Martin Ajdari's contribution to La Journée de la création

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Madame President of the Festival de la Drama, dear Sophie Révil,

Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends,

I'd like to start by saying a few words about the notion of cultural exception, which is the common thread running through this afternoon, and which is based on the conviction that audiovisual creation, and drama serie in particular, is not an industry like any other; it is also an art - to paraphrase Malraux - an art that plays a major role in shaping our imagination, and in illustrating the passions and tensions, both individual and collective, that animate society.

That's why the audiovisual regulator's summons, unlike that of other industries, is not primarily aimed at ensuring the free play of competition, but rather at promoting creative freedom and the diversity of aesthetics and genres, from documentaries to animation and drama.

However, the vitality of audiovisual creation and the influence of our talents come under the control of our business model, and its three main pillars: advertising, contracts and public audiovisuel.

In Q1 2025, the advertising market posted net revenues up 3.4% year-on-year, despite a gloomy economic climate. But this growth is being driven more than ever by digital pure players (+8% vs. Q1 2024), while total TV net revenues are down slightly (-1.7%), and the good health of digital TV revenues is not offsetting the decline in revenues from traditional advertising space and sponsorship. Admittedly, 2024 was a good year, and we're still slightly ahead of 2023; but this apparent resilience shouldn't blind us to the medium/long-term trends set out in the PMP study published by Arcom a year ago (total TV market share - linear and non-linear - at 17% in 2030, compared with 20% today).

The second pillar of the audiovisual creative economy is subscription revenues, which are experiencing contrasting developments, between the incumbent channels, whose erosion continues, and SMADs, whose sales continue to increase rapidly (by more than 10% in 2024, to over €2 billion), thanks to the expansion of the subscriber base and/or tariffs. SMADs are clearly established as leading players in the ecosystem.

The third pillar is public audiovisual, whose weight and ambition are just as much a part of our cultural exception. France Télévisions and Arte combined invest nearly €500 million in French audiovisual creation, excluding cinema, and France Télévisions remains by far the leading financier. This is one of its primary missions, and must remain so, whatever the developments in the governance of public audiovisuel. On this point, I've already had occasion to say that I'm in favor of pooling forces, with unified strategic management. Not so much to save money, but to give public audiovisuel a "critical mass", particularly in terms of editorial and technological content.

But for audiovisual creation, the urgent need is also to give financial visibility to France Télévisions' workforce, so that it can plan for the necessary transformations, and for professionals to develop their projects. After a very positive year in 2024, not only in editorial terms, but also in economic terms, with an endowment that was secured in principle, and which was set to rise again, the least we can say is that 2025 plunges us back into uncertainty.

As we can see, the situation is mixed - and in part fragile - in each of our three resource categories, summoning a general mobilization if we are to maintain the foundations of our creative fabric.

First and foremost, we need to reinforce our ambitious scheme of financing obligations, underpinned by professional agreements, which enable these resources to be transformed into productive investment. A scheme that has proved its effectiveness year after year:

Efficiency in terms of financing: 1.6 billion euros of investments declared in 2023 (+23% in ten years), more than half of which for drama. For 2024, the first available data suggest a continuation of this positive trend.

Effective in terms of quality and audience success: excluding sports, seven French dramas feature in the top 10 ratings for 2023. In fact, for the 4th year running, French series have occupied all the places in the Top 20 of the 2023 drama charts (where American series reigned ten years ago).

This is first and foremost the result of your work, your ideas and your audacity, and we must salute them. It is also, no doubt, in part the fruit of a regulatory system that has set itself the task of adapting a demanding regulatory framework to the projects and strategic developments of each and every one of us. To support developments and anticipate changes. An approach that Arcom intends to defend at both national and European level.

At national level, this support approach will be implemented in a number of ways over the course of the year:

1. Accompanying players as they start up or reposition themselves: I'm thinking of foreign SMADs recently subject to the law (Crunchyroll, Appel TV + and Paramount +) or which could become so (Max); and of course the development of Disney+'s positioning; the arrival of the two new channels T18 and NOVO19; developments in the broadcasting method for the Canal + group's channels; and even plans for a change of control. All this, while encouraging as much as possible the dual dynamic of contractual inter-professional agreements and partnerships between industry stakeholders, to which I am very attached.

2. Support also means continuing to tackle the issue of the nbalanced regulations from which the audiovisual industry suffers, and in particular two issues relating to advertising:

First topic: As I announced, Arcom has launched a cycle of hearings on the rules governing surreptitious advertising and those applicable to product placement in flow programs. The deliberations are long-standing, and the question is whether they should be groomed or the cursors moved. Clearly, there is no unanimity, but the hearings will provide us with a precise assessment of these issues.

Secondly, there are disparities in the transparency of the advertising market, between a media market that has historically been transparent and a digital advertising market that is less so, with platforms that often own their audience measurement schemes and advertisers that do not have the means to verify the reality of the audiences they have purchased. I can only applaud the work of Médiamétrie's cross-media committee, which brings together several platforms to develop a consensual method of unified audience measurement.

3. Support also means working with market players to make the best use of the terrestrial resources made available by the withdrawal of Canal Plus from pay DTT, bearing in mind the economic dynamics I mentioned and the potential benefits of modernised diffusion. Under the provisions of the consultation launched on April 30, which ends on June 13, the impact study will be published in early July. Beyond that, you'll see that I'm always attentive to the economic structuring of the sector: diversity is good, dispersion is bad.

4. Finally, support means fighting piracy: the loss of revenue for creators is estimated at 1.2 billion euros, or 12% of the value of the audiovisuel market in 2023. Although the number of fraudsters is falling (by almost 40% in three years) thanks to blocking actions, it remains too high, and we will not waver in this historic mission of Arcom.

Two final thoughts on the European manager framework, now that the Commission is due to take stock of the AMS directive and put forward proposals for its revision.

The first is a red line: reject maximum harmonization (recourse to a regulation), presented by its promoters as a simplification. The second is to preserve the principle of subsidiarity, which allows member states to tailor obligations to the characteristics of their markets, the tastes of their public and the wealth of their productive fabric. This principle has enabled France, in transposing the AVMS Directive, to choose the highest contribution rate within the EU, without adversely affecting the dynamism of platforms. According to the latest information, this message seems to have been received in Brussels, but we will remain vigilant on this point.

Second point: we must not shy away from seeking improvements, in particular more advanced harmonization of advertising rules between all players: channels, SMADs and video-sharing platforms, in order to strengthen fairness between players and protect audiences. Provided, of course, that the whole package is not reopened. So there's a balance to be struck.

More broadly speaking, we can only welcome the mobilization that has been expressed, notably at Cannes, in defense of our cultural exception, our ability to organize the creation, production and diffusion of original narratives, narratives that resemble us and bring us together; and not narratives that are imposed on us, a fortiori if they have to be artificially conceived. Creativity is an issue of sovereignty, and also of soft power through its influence on the export market, but more fundamentally of preserving a model of society and, in the same way as the production of quality information, of defending our democracies.

Thank you for your attention.