NATPE: Lis Murdoch says producers need to harness Web 3.0

TV producers need to embrace social media of they are to remain relevant and grow their businesses as the industry lives through a period of transition, Shine Group CEO Lis Murdoch told delegates on the last day of NATPE.

“If we embrace social media – we reinvent our companies, we rethink our attitudes, and we rethink our creativity,” Murdoch said. “We must end our traditional, one dimensional attitude, and realize non-linear story-telling.”

Murdoch said that developing new, digital, applications and services will in turn reap financial rewards for savvy producers, characterizing free content as ‘so 2009’.

“We are at the start of something exciting – a model that can lead to a new kind of commerce – which avoids free nonsense, and provides value to our creative industry,” she said.

By way of example, Murdoch pointed to online diet clubs that producer and distributor Shine has launched off the back of its hit Biggest Loser series, which airs on NBC in the US, and which have attracted 400,000 subscribers.

The Shine boss also used her keynote address to call for action to tackle piracy. “Let me just say that we must deal with the threat of piracy,” she said. “If our industry is not protected by the rule of law how are we going to be pioneers?”

She added that digital media, properly executed, can actually reduce the threat of content being stolen.

“Where consumers have a direct relationship with media, they prove time and again that they are willing to pay for it,” Murdoch said. “I also believe that experiential media is a potent vaccine against piracy. If our content is irreducible to a file format – because it’s simply too multi-dimensional – the less chance we have of being ripped off.”