Adam Crozier

The chief executive of ITV.

 

This interview originally appeared in the MIPCOM 2012 issue of World Screen.

 

ITV, the leading commercial broadcaster in the U.K., is a preferred partner for many advertisers. Between the main channel, ITV1, and the bouquet of targeted digital services, ITV is capable of providing a variety of marketing solutions, including product placement. The most powerful offering as viewers enjoy their content on multiple screens, as Adam Crozier explains, is the mix of television and online.

 

WS: These are difficult economic times in a number of countries, and obviously the ad industry is feeling the impact. How is TV in the U.K. holding up as an advertising medium?

CROZIER: Television has been remarkably resilient and there is no doubt that newspapers, radio and direct marketing have suffered disproportionately badly. The forms of advertising that have really held up have been television, which obviously reaches a mass audience, and the Internet. The combination of the two is increasingly a winning combination for advertisers and marketers in the U.K.

 

WS: Would you give some examples of how ITV is working with advertisers?

CROZIER: With our share of viewing and our share of the commercial marketplace, I do genuinely believe that we are the strongest marketing platform for advertisers in the U.K. What we have tried to do over the last couple of years is move to a different way of working with them so that we have become the strongest marketing partners. We’ve restructured our commercial team so that we can engage more directly with advertisers and media-buying agencies. All of them are trying to stand out in a quite crowded marketplace so we are working on creative solutions with them. We’ve had some very innovative partnerships with companies like Nationwide, Yeo Valley and Virgin Media. We’ve done an exclusive deal, for example, with Shazam for Shazam-enabled ads, which we launched in the Britain’s Got Talent finale this year. We are working on a number of new VOD formats that we will be bringing to the market. One is something we call Ad Explore, which will allow viewers, when they are watching advertising on our online ITV Player, to get deeper information about that company’s brand. So there are lots of different things we are doing and they are being very well received in the media buying and advertising marketplace.

 

WS: In the U.S. there is a lot of talk about whether the 30-second spot is still efficient. Is it still an efficient buy for advertisers in the U.K.?

CROZIER: There is no doubt that television in the U.K. is among the most, if not the most, cost-effective way of reaching your audience. So from that point of view, the 30-second spot is still an incredibly important part of campaigns here. The interesting thing about television for me is that people have used it as the medium to reach mass audiences, and increasingly the Internet for more targeted ones, and the more we move into connected TV the more television can also provide more targeted solutions alongside that mass awareness. I think that is a real opportunity for television stations, not just in the U.K. but also right across the world. The connection between television and the Internet provides TV with a unique opportunity going forward to take a greater share of the marketing budget.

 

WS: The European Union only recently allowed for product placement in programs, but ITV has already had some successes with it.

CROZIER: Product placement is very well established in the U.S. and wasn’t in Europe for regulatory reasons. That was opened up and it became possible two years ago. I have to say it was opened up in a way that was still, from a regulatory point of view, very restrictive. And because of that it’s been very slow to get off the ground for all broadcasters and, indeed, for all content companies looking to do these kinds of deals. Therefore we haven’t seen that much activity.

 

Last year, we did a deal with Nestlé on This Morning, another with Nationwide, where a cash machine was placed on the soap Coronation Street, and we also recently did a deal with Welcome to Yorkshire [which promotes tourism in the U.K.’s largest county] for Emmerdale. We’ve had good, positive feedback from clients, but the problem is that the rules and regulations still make it very, very difficult.

 

Interestingly, a recent study suggested that viewers in the U.K. have begun to look at product placement more positively and see it as less of an issue than the regulators do. Of course, if there is an American show shown here, it has product placement all through it and no one bats an eyelid. So it’s a slightly odd rule, and I think there is every likelihood that [the media regulator] Ofcom and the government will look at this again in the near future.