Posts Tagged ‘BBC’
Are We Now the “Smug” Dragons?
Tonight, RTE 1, 9:30pm, sees programme three of the current series of Dragons’ Den where myself and new Dragon, Norah Casey, are battling one another, yet again, over a potential investment. The audience figures this year are up by about, an amazing, 200,000 viewers across the week on last year. This is, in the main down to, a primetime slot on Sunday nights and a repeat at 8pm on Thursdays.
However I ask the question are we Dragons not looking a bit too smug this year? Here we are in the middle of the mother of all recessions and if someone is prepared to set up a business in these challenging times should they not be lauded rather than be lambasted as happens sometimes in the Den. I can’t excuse it, but even though I am integral part of it, I question the programme’s tone this year.
The producers are obviously feeling the pressure of the primetime slot and only want to feature the brilliant or the barmy. Anything in between is edited down or out. So you only get situations where the Dragons are battling with one another over a very good idea or you get the opposite, us Dragons, giving the false appearance we are queuing up to put the final nail in the coffin of someone’s dream. There is no middle ground because 21st century television demands jeopardy, you must always either win big or lose big.
Of course the producers are constrained by a strict format dictated by the programme owners, Sony Television, who stipulate how it is to be shot. In fairness who could argue with them, their show is now a success in 22 countries, so they know what works and what doesn’t but Ireland is in an unusual place at this time. More than ever start up businesses need to be encouraged and that is still must be the primary objective of Dragons’ Den.
It is alright, perhaps, for the BBC Dragons to be arrogant. That’s the UK but Ireland is still a community, one large family. I fear we, Irish Dragons, may be falling into that trap of appearing arrogant. The opening sequence has each of us with our arms folded, staring down the camera lens. This is the classic, formatted, Dragons’ Den look but for Ireland I would have preferred to see the Dragons with their sleeves rolled up working with some of their previous investments.
Also because it is series three we have all become very comfortable both in the Den and with one another. So if someone comes in and they have forgotten their figures, an all too frequent occurrence, because we five all know one another so well now, we are more likely to look and smile at one another but this can be misinterpreted as perhaps laughing and the promoter struggling in front of us. I know this is never, ever the case but it can appear like that.
These are not excuses it is just setting a record straight. For a fact I know both Sean Gallagher and Bobby Kerr do countless talks for free in Universities, colleges and schools and with Enterprise Boards the length and breadth of the country doing their bit to promote enterprise. Niall O’Farrell, has in my view, in this series made at least two investments because he was taken by the determination and drive of the promoters even if the rest of us saw no hope of a financial return in those two businesses. Norah Casey, who I am only still getting to know, but I can vouch I have witnessed her being very generous in one business dealing.
Another consequence of a primetime slot is the show gets constant promotion. But producers will always pick the sensational lines for a promo’. So when Bobby Kerr asks, “ why do I smell a rat here?” that can be edited to, “I smell a rat here” and worse is repeated in numerous promo’s, out of context, which I believe is not fair to Brian Lesley, the promoter, who was proposing modest charge to people who needed their debts managed.
Any Marketing Geniuses out there?
Good morning what a fantastic Monday morning.
If you have just caught up with us recently, I blog twice a week. Thursday nights, 11:15pm, after Dragons’ Den is broadcast and Monday mornings. They are two definite updates but of course as you have seen I will also go in and update from time to time.
Looking for Great Marketing Ideas
There are now thousands of people following this blog. I am flattered especially by so many overseas friends from around the globe. This is a big resource and I want to use it.
So please check out www.TanOrganic.com and www.Hidbin.ie
I want your advice on how we should best market these two products. Gives us your views on both or which ever one takes your fancy.
Let me give you a bit of a steer. For Tanorganic, the 100% natural, organic, anti-aging, healthy, sunless tan-lotion I am looking to really grab the Irish public’s attention when it is launched mid to late May. I am thinking of billboards around the cities of Ireland and a large prize for the most beautiful tanned woman to appear actually live on the billboard and wave at people as they go by. Please don’t involve yourself if you think it is sexist or demeaning of women etc. It is a beauty product aimed at women and also it is a bit of summer fun. If you can’t get your head around that you are wasting your own and our time. Don’t restrict yourself. Let your imagination runawy with itself. Please submit your ideas for this one to info@tanorganic.com Now don’t restrict them to the billboard concept I just want you to know what I am thinking.
