Nick Bampton is to leave Channel 5 as commercial sales director at the end of March after more than four years in the role.
In a statement, Bampton said he resigned from his position so he can concentrate on his next move in the media industry, which he will be working on over the coming months.
He has agreed with the broadcaster’s new owner, Viacom, to continue as a part-time consultant for Channel 5 from 1 April to help with the transition.
Bampton’s deputies, Agostino di Falco and Ross Belcher, will run the broadcaster’s commercial sales team until a replacement has been recruited.
“Channel 5 has been a fantastic experience and one I will never forget,” Bampton said. “After the sale I agreed to help transition the business into Viacom and now that has been completed I want to do something new.
“This is a really exciting time in the media business with heaps of opportunity and I want to be leading this change but with a fresh perspective.”
Bampton joined Channel 5 in December 2010, when it was owned by Richard Desmond’s Northern & Shell. He played a lead role in significantly growing the channel’s revenues in the Northern and Shell era and was a key part of the management team that sold Channel 5 to Viacom for £463m last year.
Last month Channel 5 achieved its highest monthly viewing figures for almost six years.
According to figures released by the broadcaster, Channel 5 delivered a 4.99% share of consolidated viewing throughout the month, which in addition to being its best January performance since 2007, was its highest monthly share of viewing since August 2009.
The surge was helped by the strongest Celebrity Big Brother audience since Channel 5 began broadcasting the show, with 21.1 million people having watched the show across the series and an average episodic audience of 3.13 million across the series – up 5% year on year.
Between 2010 and 2013, Channel 5’s revenue increased 31%; and despite being blighted by the Omnicom/Opera dispute last year, which cost the channel around £25 million, revenues were still up just over 20% between 2010 and 2014.
Following the news that Channel 5 had poached the Football League highlights from the BBC, media journalist and Newsline columnist Dominic Mills said that its current programming strategy may be a sign that it has Channel 4 in its sights, and has decided that a more “varied and nuanced” strategy is the means by which it can overtake it.
“As far as I can tell from the figures, the strategy seems to be working,” writes Mills. “In peak time in 2014, its share of ABC1 adult impacts was up around 1.5%, and that of 16-34 adults up more than 5%.”
