It's time to face The Musical
More bad news for Montrose
RTE released its list of highest paid stars on Monday, it covers 2022, and it showed that our old friend Ryan Tubridy trousered €515,000 in the 12 months, that’s a hefty 17% pay increase on 2021.
There’s a considerable gap between the born again Virgin, and his RTE compatriots, with Joe Duffy and Claire Byrne, the only two in the €300k club, while lesser lights like Ray D’Arcy, Miriam O’Callaghan and Brendan O’Connor have to make do with roughly a quarter of a million, or in football parlance, 5 grand a week.
It all seems quite tame now, compared to the glorious and mystifying adventures with the Public Accounts Committee, and RTE is committed to making sure that no one gets paid more than the boss, Kevin Bakhurst, who is also in the quarter of a million club.
Arguably, if I were Kevin, I’d just give myself a pay rise and save some negotiating time, but I have a feeling in the age of austerity that RTE face, that might cause a headline or two in The Daily Star.
I’d be extremely surprised if Ryan’s new gig on Virgin Q102 is landing him anywhere near the kind of money RTE paid him in 2022, and that London can be terrible expensive, so it’s just as well he also had a Daily Mail Diary now, to keep him in Tube fare.
So far, not so scandalous really. But that’s not surprising, given that the salary list emerged in the same week as the truly spectacular report on RTE’s most spectacular failure, “Toy Show, The Musical”
The Musical Report
The headline numbers are truly staggering, the show sold just 11,044 tickets, resulting in a loss to the organisation of €2.2 million, or 4 years of Ryan Tubridy.
Nothing about the report is positive, as Grant Thornton sliced their way through the figures, it turns out the show failed to attract the projected sponsorship, so RTE had to make up the shortfall, putting an extra €75,000 into the pot.
The show was projected to make a net profit of €1.2 million in Year 1, and the projected takings for the first three years was over €6 million.
That kind of projection is truly insanity, and it appears the RTE Board didn’t have the full picture, and the process of signing off doesn’t seem to have produced any kind of paper trail.
Look, organisations make mistakes, and I think we’ve all been in those meetings, where the Board has decided we need to diversify the business, expand into new areas, find new revenue streams.
Let’s have a Brainstorm
Usually, people get broken up into subgroups and sent away to develop a strategy that will take the businesses’ existing strengths and turn them into a whole new revenue stream. Some people will come back with great ideas, some will come back with very predictable ideas and some people will return with ideas that just don’t work.
Clearly, at some point in the last few years, there was one of those meetings in RTE.
You can hear the pitch, “times are tough, linear media is under pressure, we need to branch out, can’t just depend on licence fee and advertising, we need to add a new revenue stream”.
Someone at the back, puts their hand up and says, what about events? We could run live events and generate income from our audience in new ways.
That is the point at which senior management should have said, ok, but we have no large scale live event expertise, we’ll need a carefully worked out plan, that minimises risk and lets us trial the idea before we go all in.
That doesn’t seem to have happened though, and instead, we got Toy Show, The Musical, which clocked up a loss of 2.2 million euro in one year.
Just say No
It’s really down to the Board and the Senior Management to say, “Stop, this is too ambitious”, or “Stop, why isn’t our Late Late Show star involved in this?”, or just “Stop”.
Reading the report, it’s clear that RTE staff and management had absolute faith in the Toy Show. They saw it as a silver bullet that would guarantee success in the live arena and thought that it’s huge popularity could translate into a totally different type of event, which would also be wildly popular.
Equally, there was a value for the organisation in developing a show that targeted children, with a long term view to help recruit future listeners and viewers for RTE.
But, to launch a show like that, after the Toy Show had been on TV, and in one of the most crowded parts of the calendar for live events targeted at children, truly was a bizarre decision. Every town and city has a pantomime which starts in December and runs until January, every pantomime fights tooth and nail to draw as much audience as possible, but somehow RTE imagined that on it’s first outing, Toy Show, The Musical would hoover in 70,000 paying guests.
And to launch into, in a post Covid world, with a show based at the National Convention Centre, which is not a traditional live event venue seems like madness. Worst of all, the tickets went on sale in May and from the Grant Thornton report, it’s crystal clear that there was simply nowhere near the expected demand.
At any point before December the 10th, someone, anyone could and should have said “Stop”.
The Lessons
I think there are many lessons here for RTE, but also for any companies in this space.
· Not every idea is a good idea.
· Sometimes good ideas just don’t work in practice.
· A Board needs to take responsibility when you let someone take a creative or commercial risk, if it’s not working, those involved won’t always be able to see it.
· And please, please, please someone check the numbers on the Excel Sheet.
This has been the 31st official edition of the RAudio Newsletter.
Apart from writing newsletters, I also consult to radio stations and podcasts, so if you have a question, or a project you need help on, drop me an email – liamathompson@gmail.com
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