On today’s episode of Variety’s “Strictly Business” podcast, NBCUniversal’s Pearlena Igbokwe details the company’s key areas of focus following its transition with the Versant Media spinoff at the start of this year.
Igbokwe, who is NBCUniversal‘s chairman of Television Studios, NBC Entertainment and Peacock scripted, discusses the return of the pilot process at NBC, the importance of multigenerational co-viewing and harnessing the power of broadcast and streaming platforms. The conversation was recorded April 23 as part of Variety‘s annual Entertainment Marketing Summit in Beverly Hills.
“We missed them. We missed making pilots. When I first got to NBC in 2012, we probably made 18 to 20 pilots a year. Every network was doing that, right? And it was exciting because making pilots is how you found the next great show,” Igbokwe observed. “The whole pilot process is about taking the risk. It’s about, Let’s see if this script translated to screen is what we think it can be. From your director to your actors — so many different things happen and sometimes you get magic and maybe you don’t, but at least you know where the problems are. In my early years at NBC, the way we found our hit shows was by making a pilot.”
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Igbokwe cited her experience early on in her NBC tenure of developing a low-profile drama pilot with Sony Pictures Television called “The Blacklist.” It wound up running for 10 seasons. “You just don’t know until you make the pilot,” Igbokwe said.
The newly streamlined NBCUniversal is keenly focused on finding big events and big cultural moments where the company can amass a big audience — hence its investment in sports rights, Olympics and other events with must-watch-live urgency. This capitalizes on NBC’s enormous reach as a broadcast platform. And it also lends itself to the kind of multigenerational audiences that top advertisers covet.
NBC is always on the hunt for programs “that the entire family can watch — that is important to us,” Igbokwe says. “We have a lot of our shows that score high on co-viewing indexes. ‘The Voice’ is a show that when my kids were younger, we’d sit and watch and so. Obviously sporting events are big on co-viewing and it is really for u those shows that span generations are great because you need to create that next generation of viewers. So it is something that we think about a lot when we’re developing and creating shows.”
With the Versant Media spinoff that was completed in early January, NBCUniversal is a much streamlined company rooted in film and TV production, NBC, Bravo and Peacock and the Universal Studios theme parks. That level of focus has helped NBC and Peacock collaborate better on big priorities for the company. NBCUniversal, like other Big Four network parent companies, is experimenting to find the optimal ways to cross-promote and cross-pollinate its biggest franchises across the NBC broadcast mothership and Peacock’s younger-skewing audience.
Igbokwe cited “Law & Order: SVU” as a great example of how hit shows can travel in the new TV universe. On NBC, the median age of “SVU” viewers is 67; on Peacock, it’s 45. Marketers in the audience for the conversation swooned at that information, because it indicates very little duplication in viewership on the two platforms. That’s the sweet spot for NBCU.
“It’s really allowing us to maximize our reach by trying to program across the platforms,” Igbokwe said. “Then we also super-serve those audiences on Peacock by offering them exclusive sports live events but also original entertainment.” She cited Peacock’s success last year with “All Her Fault,” a limited drama series starring Sarah Snook.
“That really appealed to that female-led, aspirational Bravo audience but also that mainstream NBC audience that likes its crime thriller procedurals,” she says. “And those two cohorts led that show to become one of our most successful shows, reaching about 75 million hours viewed. So by really looking at it as a combination of elements — it’s not just programming to NBC or just programming to Peacock or just programming to Bravo. We really look at it as, how can we program for all of the audiences that are in our flywheel or that are in our ecosystem. And it’s been working.”
“Strictly Business” is Variety’s weekly podcast featuring conversations with industry leaders about the business of media and entertainment. (Please click here to subscribe to our free newsletter.) New episodes debut every Wednesday and can be downloaded at Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, Google Play, SoundCloud and more.
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