Branded Entertainment: Call for cross-platform savvy contracts
by: Rachael Turk

Screen Hub
Wednesday 4 March, 2009

A forum exploring the future of branded entertainment held by the Screen Producers Association of Australia (SPAA) on February 24 has revealed an urgent need for industrial policies to get up to speed with the changing nature and requirements of branded entertainment.

Corey Esse, Regional Head of TV for Publicis Mojo, named the lack of adequate contracts and agreements between talent and other parties as the single biggest problem currently facing branded content producers.

"As soon as there's an advertising client attached, the fees just skyrocket," he told the forum.

"The AFA [Advertising Federation of Australia], SPAA, MEAA [Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance], all the various bodies, need to come up with a workable contract.

"Clients are starting to introduce their own contracts but these are far more legal than industrial, and often eight to ten pages long."

Also on the panel, Denise McKeon, Senior TV Producer at Clemenger BBDO, agreed to the need for some form of formal mediation. “Agents often don’t know how to package or stretch the talent fees,” she said, “and these are often the biggest cost.”

The main issues needing address in such a standard agreement are confidentiality, accountability and terms of payment, Esse told Screen Hub.

Geoff Brown, Executive Director of SPAA, acknowledges an increasing level of discussion about the need for contractual formality – attributable to both the increased level of international production and recent decline in cash flow – and says it is developing a “responsibilities checklist” for agency producers.

“Terms of Trade in branded entertainment will, I imagine, forge a derivative of traditional ‘producer/investor’ terms and traditional ‘production company/agency’ terms,” he told Screen Hub in a separate interview. “Where it will get interesting is where the copyright equity is split and this does depend on idea origination. Traditional content producers are used to retaining their rights, as compared to TVC producers, who have traditionally sold them at a higher price.”

However, Simon Whipp, Director of Equity at the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA), does not believe contractual stipulation of this sort to be the role of industry organisations.

“Whilst the right of performers to consent or withhold their consent with relation to the context of goods and services must remain, for those performers who are interested [in branded content], negotiation with the advertiser (that is, the client) must be remain separate,” he said.

The MEAA currently makes specific provisions in all its agreements that indicate the performer is not to be used in commercial tie-ins and anything more than incidental product placement is not permitted. In particular, these provisions prevent conflict of interest between projects and any products appearing in them.

“I fear those provisions will be put under pressure as funding models themselves come under pressure, Whipp noted. “But the commercialisation of Australian content funding on the whole is something about which the industry should be concerned.”

Either way, the issue is set to become more relevant as branded entertainment continues to takes hold. “Particularly,” as Esse noted, "once we get into longer formats”.

Rachael Turk
Rachael Turk is a Sydney based writer and the former editor of Inside Film Magazine. She has written for The Sydney Morning Herald, British Cinematographer and Online Asia and has three film projects in development.

http://www.rachaelturk.com

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