Ad Restrictions Limiting ITV’s Potential Revenue

ITV’s managing director for brand and commercial, Rupert Howell, has said that restrictions on advertising airtime is limiting the potential revenue of weekend shows.

Speaking at a Royal Television Society dinner on ‘The New Economics of Television’, Howell cited the example of Sunday evening detective show Lewis having no ads in its second-half because the station’s maximum ad minutage had been used up earlier in the evening on popular shows such as Dancing On Ice.

Howell said that the current Ofcom rules – which allow ITV to run 12 minutes of advertising per hour in peak time, as long as it keeps an average of seven minutes per hour across the day and eight minutes per hour in peak time – should be made more flexible.

“It was one reason, one of many reasons, that Parkinson ended because we had used up our minutage. We have had the situation of not running any ads, only promos, in the second half of Lewis,” he said.

He put forward a proposal that ad airtime rules might be revamped giving a new weekly maximum minutage which would allow ITV to show more ads on weekends at the expense of lesser watched weeknights.

Howell also said that ITV will be bringing back premium rate phone services. “We will need watertight controls; however, interactivity is here – you can’t deny it’s a perfectly legitimate revenue source,” he said.

In May, Ofcom fined ITV a record £5.675 million for its part in the premium rate phone-in scandal that rocked broadcasting last year (see ITV Handed Record £5.675m Fine Over Phone-In Scandal).

Ofcom said that the fine, the highest imposed by this or any of the previous regulators, “reflects not only the seriousness of ITV’s failures but also their repeated nature”.

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