3 September 2014: Finding great big characters and shouting loudly enough about new and fabulous ideas are the biggest challenges formats producers and distributors face in Asia at the moment. And then there's money, talent and local values... The feature has been adapted from ContentAsia's first Formats Outlook, published for the ContentAsia Summit. The Formats Outlook 2015 is part of ContentAsia's year-round focus on all aspects of content in Asia. In-depth analysis will be enhanced through 2015 with a dedicated formats' platform online, in print and face-to-face. Please contact i_want@contentasia.tv if you would like a copy of ContentAsia's Formats Outlook 2015.Finding charactersCasting is a universal challenge, from modeling and food shows such as Hell’s Kitchen Indonesia and How to Make It: Culinary Dreams, to dance contests, charity series and factual/ reality such as Mom’s Time Out. But perhaps the biggest challenge in Asia has been finding big-personality Duck Dynasty/Pawn Stars-style characters and families with whom to develop multi-series entertainment properties with cross-border appeal. NBCUniversal’s channels group in Asia has made a regional start with It Takes Gutz to be a Guttierez, which is in its second season for E!. The Kardashian- style series follows Philippines’ celeb family – Eddie, Annabelle, Ruffa, Raymond and Richard Guttierez – “as they give audiences an unfiltered look at their incredible personal and professional lives”. Overall, season one was the channel’s most-watched programme in the Philippines since January 2013, when measurement began. At its peak, Gutz made E! the number one channel during the show’s 9pm-9.30pm timeslot among key demographics (Total Viewers, Adult 16+, Women 16+) out of 24 English-language general entertainment/lifestyle channels in the Philippines. The series also performed well in Malaysia, where it ranked as the number two programme on E! for the week of 15-21 June. (Source: Kantar Media Philippines/Nielsen Media Research Malaysia/Arianna). Challenges now include spreading the family’s fame beyond the Philippines. Will viewers in the rest of Asia care? The ingredients are all there, says NBCUniversal International’s L.A.-based programming senior vice president, Gracia Waverly. “With the right combination of people and the right story, it doesn’t matter if they are known or not,” she says, adding: “It’s about their issues and their story.”For A+E Networks Asia, the challenge was finding families comfortable expressing themselves in English on camera for Lifetime Asia’s first original production, Mom’s Time Out. Michele Schofield, A+E Networks Asia’s senior vice president, programming and marketing, says the network “needed three families that were comfortable with cameras following them for a week, as well as being open and expressive in good and bad situations”. The five-part half-hour reality series, which premiered on 28 August at 9pm, featured families from Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines bidding farewell to wives/mothers and leaving husbands/fathers to take care of home, hearth and kids. “We wanted to explore the idea that being a mom is an attitude and not just a biological relation,” says Chris Humphrey, director, production for A+E Networks Asia.Producers of reality shows such as Next Top Model also talk about the cultural challenges of contestants opening up and sharing feelings in front of the camera.Scripps Networks Interactive’s Asian Food Channel (AFC) goes one further. For The Amazing Food Challenge: Fun in the Philippines, the network’s programming team says that one of the challenges was “finding contestants who not only are adventurous and have on-air charisma, but also possess culinary skills to compete in the challenges”.The biggest challenge for AFC’s How to Make It: Culinary Dreams was casting a credible talent looking to venture into the food business. The show, now in its second season, features a celebrity, who is also an aspiring restaurateur, thrown into six-week crash course at a culinary school to see what it really takes to succeed in the food business.The talent may be different, but the challenge was the same for Red Arrow International’s Schiller Street, made for China Central Television’s (CCTV) flagship CCTV-1 channel. Red Arrow says it was “absolutely crucial to find a group of comedians who could work well together, who could play off each other well and – most importantly – who could improvise”.Issue Three 2014