Peter King: 60 years in media
The Media Leader Interview
The OMD veteran shares what he’s learned from six decades in the industry, from creating his own job to the future of second-by-second TV measurement.
“Smart young man wanted for advertising agency.”
Little did Peter King know that this job ad he saw in a newspaper in 1964 would lead to an advertising and media career spanning 60 years.
It is fair to say King, TV researcher at OMD UK, is a rarity in the modern media world, where it is common practice to jump roles and agencies every few years.
From starting straight out of school as a “dogsbody” at Masius Wynne-Williams to becoming a TV buyer at Young & Rubicam (now VML) to joining full-service agency BMP, when the media department was just “a broom cupboard”, there is little King hasn’t seen during his time in the industry.
Key developments he witnessed include the launch of Channel 4 and Channel 5, the growth of Sky, the shift in how audiences watch TV on demand and how agencies plan and buy TV (and everything else, for that matter) — not to mention the launch of Barb in 1981. Indeed, change has been the only constant.
Now, King sees the industry as “a lot more complicated” with “intricate” and “sophisticated” uses of data, alongside developments such as more women in the ranks, less of a focus on alcohol compared with “the bad old days” at BMP and a renewed focus on widening access to new talent.
Finding a niche
So why TV in the first place? And why stay in TV and at OMD all this time?
“I wasn’t a particularly good TV buyer,” King says, laughing, but he eventually found his niche.
Someone had suggested that he joined BMP as a TV buyer in 1976. As he explains: “I found I wasn’t liking it that much. And I noticed there was a gap in the market, because all the TV buyers were working out their own costs, how their schedules were performing against the target market. So I thought I can do that for them.”
King decided to create his own job so that his colleagues would have “more time to concentrate on their buying”. He continues: “I took over and called myself a TV research manager and just did it all.”
And that, as they say, was that.
King has been at OMD in this self-created role ever since and has gone through several relocations and rebrands. After starting out at Paddington-based BMP, the media department then transitioned to the “mouthful” of BMP Optimum Media Direction near Tottenham Court Road, before it became OMD and later moved to its current Bankside office.
Over this time, King has been involved in many research initiatives, but one sticks out in his memory.
More than 20 years ago, he was involved in a piece of research with several other agencies examining the link between attention and TV ad engagement. Linking to Kantar TGI data, the Quality of Viewing study proved that ad attention “soared” when audiences enjoyed a programme compared with ones they didn’t like.
He laments: “It never really took off. It’s a bit of a shame because it wasn’t cheap. But it proved what we wanted it to do.”
Barb’s direction
King has been on the Barb council and the IPA TV research group for more than 20 years.
They have been pivotal in his career, he says, and some of his proudest moments are through these organisations, from working on Barb contracts to helping input a system called Caria, which sends schedules from sales houses to agencies.
He has particular praise for Barb CEO Justin Sampson, who joined at a time when the organisation “didn’t really have much direction”.
“What he’s done is pull in all the different sources and say to people: we know what people watch. That is a big step forward,” King says. Indeed, being able to trust the TV currency — since “we’ve only got one” — is crucial and Barb’s recent sample size increase was “long overdue”.
Going forward, streaming companies must “adopt the same methodology”, as does Google with YouTube, King suggests.
Incidentally, Barb was also partially responsible for one of the most “scary” experiences in his career, when he was invited to a conference in Switzerland to give the opening presentation.
“I was there at nine o’clock in the morning in a suit and pressed ‘play’. It didn’t work. There were 400 people in the audience, most of whom didn’t have English as their first language. I was stood up there for five minutes thinking: do I know any jokes that aren’t rude? I literally thought: I wish the Earth would open up and swallow me.”
Luckily, the presentation got going eventually and King received a round of applause.
The future of TV
When King started out, ITV had 14 companies across the country. While that later consolidated into one entity, Channel 4, Channel 5 and Sky also came along, creating more choices.
“Buyers had to be on their toes,” he explains. This is even more the case now, with streaming platforms bringing so much choice but also making it “a very difficult market”. “I wouldn’t want to be buying TV airtime now,” he remarks.
When it comes to linear, while viewing will go down, King believes it will find its “own level”.
He stresses: “People aren’t just going to stop [watching linear] straight away, because you’re only going to get the Olympics on the BBC or Eurosport, or the World Cup for football and rugby, and the Women’s World Cup. It’s all on there. Are many millions of people on a Saturday night going to stop watching Strictly Come Dancing? Probably not.
“So there will be a linear audience. But it’s obvious that a lot of people will move away, taking three or four subscriptions [instead], but it depends on how the cost of living comes down.”
The overload in choices and an inevitable ceiling for subscriptions will come into play, and while King acknowledges that no-one really knows what exactly is going to happen, it all comes back to the affordability and availability of TV services.
Another aspect that will change is measurement, which is currently manageable on a minute-by-minute basis and does not take into account attention. He admits that the arrival of second-by-second viewing is “going to be a bit of a nightmare”.
Advice for others
So what has King learned after such an illustrious media career?
“Never stop learning and never stop asking questions,” he says without hesitation. If you don’t know what you want and you don’t ask for it, you will never get it, he explains.
King concludes: “I expect that everything will change within another year and I think even more will have changed after.
“I don’t know what’s on the horizon, but I think AI is probably going to be up there and everyone’s going to be working out how they cope with it. That will probably be the game-changer.”