Broadcasters: ‘We’re not turkeys and we’re cancelling Christmas’
John Litster, Kelly Williams and Jonathan Allan
As they confront Facebook and Google, commercial TV rivals are talking of co-operation – but they are determined not to repeat the mistakes of the newspaper industry. By Dominic Mills.
Before anyone says anything…yes, I am aware this a potentially inflammatory headline, capable of misinterpretation.
Bear with me.
It was sparked by a, to me, surprising and illuminating conversation on the BAFTA stage last week at Thinkbox’s Big Think event.
The protagonists: John Litster of Sky Media, Kelly Williams of ITV and Jonathan Allan of C4 – who rarely appear together – ably grilled by Ruth Mortimer of Centaur.
The subject: future co-operation among the major broadcasters over the next five to ten years.
The reference to turkeys and Christmas? Well, that has its roots in a comment made to me earlier this summer by a major industry figure after the collapse of Project Rio (or was it Juno? I was always confused), the plan by some national newsbrands to pool sales efforts in their bid to counter evisceration by the Duopoly. “The turkeys have voted for Christmas,” was his succinct and glum summary.
You can read other opinions on the original idea here and here.
Listening to the discussion between the three telly amigos (and they were indeed friendly and courteous to each other) it is clear that they have watched the deliberations of the newsbrands with interest.
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Not for them the same route. It’s what you might call second-mover advantage. The big mistake newsbrands made, according to one leading TV player, was to go too big (i.e. straight to combined sales) and too late. A more gradualist approach might work better.
You can see this particular session here, with the key points about six minutes in. Click on the ‘Futurama’ tile at the bottom of the screen.
So where might the broadcasters co-operate? The first area, according to Allan, is in data, by pooling their assets onto one platform, combined with a common supply-side platform to give one point of access. This makes sense. The two areas the Duopoly outgun everyone else is in data – depth and breadth – and scale. Putting together data from these three would give pretty much total UK coverage, although to uneven levels of detail and at a more household level. It could also help advertisers by giving them one common data set covering almost all UK broadcast TV. Making TV easier to buy is a no-brainer.
Although the Duopoly will have more data points per individual, I suspect that the implementation of the new EU GDPR data rules from next May will rebalance the landscape away from them. As I understand GDPR, the more individualised the data, the greater the consent required – consent that will be far harder to obtain.
The second area is sharing technology costs. With its AdSmart and AdVance technologies (the former for targeting, the latter sequencing), Sky is ahead of its peers in terms of developing ad technology. So why not licence those systems out, and find ways to share the costs of developing new techniques? Virgin Media has already signed up to AdSmart, and according to Litster discussions with ITV and C4 are underway. To date, he admits, the commercial case doesn’t stack up yet but these are early days.
The third area is in co-production where, presumably, bigger budgets could be brought to bear and allow UK terrestrials to begin to level the playing field, in budget terms, with the likes of Netflix which commissions for global audiences with Hollywood-style amounts of cash, or if the Duopoly make a play for any sports rights. It’s not my area, but I thought this sort of thing already happened between broadcasters, albeit at a low level.
And what about the ‘S’ word, as in sales? No chance. That would clearly be unacceptable to advertisers and, one suspects, to the broadcasters themselves too. Over time, this might change – by which point you’d know that TV had lost the war – but not for many years. In the fight for share, they’ll still knock the shit out of each other.
Now all this talk is a fine thing, and there is clearly some way to go. But it is clear to me that the broadcasters are determined not to make the same error as newsbrands or to fall victim to same ego-driven divisions that, some say, ultimately did for Project Juno/Rio.
As one senior TV figure said to me after the session: “You’ve got to realise the newsbrands hate each other more than we do.”
If that’s true, then TV starts from a better place, albeit there is still a long way to go. The turkeys may yet delay or cancel Christmas.
Mumbo jumbo lets the side down
My thanks to ITV’s Kelly Williams for telling the audience (approx 35 minutes in) about a conversation he had with a media agency about “human viewable CPMs”.
Yes, you read that right…the implication being, thus, that there is such a thing as ‘non-human, non-viewable CPMs’. As if.
No doubt someone will dance on the head of a pin to explain that this is a logical stance to take, and that advertisers/agencies ought to build this into their trading model.
We can all laugh at the idiocy of this sort of thing, but the industry spouts this rubbish and then wonders why it is losing respect and credibility.