The big Western media giants have tried repeatedly to break into the huge Chinese TV market. And, largely, they’ve failed. Now one of Rupert Murdoch’s former aides is back with a new strategy.
Marty Pompadur certainly has the track record to give it a shot - after a career of nearly 50 years in the television business, the last 10 of which were spent at the top of Murdoch’s News Corp, he’s not short of contacts.
The 73-year-old has partnered with Larry Namer, the co-founder of the E! cable channel, to launch Metan, an advertising-supported content business based in China.
Metan is a play on the Mandarin words for ‘beautiful sky’. The private equity-funded company is effectively a syndicated programming business that will give content to China’s local TV stations and sell the associated advertising inventory. The ad slots will provide a home for Western brands that want to get in front of Chinese eyeballs - and with 370 million TV homes and over 500 city and 3,000 county TV stations, there’s no shortage of them.
“We’re taking exciting [acquired] TV product and putting it on Chinese TV stations,” says Pompadur. “The second part is that we will produce our own programming. The Chinese really want to know what’s going on outside China and they are very interested in sport, entertainment, music, celebrity and film.”
A slate of four 15-minute programmes are in the works. First up is Hollywood Today, an entertainment news round-up fronted by two Chinese hosts reporting from Metan’s Beijing studio. It will debut later this year. Music News, World Film News and World Sports Report will follow in early 2010. A 50-strong sales team will be split between Beijing and Shanghai.
Metan also wants to acquire content and formats. Pompadur points to the WPP-brokered acquisition of Ugly Betty as a great example of what can be done. Mindshare acquired local rights to the show, for which Unilever then had exclusive rights for sponsorship and product placement.
Affable in person, the American has a reputation as a hardened dealmaker. A straight-talking New York resident, he has survived tenures at ABC and News Corp and built a portfolio of outside interests in media and beyond. He started at ABC in 1960 and spent 17 years at the US network, which is now owned by Disney. By the time he left ABC he had become the youngest ever member of its board of directors.
His ascent continued at NewsCorp, where, within two years of joining, he became chairman of News Corp Europe. The relationship with Rupert Murdoch’s empire has not been severed entirely. Pompadur remains an advisor to News Corp and is on the board of Sky Italia, the News Corp-backed Italian pay-TV service.
Meanwhile, a clutch of private interests include investments in Caribbean International News Corporation, which publishes El Vocero, a Spanish-language daily newspaper in Puerto Rico, payroll company Talent Partners and UK-based ticket reseller Seatwave. A diverse range of interests also includes Montana Coffee, a Russia-based wholesale coffee business.
Asia, however, is a notable blind spot. This is Pompadur’s first foray into China. Yet for a man whose career has been so closely tied to large media companies, size now appears to be a disadvantage when it comes to the Chinese market. “If News Corp, Disney or Time Warner were doing this it would be a huge deal. The Chinese authorities do not want big media companies coming in,” he says.
The partners are mindful that China is not immune to the economic slump, but Pompadur’s reading of the local ad market factors in decent growth. He says: “Growth will be down. It was 12 per cent or 13 per cent year on year and now it’s probably between six per cent and eight per cent , but the market’s still growing. Western advertisers have limited resources but they want to be in China.”
The Chinese ad market is the fifth largest in the world, trailing only the US, Japan, the UK and Germany. ZenithOptimedia forecasts that the TV advertising market will register four per cent growth in this post-Olympics year, which would take the total to US$7.1 billion. TV claims 39.8 per cent of the total, the largest single category ahead of newspapers, which have a 30 per cent share.
The goal is to provide a comfortable place for Western companies to put their brand. The strategy is backed up by Namer, who has experience of importing content into difficult markets, having engineered the import of US soap Santa Barbara into Russia in the 90s. It became one of the most popular shows on Russian TV.
“A lot of US and Western companies have got it all wrong when it comes to figuring out China. Everyone looks at the market and says that you have to work with [state broadcaster] CCTV, but it’s the local stations that have the biggest problem adapting to the new economic realities in China. They don’t have any contracts for international programming and are not going to the international conventions to buy it,” Namer says.
The third, and Chinese, partner in Metan is Jean Zhang, founder of AmeriLink, a San Francisco-based consultancy that brings Chinese businesspeople to the US for training. She is confident her local connections will avert the regulatory hurdles that have halted other Western companies in their tracks.
Metan is deliberately taking a small-is-beautiful approach. Having watched from the inside as News Corp has tried repeatedly to break the market, Pompadur is clearly wary of making similar mistakes. Whether he can add a successful Chinese business to his already glittering career remains unclear, but one thing is for sure: Rupert will be watching.
Marty Pompadur’s CV
2009 Co-founder, Metan Development Group
2008 Consultant to News Corp
2000 Chairman, News Corp Europe
1998 Executive VP, News Corp; president, News Corporation Eastern and Central Europe
1982 Chairman and CEO, RP Companies
1977 President, Ziff Corporation
1960 Various roles, rising from general manager to board member, ABC
Marty Pompadur certainly has the track record to give it a shot - after a career of nearly 50 years in the television business, the last 10 of which were spent at the top of Murdoch’s News Corp, he’s not short of contacts.
