Making television formats travel.

Television that has to travel

Banijay was expanding fast when I was there, stacking acquisitions into one of the largest production groups on earth. In that business a format isn’t just a show. It’s a brand that has to be sold to buyers, localized by producers, marketed by broadcasters, and sustained across dozens of territories, each with its own culture, language, and audience.

My job sat behind that machine: turning formats into brands that could make the trip. Show packaging and key art on one end, sales enablement and executive presentations on the other, and the creative systems connecting them.

Lock the core, free the edges

Here’s the tension every global format lives with. If the identity is rigid, it breaks the moment it crosses a border: the layout meets a long German title, a different broadcaster’s standards, a culture that reads the imagery differently. If it’s loose, the format dissolves into a dozen unrelated shows. You need both at once.

The answer was never a stricter template. It was defining what’s actually core: the principles, the hierarchy, the narrative structure, a small set of immovable assets, and then designing real freedom around them. Every territory got room to be local. Every version was still unmistakably the same show.

Selling a show that doesn’t exist yet

Unscripted lives and dies on the pitch: the key art, the sizzle, the packaging that makes a buyer see a show that hasn’t been made. I led that creative across the slate, and the discipline is speed with judgment. Every show needs its own world, built convincingly, on a development timeline.

But the bigger design problem was who does the pitching. Sales executives, business development, leadership entering new markets: people who communicate for a living but don’t design. So instead of producing every deck myself, I built presentation systems they could run: a constant spine that carried the brand, and clearly-marked slots to swap per buyer and per market. Complex business information, turned into visual stories a buyer gets in minutes.

The first digital property

The other half of the run was new territory for the company itself: I helped create Banijay’s first digital entertainment property, in-house brands built for the internet instead of the broadcast grid. Video, livestreams, and podcasts on the content side; SEO, affiliate marketing, and constant A/B testing on the growth side.

That work wasn’t marketing in the campaign sense. It was audience engineering: ship, measure, tune, repeat. And it paid its own way, through distribution and revenue partnerships that closed repeat six-figure deals.

What it set up

TMZ taught me speed. Banijay taught me scale: how you keep a brand coherent when dozens of teams you’ll never meet are the ones executing it. That’s a systems problem, not a style problem, and it’s the exact muscle I carried into studio-wide work at Amazon MGM. The formats changed. The job of designing things other people can run didn’t.