ITV can beat the BBC, if it gets its timing right
Despite a squeeze on programming budgets and the digital drain, ITV still has the quality to compete if only it bucked up its scheduling.
This probably won’t be remembered as one of ITV’s glory years. Declining ad revenues and the poor performance of the digital channels have led to a £186m loss for Granada, mounting debts at Carlton, mass redundancies, continuing speculation about the future of the aforementioned digital channels and renewed debate about the prospect of a single company controlling ITV.
While I’m sure there are some who would take some pleasure from ITV’s discomfort – after all, there are those who would accuse it of being arrogant and complacent in its approach to revenue generation and naive with its digital proposition – most advertisers must surely want the third channel and its offshoots to be strong, successful and forward thinking. ITV1 is still pretty much the only conduit through which to reach big broadcast audiences and long may it continue, particularly if supported by well-targeted, high-quality ITV digital channels. Let’s continue to support ITV and encourage it to get through its current difficulties with all the bits still intact.
How disappointing, then, that ITV director of channels David Liddiment seems to have already conceded ITV’s position as the UK’s number one broadcaster. Apparently he thinks it will be virtually impossible to beat BBC1 in the ratings war until revenues have recovered to such an extent that his programming war chest is the equivalent of the US military budget. Perhaps it’s this “out-spend rather than out-think” approach that is about to give the BBC its first annual ratings victory over ITV since the latter’s inception in 1955. Let’s face it, on recent evidence, clever scheduling is not exactly ITV’s forte.
The Premiership was doomed from the start. ITV is obsessed with football (and has spent a fortune acquiring the rights) but most accept that, with the exception of national or European games, peaktime football doesn’t work on a mass entertainment channel. Next up came Cold Feet, the much-praised Mancunian comedy drama. After three highly successful series on Sunday evenings, ITV took the extraordinary decision to schedule two episodes a week, resulting in a fall of about 2 million in the audience for the Monday episode. And what about the late evening news? Can you say confidently when it goes out? It’s 10pm usually, but sometimes it’s 11pm, and occasionally it’s on at 10:30pm. Surely news, of all things, needs a consistent slot. Much of this neurotic scheduling is of course down to politics, not ineptitude on the part of the schedulers, but there is an increasingly jumpy approach down at Grays Inn Road. Ross Kemp is truly Without Motive now the show has been pushed out of peaktime. Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? is all over the place (last week Wednesday, this week Tuesday) and even Coronation Street jumps from one day and one time to another.
ITV can beat BBC, even with a programming budget that will inevitably feel the effects of the current downturn in advertising budgets, but it must at least give viewers a consistent offering.
Tim Irwin is joint managing director at BJK&E Media
