Rikke Kristine Nissen on DR Sales’ strategy

You’ve just made two high profile hires, with the appointment of Noemi Ferrer Schwenk, long time head of International at the Danish Film Institute, soon to join your sales team as executive producer, partnership and pre-sales and Mette Bjerregaard, sales manager.

Could you outline your strategy going forward?
Rikke Kristine Nissen: We are extremely happy to have hired Noemi and Mette, two highly experienced and distinguished executives.

Noemi in particular comes with a solid network and in-depth knowledge of the national and international film and TV industries. I feel we have a dream team working in sales, and I will soon hire a Business & Legal manager to complete our staff.

At DR Sales, we have the rare privilege to work with DR’s various departments, in particular DR Drama and DR’s legal department. We have vast in-house resources that we are very proud of. In terms of content, historically, we have represented some of the best productions from the Nordics, and DR Sales has enjoyed its long time quality branding, associated to many award-winning dramas such as Borgen, The Legacy, Ride Upon the Storm, Follow the Money and documentaries such as Last Men in Aleppo and Cold Case Hammarsksjöld.

Going forward, we will prioritise quality over quantity, making sure we continue to be an essential part of - and build on the Nordic brand - as it develops over time.

Then of course our ability now to exploit our back catalogue across all rights - including VOD - offers vast opportunities. We therefore have introduced a two-leg business focusing both on pre-sales/co-financing and partnerships, where Noemi will play a major role, exploiting new financing and presale models with both internal and external producers and commercial partners. At the same time, we will continue bringing MGs to the table and post-sales, with rights exploitation of our back catalogue.

The novelty is that all DR Drama’s output will now be handled by our sales department, whereas before, some premium shows with international potential were offered to external global distributors. This combined with the new access to VOD rights will be a true game changer for us. We will work earlier on editorial, creative, financial decisions with DR Drama and external producers, offering them the best tailor-made solutions. 

So you will still board third party productions?
RKN: Yes of course! It is a natural goal and important part of our strategy to contribute to the Nordic brand through high quality dramas and documentaries. With Kim Christiansen’s long lasting relationships with Nordic producers – which most recently is resulting in the world festival premieres of The Fight for Greenland (CPH:DOX opening film, March 2020) and Newtopia (Human Festival Feb. 2020) and with Noemi on board our ambition is definitely to extend our tradition of representing some of the best content from the Nordics, with more titles and earlier support.

Also, as part of a pubcaster network, we have an on-going collaboration with RÚV in Iceland, and strong relationships with the other broadcasters TV2 in Denmark, Yle in Finland, NRK in Norway, SVT in Sweden, as well as Nordvision and Nordic 12. Offering MGs, as well as professional support and pre-sales is a natural part of these co-operations.

DR Drama’s output includes premium long running dramas as well as youth-oriented short format. Will you expand in that genre?
RKN: Yes our goal is to increase our young adult drama slate, which already includes hit series such as Doggy Style. I’m currently talking to Nordic producers to explore how to cooperate in this genre that is in high demand, especially from streamers.

How is the market for formats and remakes?
RKN: It is continuously expanding and offering new lives in different versions to many of our strong original shows. For instance our Norwegian series Home Ground first sold as original to most market across the world and in a second roll, it was sold and optioned in around 20 territories for remakes – and still counting.

What do you feel are the biggest challenges today on the international market?
RKN: It is a common challenge to be part of a quite overheated market amongst that results in production prices skyrocketing and pressure on talent and eventually quality. In this context, I feel it is a privilege to represent a world renowned brand and as a distributor, to be part of a network delivering consistently high end drama series and documentaries, which gives us a solid base to build our slate.

In short, we try to guard our ‘haute couture-ish’ position which gives us a unique position in a crowded and very commercially driven market. I do believe this approach will secure our close relationship to our international clients who know us as distributors who deliver steadily on innovation 

READ ABOUT DR's LATEST INTERNATIONAL SALES APPOINTMENTS: CLICK HERE.