer] We just launched
our streaming service, Salesforce Plus.
- [Interviewee] Yes.
- I was wondering if you had advice for us.
- Well, I'm always happy to give advice,
whether it's good,
is another matter.
- I'm sure it's great.
Look, the biggest thing with any service
is to be ready to change,
listen to your consumers,
see what happens,
think about them as distinct groups,
what do they need,
how often do they need it,
and do they want things that are of the day
or of the week or of the quarter?
You know, I think that's probably the key things
to think about there.
And then, you know, see how it goes, be ready to change.
- I think change is hard in an organization.
How do you make change happen?
- Well, I think change is hard,
but it's also making people realize
that change can be a good thing.
It's about rejuvenation.
It's about freshness.
It's about new ideas.
It's about growth.
And of course the opposite of change is atrophy.
- Not that.
- Nobody wants atrophy, do they?
So it's about explaining that.
And it's not something to be feared.
It's something to be celebrated and learned from.