Can new ad opportunities save local TV?
With a new and ambitious Local TV advertising strategy on the cards, can the fledgling sector finally nurture some meaningful growth and revenue?
The reputation of local television in media circles – how can we put it gently? – is not exactly great.
Apart from general scepticism about advertising revenue, the primary reason is that the launch of London Live attracted so much attention, mostly of the worst kind.
The dreaded BARB zero ratings, dire programmes interviewing, at great length, people queuing up to get into pop concerts, and a breakfast show said to be averaging 2,400 viewers.
The attempt by London Live to persuade regulator Ofcom to slash its local output obligations, including a drop from three hours to one hour in prime time – rightly rejected – hardly helped its reputation (although a less radical proposition was accepted).
A presumably typical schedule, still appearing first in the television listings pages of sister paper the Evening Standard, is hardly impressive.
After the Evening News at 6pm followed by The Evening Show which runs until 7.30pm, every single programme until midnight, including River Cottage Life, The Krays, and Murder Casebook: Lord Lucan, are repeats.
London Live talks of growth and that the channel is reaching more than 10 per cent of Londoners every week.
Yet despite such claims, and allowing for the difficulty of measuring small audiences, it would be easy to look at London Live and say: there you are, conventional wisdom was right all along. Jeremy Hunt’s folly was doomed from the outset.
Perhaps that is still indeed the ultimate fate of much of local TV, but away from the hothouse of London, which gets most of the attention, a lot has been going on and much achieved in the first year of local television.
A national infrastructure has been created – albeit paid for by the BBC licence fee – and no less than 15 stations are already on air with many more to come this year.
Two of them, Cardiff and Bristol, have recently published their first viewing figures based on their own research. While they will hardly set the world alight they can reasonably be described as a decent foothold, as long as they lead to further growth.
The figures from Bristol, one of five licences held by Made Television, show 168,300 viewers a week – giving an 11 per cent weekly reach with 39 per cent awareness.
The research was carried out by Otherlines.tv, a division of Dipsticks Research and is based on telephone interviews with a sample size of 400 per region each quarter.
The performance for Cardiff is a little more on the niche size with 104,000 weekly viewers, an 8 per cent weekly reach with 37 per cent awareness.
Nigel Dacre, the former head of ITV News who chairs the Local TV Network, and a director of Notts TV, is encouraged by the progress so far.
“A lot of people argued a couple of years ago we wouldn’t get to this stage. Well we have,” insists Dacre.
All the stations, with the exception of London and Norwich, are getting together to create a national network advertising break that will go out once an hour. It is expected to launch next month and a national sales house, Axiom Media, has been appointed to sell the slot.
Crucially, it can be measured by BARB so that advertisers will know exactly what they are getting. How that slot performs over time will obviously demonstrate the extent to which local TV can break out of the purely local in revenue terms.
Equally obviously, seasoned broadcasting pros like Dacre acknowledge “a lot of challenges” facing local TV, particularly in trying to build up audiences and revenue.
Medium-sized stations like Notts and Norwich are carrying out research so that a currency is created that can be respected by local advertisers.
Dacre also points to considerable innovation in both programme-making and advertising – making programmes for previously unheard of small sums of money and long-form advertising such as 10 minute “commercial features” on a local gym or restaurant.
On Notts TV you can get 25 plays of a 10 second still photo ad for £500. For £2,500 you get 30-second video ads with actors and 25 plays.
Notts TV has taken a consortium approach involving local universities and training colleges and the Nottingham Post.
Local newspaper group Archant’s Mustard TV in Norwich has claimed a 20 per cent reach – the equivalent of 96,000 people in early research last year.
It also has a television resource in the shape of former senior ITV executive Jeff Henry, the new chief executive of Archant. Apart from anything else Henry sees local TV as an additional new entry point for young people wanting to start a career in television.
STV, holders of the licence for STV Glasgow, which launched in June, and for Edinburgh, which launched earlier this month, can surely be trusted to turn out programmes of reasonable quality.
Dacre is, however, right on three counts. There are “real positives” coming out of the fledgling sector, but equally right about the challenge of growing audiences and revenue.
At the moment the local stations enjoy a small but meaningful programme “subsidy” courtesy of the deal imposed on the BBC by Hunt when he was Culture Secretary.
Stations receive around £200,000 in their first year falling to £120,000 in the second.
It helps to provide a modest breathing space but only for two years.
It is impossible to predict what will happen then, although Ofcom has been frank in saying they do not expect all the local licences awarded to survive. Advertising revenue will remain hard to come by.
Best guess is that the better-funded groups such as Made Television will expand and take over some of the weaker brethren. Those backed by existing media groups could survive at the margins for a considerable time.
There will also be stations that slip into being community projects rather than serious businesses.
However, conventional wisdom needs to be reviewed. It suggested that local TV’s best chance of survival, if such a thing was possible, would be in the big cities.
It fact competition may be most ferocious in the largest cities and the best chance of a modest survival could be away from the very bright lights where there is a stronger sense of local identity.