Patrick Le Lay

Patrick Le Lay , born the June 7th 1942 with Saint-Brieuc, is leading of company French.

Career

He studied with the special École of public works before integrating the universe of BTP. It is as a person in charge of the diversification of the group Bouygues that it prepared the candidates' file for the privatization of TF1 in 1987, according to the will of Francis Bouygues.

general President-director of the French television channel TF1 since the February 23rd 1988, it is as from the May 22nd 2007 chairman of the board of the chain, leaving the head office to Nonce Paolini

Man of being able who keeps away from the Jet-set Paris ienne, Breton marked, it is at the origin of the creation of the Breton regional chain TV Breizh, subsidiary of the group TF1.

He was made knight about the Légion of honor in January 2003. In 2001, Michel-Constant Verspieren had revealed in the book the maconnic Dead end that Lay one high-was graded Franc-maçon.

It gained in November 2007 in New York, the Emmy Award of the best director of television.

Polemical quotations

Patrick Le Lay is particularly famous for its analyzes perceived like frank, incisors and prone to polemic.

A polemic made rage in July 2004 following the publication of its remarks collected in the French Leaders and the change by the consultancy EIM, which presented to it the answers of leaders such as Patrick Le Lay, Michel Bon (ex- France Telecom), Robert Louis-Dreyfus (LD COM), Michel Pébereau (BNP Paribas), Henri de Castries (Axa), with questions carrying about the new challenges of the French companies vis-a-vis the change.

There are many ways of speaking about television. But from the point of view “business”, let us be realistic: at the base, the trade of TF1, it is to help Coca-Cola, for example, to sell its produit.

However so that an advertizing message is perceived, it is necessary that the brain of the televiewer is available. Our emissions have the role to make it available: i.e. to divert it, to slacken it to prepare it between two messages. What we sell in Coca-Cola, it is time of human brain disponible.

Nothing is more difficult than to obtain this availability. It is there that is the permanent change. It is necessary to permanently seek the programs which go, to follow the modes, surfer on the tendencies, in a context where information accelerates, and…
is standardized multiplies

Television, it is an activity without memory. If one compares this industry with that of the car, for example, for a manufacturer of cars, the creative process is much slower; and if its vehicle is a success it will have at least the leisure to enjoy it. We, we will not even have time of them! All is played each day on the figures of goes down for hearing. We are the only product in the world where one “knows” his customers at the second, after a twenty-four hours deadline.

The polemic was relayed in particular by the Puppets of information and overall by the opponents with the leadership of TF1 on audio-visual the French. Those took again while taking out it of its context the quotation “Our job, it is to sell in Coca-Cola time of human brain available”, putting in parallel TF1 and the world companies.

Patrick Le Lay gives some explanations in a maintenance for Télérama in September:

It was not an official interview. The MEDEF had called me while saying to me: one questions managers of undertaking on the change and the movement. I do not remember this maintenance precisely any more, but, like often, I had to speak two hours with broken sticks and to make these remarks during the conversation.
I do not recognize however the trade of TF1 in this formula and I do not find myself in the remarks only one lends to me: one transforms me into merchant of brains!

I recognize that this formula was a little caricatural and narrow. But, once again, it was a conversation and I am accustomed to forcing the feature to render comprehensible the concepts.

The trade of TF1, it is information and the program (fiction entertainment, sport, magazines of discovered). We are a popular and family large chain whose objective is to like a maximum of audience. We live publicity, but they are our customers who develop the spots that we diffuse. Actually, that do we really sell to our customers? Time of antenne.

The logic of TF1 is a logic of power. We sell to our customers an audience of mass, a number of individuals likely to look at a spot of publicité.

For the advertisers, the time of antenna represents only contacts customers anything else. Human attention. In particular that of famous the Domestic of less than 50 years, largely décisionnaire in the food product purchases, domestic maintenance and of beauty.

The other “yell” of Patrick Le Lay was marked in August 2005 when, in the magazine Bretons , he showed France to have organized a cultural genocide (Ethnocide) in Brittany, and that he affirmed “I am not French, I am Breton”.

Anecdotes

In the documentary one of Maurice Dugowson Télévision (secret Stories) , Jack Lang entrusts that the idea to create a common presidency between Antenne 2 and FR3 came to him at the time of a conversation with Patrick Le Lay.

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