Quantel Quality, Clipbox Power
- Article 1 of 4
- Soho Independent, December 2000
“I'm amazed at some of our competitors. Rather than throw stones at us, they should sit down and think 'why is Liberty doing this?'” Mark Hewitt has been looking into his crystal ball. The MD of post-production house Rushes sees a future as little as a year away in which he and only two of his competitors will be so far ahead of their Soho neighbours, the others stand almost no chance of catching up.
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Mark Hewitt has been looking into his crystal ball. The MD of post-production house Rushes sees a future as little as a year away in which he and only two of his competitors will be so far ahead of their Soho neighbours, the others stand almost no chance of catching up. “Interactive commercials are coming. Interactive television is coming. Liberty has seen that and that’s what our whole drive is for.”
You can tell Hewitt is glad to be part of the Liberty Livewire group. Probably the largest collection of post-production companies in the world, Liberty owns over 12 companies in Soho alone, including Rushes since it was acquired earlier this year. And as far as Hewitt can see, there are almost no disadvantages to this.
“Obviously I have a biased viewpoint, but I don’t understand the hysteria that it has caused within Soho,” he muses. “It’s great to be owned by a company whose whole reason for being is our industry. So many post houses are just ‘mom and pop’ shops set up by operators. That always limits capital, creativity and horizons. To be owned now by somebody who’s taking a worldwide view of it is exciting.”
Hewitt, to put it bluntly, thinks a lot of “bollocks” has been talked about the whole deal. None of the companies in the group are being ‘submerged by a behemoth’ (“you don’t spend the money Liberty has spent buying established names like Soho 601, SVC and Rushes and just do away with the names,” points out Hewitt. “That’s crazy. It’s like buying Marks and Spencers and deciding to call it ‘Rachel’s and Steve’s’ instead. You just don’t do that.” The forthcoming merging of various properties is pure coincidence, he adds: four of the Liberty companies have their 15-year leases up in the next six months and would have merged their properties, anyway, he says).
Clients aren’t running away in droves because of the take-over, either. Far from it, says Hewitt. “Most clients don’t know about the take-over. When the press release came out that we’d been sold by Virgin, a proportion of our clients didn’t know we’d been owned by Virgin,” he points out. Reassuringly, he adds “That’s no disrespect to clients. If my car breaks down, I call out the AA. I don’t think ‘actually, they’re owned by Cordiant or whoever’. Client service is an inter-personal skill and it’s always between Rushes and its clients. I use other services, but I don’t really give a monkey’s who owns them. Our clients don’t really bother about who owns us.” The extra facilities Rushes et al can offer through their sister companies don’t hurt, either.
The ‘craziness’, Hewitt believes, is down to jealousy. “This reaction, to a large extent in the press and the bars around town, is just crazy. Most of the ‘unnamed sources’ quoted are unnamed because they’re ringing us up to ask if they can be next on the list and don’t want to spoil their chances by being named.”
Liberty doesn’t want to interfere with how its acquisitions have been running themselves, Hewitt maintains. “Their view is just to let companies continue doing what they’re good at.” The picture he paints is of benevolent Americans, coming to the UK with their money, big cars and chewing gum to help companies by opening their bags of gold. Rushes and co can carry on with their work, uninterrupted, their only limitation being they’re just not allowed to offer old software and machines to clients any more. In return, Liberty gets the UK expertise, local know-how for the quirks of European jobs and worldwide economy of scale for iTV production. “It’s about giving creative talent the best possible tools they can have to give clients the best possible service.”
A nice picture. But is it believable? Why does Liberty need to come to England at all? Why buy up so much of London? “The UK is a world leader already in interactive television,” replies Hewitt. “For years, we’ve had Teletext, Ceefax and all that. While those technologies are not that exciting, British people are already used to getting information from their television using remote control. The States has never had that background.”
Interactive TV is not an easy thing to produce. It needs expertise in many areas, something it now has in Soho, as its acquisitions cover all the bases of television post-production — “we can do everything after the can has been closed, from developing the film, through the offline, high-end or low-end post work to producing one or ten thousand copies for the client of the result,” says Hewitt proudly.
With Sky Digital the world’s first properly interactive, digital platform and the other UK digital platforms catching up fast, Liberty is guessing that the expertise gained from its UK acquisitions in making content for digital viewers will give it a head start in the other markets as they come online, while the huge capabilities of the combined Soho companies will create a commanding lead here.
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