Hidbin, as you know is a synthetic screen hedging that neatly hides your ugly wheeliebins. “Making the unsightly unseen.” It costs €99 for a one bin unit and €179 for a two bin unit. Can you think of any guerrilla marketing tactics for this concept. Please send your best ideas to info@hidbin.ie
Our Last Show This Thursday
Thursday’s show is the last in the series and I genuinely believed they have saved the best to last. I am actually going to be out of the country with all the Dragons, well actually Sean can’t make it now. We are going on a late season ski trip to Zermatt. It is all down to Sarah’s great generosity. I am not the facebook type but I will ask Sarah for her permission to report from there and her wonderful chalet, www.chaletgrace.comI am told it is literally out of this world, so Bobby, Niall and myself are really looking forward to a few days ski-ing and crack with the hostess with the mostess.
Great Ideas and a number of Investments
The show on Thursday, and I will be blogging at 11:15pm directly after the show, features some really interesting pitches including an Irish developed, I-Phone App’ and you will also get to see just how bad Sean Gallagher is at hurling. If you are a Dragons’ Den regular and you followed last year’s first series I’d like to know why you think this was even better? I say it is better because the ratings are even higher. During the series the programme had a bigger audience than the main evening 9 o’clock news (Programme 6). That’s a large audience for 10:15pm and the viewers stay right until the end until well after 11pm.
Desperate Housewives twinned with Dragons’ Den
Also we are informed there was a very large number of female viewers. In fact the programme was “diaried” and “twinned”, we are told by the media buyers in the advertising agencies. That means about 125,000 women had two favourite shows per week, that they definitely would NOT miss. Desperate Housewives on Tuesday and Dragons’ Den on Thursday. Sean says he knows why, he claims it is his sex appeal. I argue his most endearing quality is his modesty. But if anything, I believe, it is down to the humour. Niall O’Farrell was just so funny at times this year. For example when he held up the Feel Good energy boost cocoa ball and said “It looks like something you’d find behind the couch,” I cracked up. Bobby can be so brilliant at giving fantastic advice to the point and succinctly and then the next minute he can crack a great joke. And all the audience research tells us women are fascinated by our Sarah. I feel privileged to be in such great talented company.
Eugenia Cooney Producer
Sadly not coming away on our little Dragons’ Den trip, though we did everything to twist their arms, are Larry Bass and Eugenia Cooney. Larry, the Executive Producer, is at the TV festival in Cannes this week. By the way that’s where he bumped into Mark Burnett in a lift in 2004 and that led to him acquiring the rights to both the Apprentice and Dragons’ Den. Both were invented by the genius of Burnett.
But the genius behind our Dragons’ Den is, Producer, Eugenia. She and hubby Ed’ are attending a family wedding this weekend and couldn’t join us. I would have dropped my family to go to Chalet Grace but Eugenia is a good Dundalk woman and they value family not like us south Louth, Drogheda types who eat their young, well that’s what they say about us in Dundalk.
600,000 Viewers
The success of the programme, and the almost 600,000 viewers a week is down to Eugenia who takes it from people applying to come on, vetting them, accepting a fraction to come to studio, recordings for weeks, editing down 120 hours to about 7 hours in total for the full eight shows of the series and she is across every item until the last credits roll this Thursday night.
We have been honoured to work with such a great leader.
I will talk to you on Thursday night.
Bye for now.
Bock The Robber, another blogger, has a go at me
Other Bloggers are keeping an eye on me!
Blogging is new to me, but I have learned that there are some serious bloggers out there and they have been very encouraging and helpful.
Bock the Robber
One Blogger, Bock, had a go at me for spelling Herbie Porsche’s name incorrectly. I responded and duly apologised explaining that on Thursday nights, as the show is on, I just type up quickly and zap it up at 11:15pm without spell checking. Anyway, there were follow up comments and some questions asked about the show and I replied to those also. Below is my reply.
“Wow, I am pleasantly surprised by the supportive comments and Bock I can see straight away that you’re tough but fair. I should be writing my blog now, which goes live in the morning, but before I do that let me reply to the various comments if that is OK?
I hope this isn’t too long a reply but there are a number of issues raised by Mel Drew, Mark, Cap’n P and Sandra.
Damn you Bock I am now so conscious of my spelling that I am being extra slow and careful! But hang it, I am just going to let my fingers follow my mouth and if there are typos I am sorry.
HOW THE IRISH DRAGONS’ DEN CAME ABOUT
To all who commented I would say that doing Dragons’ Den is both equally brilliant and a nightmare. The production company, Shinawil, acquired the rights back in 2006, but RTE hummed and hawed and it didn’t get the go ahead. But then TV3 did the Apprentice after RTE passed on it. When it got huge ratings RTE panicked and suddenly wanted to do Dragons’ Den.
By that stage I didn’t want to do it. The economy was clearly beginning to crumble and I thought the timing was awful. But I genuinely believe my ego got the better of me. I was already a huge fan of the BBC show, and I was flattered to be asked, so eventually I said yes. By the time we got to doing it, beginning filming in November 2008, the economy had crashed. By the time we went on air in February ‘09 it was no longer a recession but a great depression we were in.
