Should broadcasters be embracing YouTube?
Future of TV Advertising Global 2024
“TV is falling into the newspaper trap.”
Media analyst Ian Whittaker issued a stark warning to broadcasters that giving away their content for free by posting it on YouTube and other social media platforms risks devaluing their proposition.
“If you look at what happened with the newspapers 15 years ago, what they did was believe they had to give into the demands of the tech players. That in terms of their own agency, they didn’t have that much,” Whittaker said.
“They turned around and said: ‘Our content — we have to give away for free. We need to move away from our core product.’ What happened to newspapers? From an advertising perspective, they declined into irrelevance.”
According to the latest adspend forecast from WPP media investment arm GroupM, print (and its digital counterparts) will account for just 4.3% of total global adspend next year. A quarter-century earlier, it accounted for more than 50%.
Speaking in front of a packed audience at The Future of TV Advertising Global conference in London last week, Whittaker suggested that Paramount Global posting the entirely of Mean Girls on TikTok last year is exemplary of the problem, because it allowed TikTok to earn money off the back of Paramount’s work and go to advertisers asking for a greater share of ad budgets because it was playing host to premium content.
“What did Paramount get out of it?” Whittaker asked. “Sure, they got a bit of a revenue stream. But actually in terms of what they did structurally for their business, fundamentally these sort of deals are catastrophically bad.
“Kelly [Williams] from ITV will be on in a few minutes to tell you why I’m fundamentally wrong on that.”
‘Over my dead body’? Not any more
Indeed, Williams, ITV’s managing director, commercial, later took the Kings Place stage to defend ITV’s decision — revealed at the event — to follow Channel 4 in leaning in to tech platforms by uploading full programmes to YouTube.
As he explained: “I know Ian thinks it’s the worst decision in the world and, look, two years ago I’d have probably said: ‘Over my dead body.’
“But we’ve thought carefully about it. We’ve watched what Channel 4 have done. They went probably 18 months ago and it hasn’t cannibalised their audience.”
Acknowledging that Whittaker warned broadcasters should not “bet the bank” on a digital embrace that could be impossible to pull back from, Williams countered: “You certainly can pull back from it. If this doesn’t work, you can take it down and you can stop selling it. But we’re going to give that a go over the next couple of years.”
He sees an “opportunity to build a relatively decently sized business quite quickly on YouTube” that will help ITV diversify its revenue.
“The premature death of television has been called many, many times in my career,” Williams added. “Viewing habits are changing. But I think television is adapting really well.”
Channel 4 CEO: ‘People aren’t going to revert to retro behaviours’
The optimistic sentiment was echoed by Channel 4 CEO Alex Mahon, who promoted the broadcaster’s work on social platforms as necessary to increase reach with younger demographics, even if the business spoils have not yet been wrought.
Mahon explained that young viewers are “not fickle — they’ve just grown up with a lot of choice”. Broadcasters have therefore rightly conceded that, as viewers are no longer stuck just “watching what’s on now”, they “have to go to where they are an appeal to them.”
She argued: “If you’re in a television business, you should be trying to move into digital as fast as possible. That’s where there’s growth. What’s growing is digital and what’s shrinking is linear, unless it’s a big live event.”
According to Mahon, around 30% of Channel 4’s income currently comes from digital revenue sources, including streaming. Around 30% of Channel 4’s streaming minutes, meanwhile, are “made up of young people” in the 16-34 demographic.
However, Mahon admitted that the more precise 16-25 cohort “would be much more on YouTube or Insta[gram] or Snap or TikTok, where we’re creating social content which is about marketing our programmes to watch elsewhere”.
Channel 4 receives “a couple billion views per year” by distributing its long-form content on YouTube, Mahon said — something that she implied is a business necessity to grow the brand among young audiences.
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“Just like I’m not going to go out and start buying a newspaper in the morning, young people are not going to change to thinking: ‘I’m only gonna watch it when it’s on at 10pm,'” she said. “People aren’t going to revert to retro behaviours.”
But leaning in to new platforms not only impacts audience development strategies, but content creation itself.
For example, Mahon said Channel 4 News, which sees TikTok as a “real growth platform”, has had to adjust its editorial strategy to provide “the same news, made very differently” for the short-form video platform.
“If you’re trying to put that news on TikTok, it can’t be, like, a three-minute package that you’ve repurposed,” she explained. “It has to be arresting content from the first frame. You have to make it through the first second. You have to have an image that is thumb-stopping to get people to watch for 20-30 seconds.”
Critics have argued that such adjustments to news presentation could lead to sensationalism.
Furthermore, Mahon admitted that “monetisation can be a little problem” on TikTok.
When asked to elaborate, she clarified that Channel 4 News‘ content is “not making money” on the platform.
Digital gamble
Whittaker has thus far not found the broadcasters’ arguments convincing.
He is concerned that TV “has very much lost the narrative” and has become a “weak authority”, allowing other players — namely Big Tech — to set the agenda on where it stands on the media plan.
Broadcasters’ initiatives to digitise their offerings, he suggested, come across as “not really about driving growth, but replacing losses”.
Whittaker added that broadcasters “are betting everything” by — as Mahon did — admitting linear TV is dying and that they must go all in on digital.
“At the end of the day, if that strategy does not work out — and indeed some broadcasters are finding that now — it’s very hard to retreat from that,” he said. “Because you’ve essentially given the message that your core product — linear TV — isn’t worth that much any more.
“If you lose confidence in your product, then don’t be surprised when other people lose confidence as well. And that includes advertisers.”