BBC Worldwide Appoints New Marketing Director
BBC Worldwide has appointed Alix Tidmarsh as its new marketing director amid ongoing speculation that the Corporation’s commercial arm might be floated on the stock market or sold-off completely.
The new role will see Tidmarsh, currently head of factual marketing, oversee BBC Worldwide’s company-wide marketing projects with responsibility for non-children’s television and consumer publishing-related projects, as well as shaping the company’s investment strategy.
The move coincides with a restructure of BBC Wordwide that will see the intellectual property department, responsible for the marketing of factual programmes, merge with the marketing services department to create a full-service marketing operation under the leadership of Farhana Gani in the newly created role of head of creative services.
Tidmarsh will report directly to Mike Phillips, BBC Worldwide’s managing director of international television, who said: “The move brings our strategic market planning and the creative execution of campaigns together under a single management, with a clear remit that will be more easily understood by our partners in the BBC and in the wider production community”
Tidmarsh joined BBC Worldwide in 1998 as brand manager for the BBC natural history unit. She also headed-up the intellectual property department, where she managed the global marketing of award-winning brands including The Human Body, Walking with Dinosaurs and David Attenborough’s Life of Mammals.
The restructure comes just days after BBC denied speculation that it had invited any bids for the sales of its commercial arm, despite news that some of the world’s biggest media companies, including Bertelsmann, Time Warner and Disney, are interested in taking control of the division (see Global Media Giants Line Up For BBC Worldwide).
Speaking at a Royal Television Society dinner last week, BBC director-general, Mark Thompson, said: “What works very well internationally for the BBC in recent years is a strategy of very large-scale partnerships and joint ventures such as the Discovery joint venture. We are much more likely to see a solution built around partnerships” (see BBC Prefers Partnership Deals For Worldwide).
It now looks more likely that BBC Worldwide will be restructured in an attempt to feed cash into the wide-ranging cost-cutting process that will take place in the run up to charter renewal in 2006. The review of division, which is being led by finance director John Smith, is still in its early stages and is not due to report until the end of the year.
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