The 73-year-old has partnered with Larry Namer, the co-founder of the E! cable channel, to launch Metan, an advertising-supported content business based in China.
Metan is a play on the Mandarin words for ‘beautiful sky’. The private equity-funded company is effectively a syndicated programming business that will give content to China’s local TV stations and sell the associated advertising inventory. The ad slots will provide a home for Western brands that want to get in front of Chinese eyeballs - and with 370 million TV homes and over 500 city and 3,000 county TV stations, there’s no shortage of them.
“We’re taking exciting [acquired] TV product and putting it on Chinese TV stations,” says Pompadur. “The second part is that we will produce our own programming. The Chinese really want to know what’s going on outside China and they are very interested in sport, entertainment, music, celebrity and film.”
A slate of four 15-minute programmes are in the works. First up is Hollywood Today, an entertainment news round-up fronted by two Chinese hosts reporting from Metan’s Beijing studio. It will debut later this year. Music News, World Film News and World Sports Report will follow in early 2010. A 50-strong sales team will be split between Beijing and Shanghai.
Metan also wants to acquire content and formats. Pompadur points to the WPP-brokered acquisition of Ugly Betty as a great example of what can be done. Mindshare acquired local rights to the show, for which Unilever then had exclusive rights for sponsorship and product placement.
Affable in person, the American has a reputation as a hardened dealmaker. A straight-talking New York resident, he has survived tenures at ABC and News Corp and built a portfolio of outside interests in media and beyond. He started at ABC in 1960 and spent 17 years at the US network, which is now owned by Disney. By the time he left ABC he had become the youngest ever member of its board of directors.
His ascent continued at NewsCorp, where, within two years of joining, he became chairman of News Corp Europe. The relationship with Rupert Murdoch’s empire has not been severed entirely. Pompadur remains an advisor to News Corp and is on the board of Sky Italia, the News Corp-backed Italian pay-TV service.
Meanwhile, a clutch of private interests include investments in Caribbean International News Corporation, which publishes El Vocero, a Spanish-language daily newspaper in Puerto Rico, payroll company Talent Partners and UK-based ticket reseller Seatwave. A diverse range of interests also includes Montana Coffee, a Russia-based wholesale coffee business.
Asia, however, is a notable blind spot. This is Pompadur’s first foray into China. Yet for a man whose career has been so closely tied to large media companies, size now appears to be a disadvantage when it comes to the Chinese market. “If News Corp, Disney or Time Warner were doing this it would be a huge deal. The Chinese authorities do not want big media companies coming in,” he says.
The partners are mindful that China is not immune to the economic slump, but Pompadur’s reading of the local ad market factors in decent growth. He says: “Growth will be down. It was 12 per cent or 13 per cent year on year and now it’s probably between six per cent and eight per cent , but the market’s still growing. Western advertisers have limited resources but they want to be in China.”
The Chinese ad market is the fifth largest in the world, trailing only the US, Japan, the UK and Germany. ZenithOptimedia forecasts that the TV advertising market will register four per cent growth in this post-Olympics year, which would take the total to US$7.1 billion. TV claims 39.8 per cent of the total, the largest single category ahead of newspapers, which have a 30 per cent share.
The goal is to provide a comfortable place for Western companies to put their brand. The strategy is backed up by Namer, who has experience of importing content into difficult markets, having engineered the import of US soap Santa Barbara into Russia in the 90s. It became one of the most popular shows on Russian TV.
“A lot of US and Western companies have got it all wrong when it comes to figuring out China. Everyone looks at the market and says that you have to work with [state broadcaster] CCTV, but it’s the local stations that have the biggest problem adapting to the new economic realities in China. They don’t have any contracts for international programming and are not going to the international conventions to buy it,” Namer says.
The third, and Chinese, partner in Metan is Jean Zhang, founder of AmeriLink, a San Francisco-based consultancy that brings Chinese businesspeople to the US for training. She is confident her local connections will avert the regulatory hurdles that have halted other Western companies in their tracks.
Metan is deliberately taking a small-is-beautiful approach. Having watched from the inside as News Corp has tried repeatedly to break the market, Pompadur is clearly wary of making similar mistakes. Whether he can add a successful Chinese business to his already glittering career remains unclear, but one thing is for sure: Rupert will be watching.
Marty Pompadur’s CV
2009 Co-founder, Metan Development Group
2008 Consultant to News Corp
2000 Chairman, News Corp Europe
1998 Executive VP, News Corp; president, News Corporation Eastern and Central Europe
1982 Chairman and CEO, RP Companies
1977 President, Ziff Corporation
1960 Various roles, rising from general manager to board member, ABC
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