All3Media CEO Jane Turton has offered a glimpse as to what the merger with Banijay will look like when it likely clears the antitrust review process.
The merger, which is set to go through by late summer, will see Banijay boss Marco Bassetti take the reigns as CEO while Turton will stay on as deputy CEO.
“I think consolidation is very much center of a lot of people’s minds,” Turton said during SXSW London in an off-site conversation at Shoreditch House with Variety co-editor-in-chief Cynthia Littleton.
“All they are, these companies, by the way, is a combination of people and IP, and the people bit of it — the team of it — is the bit that matters I think enormously,” Turton continued. “The success of these businesses relies very heavily, if not almost exclusively, on the quality of the talent.”
Turton is featured on Variety’s first-ever Women’s Impact Report U.K. for steering the All3Media ship – comprised of 40 companies active in TV, film, theater and digital – since 2015.
During her Shoreditch House keynote she acknowledged that while mergers inevitably mean scale, that doesn’t always translate into value. “Of course, scale is important, but you’ve got to work out why scale matters,” she said. “It’s not just simply muscle, it’s got to be about something more nuanced and something considerably more sophisticated than literally size. You can be very big and very poor at your job, and you won’t grow your business. So the thing that’s exciting about this merger is that is the fact that you have then very deep bench of talent that covers every genre, literally.”
One example of organic synergy she offered was an upcoming theater adaptation of hit gameshow “The Traitors,” which has united three All3Media companies: Neal Street, who are producing the theater show, Studio Lambert, who produce the U.K. and U.S. versions of the gameshow and Holland-based IDTV, who created the format.
“That’s a brilliant example of what a shareholder would call synergy,” she said. “Call it what you want — teamwork, partnership — and it’s that type of thing that you can do more and more of when you have that deeper bench across multiple geographies.”
Turton pointed out that All3Media currently operates across only six markets, of which the biggest two are the U.K. and U.S., followed by Germany. While Banijay’s footprint extends across France, Italy, Spain and South America, Turton also pointed to their deep well of IP, which includes “MasterChef,” “Survivor” and “Big Brother,” saying: “That’s scale, but it’s a lot more refined than just a statement about pure size.”