The BritBox dilemma; and other ways of looking at purpose

An ad-free streaming service co-funded by ITV isn’t going to do advertisers any favours, writes Dominic Mills. Plus: how to cut through the brand purpose white noise.

At last, we have news of ITV and the BBC’s joint BritBox initiative. ITV chose to announce this with its latest annual results last week, a mix of the positive — at last, a strategy to take on Netflix — and the less so, in the form of a warning of a Brexit-induced ad slowdown.

Blimey, there’s already an online sign-up page for the ad-free service, although enthusiasts will have to be patient.

If one measure of the news is investor sentiment, then you might say the two main headlines cancelled each other out: a small initial drop was followed by an equally small rise, leaving the share price much where it was immediately before the announcement.

If another is sentiment among the commentariat, a similar sense of equivocation is evident. Ray Snoddy, writing on Mediatel here, is generally positive. Broadcaster and TV critic Mark Lawson, writing in the Guardian, far less so, describing BritBox as “bizarre” and “likely to bomb”.

I’m more with Mr Snoddy: one of the trends the rise of Netflix, Prime and Spotify has demonstrated is that, among the public, there is a greater willingness to pay for content (provided it is good, of course) than before. In that sense, BritBox is going with the tide, and its success in North America, albeit with a genuinely differentiated offering for that market, is an indication of this.

But there’s one constituency that will surely be much more nervous about BritBox, and that is the advertiser community. Ad-free, BritBox isn’t going to do them any favours.

And we know, as Ebiquity demonstrated last month in its TV at the Tipping Point? research, advertisers are already beginning to suffer from the Netflix effect on their audiences, particularly among the younger cohort.
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According to Ebiquity’s analysis, adult viewing of linear TV could decline by as much as 15-20% by 2022, by 30% among householders with children, and 45% among 16-34s.

Yes, there may be some debate about the speed and size of the decline at the margins, but the overall direction is pretty clear.

As Ebiquity makes clear, the threat to TV as an advertising medium comes in two areas: one, the loss of mass appeal; and two, the loss of rapid reach.

Sure as daylight, BritBox isn’t going to help with either of those, and if it works, it will only accelerate the threat.

There is an argument, as BARB data showed about 18 months ago, that take-up of SVOD streaming services was highest among heavy-viewing households: in other words, they were watching more TV overall, and the hit to linear viewing was less than might have been expected.

But the rapid take-up of SVOD since then suggests it is now mainstream, and thus penetration among ‘normal’ or lighter-viewing households has grown, meaning every hour watching SVOD is an hour not watching either linear TV or BVOD.

Add in BritBox, and advertisers are in a potentially uncomfortable place: declining impacts among key target audiences, and higher prices as more money chases less inventory — unless, of course, chunks of money go elsewhere.

Of course, BritBox will give ITV a wealth of subscriber data that it can allow advertisers to tap into via other ad-funded vehicles. But they ain’t likely to be TV as they know it.

Thus, for ITV, it must feel like damned if they do, damned if they don’t.

Another way to look at purpose

Regular readers of this column will know that I tend towards the sceptical in the great debate about brand purpose and meaning, and especially — as with last week’s look at the Havas meaningful brands survey — about spurious claims for its efficacy.

But thinking about it more last week, I am coming round to a more nuanced view. This is partly down to listening at last week’s Content Marketing Association summit to a talk by Thomas Kolster, founder of the Goodvertising agency (and thus also known as Mr Goodvertising).

His view, if I have it correctly, is that most attempts at purpose take a brand-centric starting point. Thus ‘we’re green’, ‘our supply chain is clean’, ‘we don’t use palm oil’ or ‘we’re good corporate citizens because we pay our taxes’. It’s all about them. But in today’s world, these qualities are mostly the base level: they’re the minimum consumers expect, and therefore brands (or their owners) don’t need to bang on about them in their communications. As a result all this ‘Look at me, aren’t we good?’ stuff is a) pointless and b) just so much white noise.

But meaning can be a different thing if it starts from a consumer-centre place that gives consumers the space to develop their own meaning. Thus, Kolster says, brands should ask themselves two questions.

The first is this: ‘who, as a brand, do you enable your customer to become?’ — which allows the brand to be an enabler of whatever purpose I decide.

And the second is this: ‘when, as a brand, do you enable this change?’.

When you think about it like this, it becomes much more interesting.

What brands achieve this?

I’d certainly put Dove into this category, and P&G’s ‘Like a Girl’ for Always too. The genius of both is that they allow consumers to find their own meaning. In Dove’s case it’s that self-definition is about what’s on the inside, not from what others see from the outside. For Like a Girl is that sex is no barrier to achievement, whatever the individual defines that achievement to be. And ‘Like a Girl’ says you can become this person now.

You could include in this group Body Shop’s decision to turn its retail spaces into centres for activists or community groups — assuming it allows these groups to do what is important to them rather than only what it deems appropriate.

I’d say two other brands moved into this space recently. The first was Nike with its new Serena Williams film (below). It takes as its starting point Williams’…hmm, let’s call it temporary loss of self-control — at the US Open last year, and seeks to show that female athletes at any level need not allow their behaviour to be conditioned by societal perceptions.

The second is Carling, once a byword for cliched, bloke-ish advertising, inevitably centred around football and session drinking.

Its latest ad (puts ‘localism’ at its heart, starting by celebrating its roots in ‘Beertown’, aka Burton-on-Trent, selling provenance, and extending this to providing support and funding — in other words letting people define their own purpose — to localised initiatives all across the country, whether they’re about community art in Rotherham or a Sunday football team, Black Country Fusion, that supports its local LBGT community.

And then there’s Apple. It also posits a version of consumer empowerment since, in the widest sense of the phrase, its products enable us to become who or what (not necessarily the same thing) we might want to be; and Apple’s stance on privacy and tracking — never mind that it might be motivated by the desire to drill a hole into the Google and Facebook business models — is also to be applauded.

Thus at the CMA summit there was general agreement that Apple was indeed a showpiece brand in this respect. I nodded along too.

And then I thought: ‘Hang on, Apple is as cunning as a fox and as mean as hell when it comes to paying its taxes’. Apple products may do wonders for the individual, but those taxes fund education and health, both essential parts of allowing us to become whoever we want to be.

It gives with one hand, and takes away with the other. The meaning I take from Apple is simple: ‘screw the taxpayer’. That’s no proper kind of purpose.