Portrait of the soap producer as a brand manager

INTERVIEW: Triona Campbell, CR Entertainment:TRIONA CAMPBELL has seen the future of the media industry - and it's extraordinarily fickle and fragmented.

"If you're talking about girls in the 13 to 19 age group, for instance, they're not loyal to any one medium," says Campbell (34), founder of CR Entertainment, the company behind Sofia's Diary, the first online drama to make the transition to television.

"One week they're watching soap operas on TV, the next they're only online chatting to new friends, the following week they've broken up with some guy and they don't want to do anything, and the week after they're spending all their time on the mobile complaining about the same guy. They use every medium."

If Campbell's description of the trials of a typical teenager sounds like the storyline from a teen soap opera, it's because that's what, largely, she specialises in producing - and that's what has built CR Entertainment into a company with a turnover last year of €1.3 million, expected to double, despite the economic difficulties, in 2009.

After a degree in drama in TCD and an MBS with the European Audiovisual Institute, she joined director Roger Corman's film studios outside Galway, where she rose from production assistant to head of the art department.

Corman - known as "the king of the Bs" - was famous for making 250 movies and for never losing a cent. Campbell cites him as a major influence on how she does business in this famously self-indulgent and costly industry.

"It was a fantastic training ground in terms of cost-effective production," she laughs. "You could be making a horror movie one week and a kids' movie the next. And they all made money.

"Roger always sold his movies before they went into production. He knew from pre-sales that he had enough money to make the show, and make a profit on it.

"It's what we try to do now with the shows that we create. We try to line up the advertisers in advance so that we know the production costs are paid for before we start shooting. After that, we have the TV sales. And we've just done a deal with Penguin, who'll be publishing two series of books for teenagers, one based on Sofia's Diary and the other on Aisling's Diary, coming out in November."

Sofia's Diary made CR's name in Britain in 2005 by transferring from the web to Fiver, a young people's digital channel run by Channel Five, and this success was replicated here by Aisling's Diary on RTÉ and on rte.ie.

"The idea was to create a soap opera that could live on the different media platforms used by teenagers, whether it's TV, magazines, the internet, mobile phones, DVDs or books."

From a business perspective, the beauty of piloting a series online is that it's far cheaper than producing a TV pilot. If it succeeds online, it can be presented to broadcasters and advertisers together with the online "community" that has been built up around it. Advertising is also less restricted online. CR has deals with household names like Unilever and Procter Gamble, which see some of their products incorporated into storylines.

"When it's done badly, product placement doesn't work. Making it part of the storyline is more effective. Because of broadcasting restrictions, we make internet productions which incorporate products and then TV versions without them. However, European legislation is changing so that product placement will no longer be illegal on TV."

It's been quite a journey since 2001 when Campbell made her first award-winning movie, The Crooked Mile. "What we used to do was produce, hand a tape to a broadcaster and walk away. Now we oversee the whole process from scripting to casting to production - but much more in the role of brand managers."

ON THE RECORD

Name:Triona Campbell.

Position:Founder and senior producer, CR Entertainment.

Age:34.

Background:Degree in drama from TCD and MBS from the European Audiovisual Institute. Worked at Roger Corman's studios in Connemara before moving into documentaries and making her first feature, The Crooked Mile. Produced Britain's first cross-media series, Sofia's Diary, and now RTÉ's Aisling's Diary. This year she and her business partner, Nuno Bernardo, set up Be Entertainment, based in Belfast.

Inspiration:US director Roger Corman, whose "B" movies always made money, and Steve Jobs, of Apple, whose marketing skill has made Apple "the coolest brand in the world".

Challenges:Doubling the company's turnover of €1.3 million next year - which should be manageable, she says, because 80 per cent of CR's turnover is generated by exports, and because the EU plans to reverse its ban on product placement on TV.