How can ITV halt its audience decline?

Could it be that the current Britain’s Got Talent hullabaloo is a metaphor for the more serious problems facing ITV?

How naive can television producers be? Surely everybody should know by now that you shouldn’t allow the substitution of a body-double dog on Britain’s Got Talent without keeping viewers informed. The fact that Matisse had no head for heights and Chase did is really no excuse. If humans had been involved you might just have got away with it. But dogs? Never.

Cue millions of protests on social media and Ofcom as a responsive regulator must surely now investigate.

The real BGT scandal, of course, is why performing dogs, whichever mutt actually did the actual tightrope walking, made it through to the semi-finals when seven-year old Leo Bailey-Yang from Manchester failed.

Obviously the fact that Leo can play Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee with his eyes covered must have counted against him, but, as has been suggested, was the real reason he failed to make it, is that he has real talent?

Could it be that the current state of BGT is a small metaphor for the more serious problems facing ITV in trying to arrest its audience decline?

Greater openness and transparency, and a better idea of what constitutes talent, might not be enough on its own but it would be a positive step.

The UK’s leading commercial broadcaster should be congratulated for the way its finances have been transformed over the past five years, but there is little sign that ITV chief executive Adam Crozier knows how to reverse this year’s ratings decline – a drop of 6 per cent on the main channel in the first quarter.

The negatives coming down the road are all too clear: the loss of European Champions football to BT and the impending departure of Downton Abbey to name but two.

The reality is that competition is growing all the time and ITV will remain a powerful player in the British media – both on the bottom line and on screen as long as it retains its status as the single largest mass market commercial broadcaster.

But how do you innovate in the fast-moving contemporary media world when established players, and ITV in particular, have a chequered past: Super Channel, OnDigital, slow initial awareness of the impact of the internet and botched attempts to buy into social media.

Nobody gets it all right. Murdoch spotted satellite but missed the rise of cable in the US. He was offered a stake in Amazon in the early days for a pittance but turned it down. He couldn’t see how the company could ever make money, but the stake now would be worth billions.

There is a standard innovation dilemma facing all companies in the media and technological sectors. Do you develop in-house or spot an emerging idea and buy it up to protect your rear and maybe make some money?

The second route is expensive and if you get your timing wrong, disastrously so. It is, however, the preferred way for the likes of Google and Twitter to maintain their dominance.

In-house innovation can be a problem if the innovators come up with something that competes with the parent company or which might be disruptive in future.

Here Kodak is the obvious classic case. The digital camera was invented by the company but was either ignored or seen as too outlandish or threatening to get proper support. The commercial consequences could not have been more profound.

Channel Four’s fund to take minority stakes in a range of middle-sized independents is a step in the right direction – as is ITV’s steady stream of acquisitions of independent producers around the world. They don’t get that much attention because they are relatively small scale compared with cable company mega-billion deals, but they are significant.

Broadcasters have been innovative in areas such as screen quality and size and in moving to multi-channel. Across its total network of channels the drop in ITV’s ratings was only 3 per cent.

Perhaps broadcasters need to experiment in the search for the break-through shows and the place to do it is on the minority channels.

Can they reach out more for ideas from individuals across the internet as technology companies are increasingly doing? They do talent shows, could they have talent shows for television with the top prize getting their programmes actually made?

Ultimately it comes down to the judgement of programme commissioners and the search for a hit is always unpredictable, almost random.

What rational person could have predicted that a programme about baking cakes would have hit the spot?

You can imitate other people’s hits. That works for a while. You can lure winning teams away or those who unexpectedly become available. Jeremy Clarkson and the Top Gear team must be a very tempting proposition for ITV except that the history of programme transfers is a very chequered one to say the least.

Despite the large, or over-large Clarkson personality, is there something from history to say that Top Gear is, and will remain a BBC show, whatever happens now?

But as Dawn Airey – the former Channel 5, Sky and ITV senior executive who now runs Yahoo’s operations across EMEA – told the Guardian, all ITV needs now is a couple of hits to stop the rot.

One of them could be Beowulf in 13 parts, a brave commission if ever there was one. It could be ITV’s answer to Game of Thrones.

Or then again, it might not.

How about a programme about a seven-year old boy who can play the piano better than almost anyone else?