Bell Media executive Phil King says that when Cirque du Soleil asks you to jump, you ask how high.
“When Cirque calls anyone in this business, the meeting gets taken,” King, president of CTV programming and sports for Bell Media, told Marketing this week. “If someone says ‘Cirque’s got a great idea and would like to talk to you about it,” no one is going to say ‘I don’t want that meeting.’”
The Montreal-based company truly is a global powerhouse, growing from a team of 20 street performers in 1984 to 5,000 employees and 1,300 performers from 50 countries. Its partnerships include the crème de la crème of the entertainment world, including the Michael Jackson estate (The Immortal World Tour), the Beatles (Love) and director James Cameron (who produced the new 3D film Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Apart).
So when Cirque approached Bell Media in June about partnering on a new content creation company, there was no hesitation. “[Bell Media president] Kevin Crull came to me and said ‘What do you think?’” King recalled. “I said ‘It’s Cirque du Soleil, one of the greatest, most innovative companies in the world – you take a meeting like that in about 10 seconds.”
The two men made a series of trips to Cirque’s 75,000-square-metre headquarters in Montreal over the next few weeks, where King said he “felt like a kid” while taking in the costume shop that employs 400 full-time staff and produces more than 20,000 custom-made pieces a year, and the extensive training facilities where all Cirque performers must train for anywhere from a few weeks to a few months before taking the stage.
It was during these meeting that the groundwork was laid for a new content company called Cirque du Soleil Media that was announced in August and formally introduced on Tuesday.
Jacques Méthé, executive producer for Cirque du Soleil, will serve as president of the new company. Its first official project, the James Cameron film, debuts this week.
That particular project was inherited by Cirque du Soleil Media, but King said that the first jointly developed properties could be sold to broadcasters as early as next summer. “We’ve got some ideas that are germinating, and there are a couple that I like for CTV and our specialties,” he said. “These things can go quick once you have a great idea.”
Majority owned by Cirque (King wouldn’t disclose how much of a stake Bell owns in the company, although Méthé told Marketing in a previous interview that the split was “somewhere in the vicinity” of 70/30), Cirque du Soleil Media will develop content for TV, film, digital and possibly even game platforms. King also declined to divulge how much Bell has invested in the company, although he didn’t baulk when asked about a reported figure of $15 million.
Cirque had already been dabbling in the content space in what Méthé characterized as a “prudent and cautious” manner centered around DVDs, IMAX films and TV specials documenting its stage shows.
But with a goal to create content as intriguing and surprising as its live shows, the company had been conducting research into the content realm for almost three years before approaching Bell, said Méthé.
“We think our brand has this depth and power that we can use to create other kinds of entertainment,” he explained. “We thought that to do it we’d be better off with a partner, and especially a strategic partner – someone not only powerful, but is a member of great media and entertainment family.
“[Bell is] a big media entity, it is well known in this country and because of the combined size of all the TV networks, it has a lot of clout in a lot of places,” he added. “They are very dynamic and proactive about new media, and that was one of the reasons we thought it was exciting to deal with them.”
With Bell’s 2011 acquisition of the CTV network and its (ultimately ill-fated) attempt to acquire Montreal-based Astral Media, Cirque determined it had the requisite size, technological acumen and distribution expertise to warrant a partnership. When it was first announced in August, Bell cited the partnership as an extension of its pending $3.4-billion Astral bid. The company had pledged to invest heavily in Quebec media as part of the deal, and Astral’s French-language TV channels seemed a perfect fit for the type of content that Bell and Cirque could produce.
Bell had also suggested that it would revisit the Cirque partnership if the CRTC ruled against the Astral deal. However, King said that the federal regulator’s October decision to kill the deal ultimately had no impact.
“It gave us pause for about five seconds, and then the same great idea didn’t go away,” he said. “It didn’t change anything really, and as you can see it didn’t stop us from moving forward,” said King.
The only difference now, he said, is that the newly created company will have to negotiate distribution deals with Quebec broadcasters like Astral rather than simply having the necessary partners in house.
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Quebecers’ affection for the Cirque brand is rivaled only by the NHL’s Montreal Canadiens (although Cirque has had a way better record in recent years), so King doesn’t anticipate that finding those distribution deals will be a challenge.
The partnership is particularly attractive for Bell, said King, because it provides the company with the first right of refusal on content for its myriad channels, which include CTV, MuchMusic, the Discovery Channel and TheLoop.ca. “There’s nothing going to pop out in two months, but we’re sitting in first position for some great content,” said King. “Ownership has its privileges.”
But Cirque du Soleil Media is not just thinking domestically, with King saying that Cirque’s global relationships – it has a presence in more than 40 countries – mean it could produce content for foreign markets including Russia, Japan or China.
Bell has no aspirations to become a content player on a global level said King, noting that it doesn’t possess the scale required to compete with entertainment behemoths like Warner Bros., Disney or Sony. “Scale matters, because whether you’re in the movie business, the recording business or TV, for every 10 things you produce two are big hits and they subsidize the eight that weren’t,” said King.
The scope of Cirque du Soleil Media will extend beyond merely putting its parent company’s live shows on screen, said Méthé. “The purpose and the quest is about creating things that are different,” he said. “It’s not a story about a clown or an acrobat – it’s an interesting story that when you see it produces the same kind of effect our shows produce. We think we have that kind of power with our IP to venture into this world with the help of people who do this for a living.”
In other words, they’re not just clowning around.