I will never forget after Christmas ‘08, going into filming on the 6th of January ‘09, and the headlines that morning saying that both Waterford Crystal and DELL were closing down. It felt like the end of the world.
AM I AN EGOMANIAC OR A GAMBLER?
Genuinely it took a certain type of egomaniac or gambler to go into the Den that day and make a €50,000 investment in a thing called Takker as I did. But Takker has turned out to be a huge success and I am sure will pay me back twenty fold.
Anyway I was convinced that there would only be one series of Dragons’ Den, so I went for broke. To all our shock the ratings were great and viewership was huge. Dragons’ Den runs in 18 countries, but the Irish version in its first season achieved the highest market-share of viewers of all 18 shows running currently.
This time around RTE was very, very keen to do a second series and so the madness continues. What worries me about it is that I, like anyone else, could go under in this recession. I am only worth a fraction of what I thought I was worth it 2007. Actually I do know I will come through, but in what shape? Who knows. But if one of the five Dragons had a business that got into trouble, can you imagine how they would be pasted by the press!
All I am saying is that I am proud that, during an awful time in our economy, whatever money I had left I used it to back soild business people, who had the balls and self belief to come into that Den and give it a shot.
SHOULD BUSINESS BE MORE HONEST ? YES
Mel Drew, I agree with you 100%. In all of my years consulting with businesses or people who got into a scrape, I am convinced that had they just ‘fessed up’ quickly, it wouldn’t have been half as bad. It is not that they are deliberately hiding things. It is the hierarchical nature of large corporations that is the problem. People are scared to report the bad news up the line.
THANKS MARK
Mark thank you for your kind comment but you over estimate me. I know nothing about Google Alerts. I just thought that as I am supposed to be a “media guru” (I hate the term), and I know nothing about social media, I should do a twice weekly blog for this series, and learn as I go along. If I wasn’t doing it I would never have spotted the pedantic Bock’s comments, and it would have passed me by. But of course I did invest in henparty.ie , and its founder, Kate Hyde, is an SEO genius who generously gives Deborah who works with us a steer.
The thing is Mark I don’t need to promote my day job, the media consultancy. We are the market leaders and even in this recession we are still out the door with work. But many of our clients are now engaging in viral marketing, so again I feel the best way for an old fart like me to learn about it is to do it. Anyway thanks for saying I am a decent guy.
CONGRATS SANDRA of PRINT DELICIOUS
Before I answer Cap’n P’s great question about copying a show like Dragons’ Den, let me just say how heartened I was by Sandra’s comments. She is right. All five Dragons loved her print delicious idea and she was one of the best presenters I have seen in the Den. Unfortunately it didn’t get an investment because it wasn’t scalable.
In investment we have a rule, “If it is not scalable, it is not saleable”. By scalable we mean could we set up a print delicious in the UK, could we franchise it in France and so on. But that has already been done so Sandra has the Irish Franchise. But I wish her well. It will be a great success, I am sure.
SHOULD WE COPY FOREIGN PROGRAMMES?
Is it evidence of a lack of creativity in Irish broadcasting that we do a copy of Dragons’Den or The Apprentice? First of all I believe very little is actually original. Everything has been tried in some shape or form before.
But Irish TV would be mad not to do Irish versions of successful proven shows abroad. Of course it is risky and can go wrong. Who remembers Eamon Dunphy doing The Weakest Link? That was…. well that was…, embarrassing. But on the other hand The Apprentice on TV 3 was super and easily as good, from a production standards point of view, as the BBC/Alan Sugar version. I do the interviews in the penultimate show of the Irish Apprentice, and I would have to say that the standard of candidate was much lower this year that in the first series, so it became more like Big Brother in series 2 than the Apprentice. But even so, it still got massive ratings.
Peter Jones of the BBC Dragons asks are we funnier?
Yes we will always be compared. And after viewing the first show we all felt the team has done us proud. Interesting story, Sarah was talking to Peter Jones (The BBC Dragon) last Friday and Peter was saying, “I hear your show is very good and is it true it is much funnier than ours?” There is that difference between the two shows I think we, the Irish Dragons, banter amongst ourselves much more than they do on the BBC show which is a little colder and more clinical perhaps.
Producer Eugenia Cooney has done a brilliant job
As we watched the show we all had a good laugh slagging one another but I think we were all struck again by the professionalism of Eugenia Cooney, the Producer and her team and just how wonderful the show looks. Andrew who does the lighting and Molly the designer and of course all the camera crew shoot it so beautifully. It looks warmer than the BBC Den.