Banijay’s Marco Bassetti on Leveraging Hit Franchises and Live Events

Banijay Entertainment boss Marco Bassetti, who will be honored with the Variety Vanguard Award at the Mipcom confab, lets his track record do the talking, and would rather discuss profit margins and business than accolades. Always speaking calmly with a polite smile and a distinct Italian accent, Bassetti could easily be described as an iron fist in a velvet glove.

Since taking the helm of Stéphane Courbit’s media powerhouse Banijay in 2013, Bassetti has firmly steered the company through some major transformations, from the takeover of production powerhouse Endemol Shine in the thick of the pandemic in 2020 to the diversification of the banner’s activities in live entertainment through Balich Wonder Studio and the Independents, all the while ramping up both scripted and unscripted business, and bolstering new and existing IPs.

While Banijay is best known for its hit unscripted franchises, such as “MasterChef” and “Big Brother,” it’s also behind award-winning series and movies, such as “Peaky Blinders” and “Black Mirror.” Banijay just picked up an award at the Venice Film Festival with Valérie Donzelli’s “At Work,” produced by Alain Goldman, whose banner, Montmartre Films, is owned by Banijay. But don’t expect Bassetti to brag about any of it or hang out on the red carpet.

“At the end of the day, we are very much focusing on quality and delivering good results to our shareholders, so we are much more keen to give you a very good bottom line than to win an Oscar or a Golden Lion in Venice,” he tells Variety at Banijay’s headquarters in Paris, located in the posh 8th arrondissement, right off of the Champs Elysees. 

Indeed, while some other big media groups, such as ITV and Fremantle, have battled the industry’s headwinds in the last couple years, Banijay Entertainment, whose parent company Banijay Group is listed on the Amsterdam stock exchange, has been delivering strong numbers.
Second-quarter results showed that revenue was up 3% from 2024 at €1.13 billion, with half-year revenue of €1.42 billion, and an adjusted EBITDA that was up 6% to
€208 million.

While the competition among the major media groups in Europe can be ferocious, Bassetti has earned the respect of his peers. Jane Turton, All3Media CEO, says, “Marco and I have known each other for many years and, over that time, he has been a fierce and competitive rival and a hugely respected friend.

“He is passionate about television, unbelievably knowledgeable and irritatingly successful!” Turton says.

Tarak Ben Ammar, the Franco-Tunisian producer and businessman who runs Italy’s leading independent distribution company Eagle Pictures, describes Bassetti as a “great manager whom people trust.”

“He is both creative and financially savvy. He reassures the banks, he always has his sights on the markets, and he speaks many languages,” says Ben Ammar, adding that Bassetti’s “bread and butter” is the “company’s results, the strategy and relations with television stations around the world that buy their formats and series.”

Bassetti, who was born near Lake Maggiore in Northern Italy and splits his time between Paris and Rome, learned the ropes of TV production in Milan. Bassetti was studying economics at university when he got into the industry “by coincidence, not by choice,” landing a job at commercial channel Antenna 3 in Northern Italy, one of Europe’s first private TV stations, through a school friend. The initial incentive for Bassetti was financial, but within a year, he says he “got to do every job” one could do in TV, working on big entertainment shows. “I started as a studio assistant, then I did mixing and videos and then I was a director’s assistant, then I directed, then I produced,” he says. 

Always at the right place at the right time, Bassetti’s career took off in the late 1980s when Rete Quattro, the TV network he was working for, and ABC struck a deal. He found himself paired with Steve Carlin, the TV producer and creator of “The $64,000 Question,” to come up with new entertainment formats. (Carlin died in 2003.)

“They said, ‘Just stay close to Steve Car­lin. You speak English, you know how to create formats,’ so I did. I worked for him for two or three years as a producer,” says Bassetti, adding that Carlin “gave [him] a lot of intel about what was going on in the U.S., which was so much bigger than any other European or Italian market.” He also learned the importance of having a strong producer’s vision behind a format. Carlin “came in with an American mentality,” says Bassetti, because he considered the executive producer as the boss, “whereas in Italy, the real boss is always the director, not the producer.”

Bassetti worked alongside Carlin on the creation of “M’ama non m’ama” (“Love Me, Love Me Not”), which he says “became the first dating show at the time in Europe. After a stint at the French channel La Cinq (co-founded by Silvio Berlusconi), Bassetti launched his own production company, La Italiana Produzioni, one of the country’s first independent production companies, at the age of 29. At a time when TV shows were being produced in-house by TV channels, Bassetti ventured off the beaten path by becoming a leading purveyor of light entertainment and game shows in Italy.

Another producer who played a big part in Bassetti’s career is John de Mol, who entered the Italian market with a 5% stake in Bassetti’s two companies, La Italiana Produzioni and Aran. After those two labels were bought by Telefonica, Bassetti and de Mol co-founded Endemol Italy in 1997 and launched, alongside other talented producers such as Courbit, a raft of blockbuster reality TV formats, from “Big Brother” to “Deal or No Deal” and “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” which they bought for 13 territories.

Bassetti got to showcase his diplomacy skills to get “Big Brother” on the air in Italy, a majority Catholic country where the prospect of seeing such an unhinged reality show on local TV ruffled feathers. “Nobody wanted to give us money for ‘Big Brother’ because people viewed it as very, very scandalous,” he says with a laugh. “The head of the channel here was very Catholic, so he asked me to go to the cardinal. The meeting was funny because the cardinal was a kind of mentor who spoke like 10 languages and read every single newspaper, including the Wall Street Journal,” Bassetti reminisces. “So I tried to explain to him that there was nothing too pornographic in ‘Big Brother’ … and in the end the cardinal gave us his blessing!”

Bassetti, who worked as managing director and then president of Endemol Italy until May 2004, says he and the “very strong producers” he was working with then “learned how to share creativity to protect formats.” “We were the benchmark,” he continues. The exec then returned to Endemol Group as chief operating officer in 2007 and was appointed president and CEO a couple of years later, before finally stepping down in 2012 and joining Banijay.

Bassetti says his years as an indie producer paved the way for how the business works today, with third-party producers making content for international TV channels and streamers. 

“What was pioneering is that we understood then that as independent producers, there was an opportunity to create value and put shows together with other companies around the world,” he says. “It was clear that the creativity could come from outside the big TV stations. And if you look today, all the big shows are created by production companies.”

Bassetti says the biggest challenge for producers and TV networks is to come up with new ideas. “I don’t see any other ‘Big Brother,’ ‘Millionaire’ or ‘Deal or No Deal,’” he points out.

Besides helping to deliver those formats, Bassetti’s most notable achievement is the successful integration of Endemol Shine into Banijay, a move that many feared — or hoped — would fail. Banijay bought Endemol Shine in a 2020 $2.2 billion deal to become the largest non-U.S. player in the market, with a catalog surpassing that of BBC Studios and ITV Studios.

“A lot of people were unhappy to see two independent companies join and become so big, because that makes us more difficult to screw,” Bassetti says with a smile. “But building scale was essential. When you create something big with a lot of IP, you need to have leverage.”

He says the industry was also skeptical about Banijay’s capacity to create value with Endemol because the latter had failed to do so through its merger with Shine. But Bassetti had a big advantage: he already knew Endemol inside out.

Convincing the financial partners to back the deal was a big challenge, says Bassetti. “It wasn’t an easy task at all to go into the market as a French company and go for a giant like Endemol Shine, which was not in the most healthy situation.”

Looking back, Bassetti says Banijay “got lucky because the timing was right.” The deal closed right before the pandemic lockdown in 2020. Now, he says, it’s a tough market for consolidation. “You need to have less risk, to know how to save cost,” he says.

Bassetti also shot down rumors of Banijay courting ITV Studios and says the company is looking for talent partnerships rather than company acquisitions, including in the U.S.

“The M&A market is not a priority for us today. We are happy where we are, and I believe that we have the right size and the right people in charge,” he says.

Looking ahead, Bassetti wants to grow Banijay’s output in movies, predicting a resurgence in popularity for films. Last year, Banijay delivered “Diamanti,” which turned out to be one of Italy’s highest-grossing films of 2024. “We’re seeing much more demand for movies, and I think there’s been too many series repeating the same stories and stretching plots, so there will be a readjustment.”

But Banijay isn’t going to go big on theatrical, he notes, because the company isn’t interested in changing its business model.

While maintaining its core business in TV content, Banijay has diversified into live events and sports in recent years with much success. Live experiences were a significant source of growth for the banner during the first six months of 2025, bringing in €173 million, a 15.4% year-on-year increase.

Bassetti says the company, which is now the owner of live entertainment group Balich Wonder Studios, global marketing group Independents and Lotchi, creator of immersive entertainment “Luminescence,” will continue building that strategy to create more value around its IP and tap into growing demand for live and immersive experiences.

“A few years ago, we decided to not just be the production company, but a media company. That meant we needed to create content around our IP. I think it would be a missed opportunity if we didn’t create a ‘Survivor’ camp, a ‘Black Mirror’ VR experience or live events based on ‘Peaky Blinders’ or ‘MasterChef,’ for instance,” he says.

“We don’t just want to be licensor of our IP but also operate them, with IP-based events,” Bassetti says, adding “but also to attract other IP holders who want to create similar live experiences.” 

Sports events are another area where Banijay Entertainment is carving out a lucrative niche. Bassetti says he’s seeing a “growing appetite for content surrounding major sporting events, such as highlights and documentaries.” The potential market is substantial, he says. “Investments in sports rights reached €60 billion, assuming 10% could be for producing related content, it would already be a big chunk!”

Bassetti is also keeping a tab on the rise of the creator economy, which he views as “an opportunity rather than a challenge.” “Before, commissioners wanted people coming from the movie world … and now streamers want creators from YouTube,” he says with a chuckle, adding that “it’s always been part of our strategy to bring in new people on board.”