On the wall outside Dawn Airey's office stands a giant Kill Bill poster with a black leather clad Uma Thurman in martial arts pose, wielding a sabre. It seems a naturally symmetrical backdrop for Airey's photograph - she is a former UK judo champion and is attired head to toe in her trademark black. But the Sky PR minder is having none of it. We are ushered away to another poster for the Wizard of Oz, featuring a cherubic Judy Garland. The incident is illustrative. Since joining Sky the outspoken Airey who, once notoriously and Ratner-esque, described her TV output at Five as the 3fs - films, fucking and football - has been atypically reserved, constrained in a corporate straitjacket.
Where Sky is all buttoned down, obsessed by how any public utterance is measured by the City, Airey is a free spirit, an extroverted showman. Raised in Preston of Liverpudlian parents, she laughingly accepts the tag of "gobby northerner." She also has oodles of northern warmth and fusses over whether I have had any lunch, wanting to order me sandwiches.
Although denying that Sky is buttoned down, Airey admits she has had to adapt her persona to match Sky's PR agenda and that the first year was difficult. Yet that may have more to do with a reportedly frosty relationship with her old boss, Tony Ball, who hired her.
"The popular caricature of me is right on one level, but when you work for a FTSE-100 company, you have to be more cognisant of what you say. At Five it was different. We had to create a personality and a brand that could challenge, and that task coincided with the personalities of some of the individuals there. But we don't have a poker up our arse at Sky and you will see that under James' (Murdoch) leadership; we are becoming far more open and more willing to talk to people. Good grief, I'm talking to you!"
You get the sense that 45-year-old Airey, having taken on an expanded role in January - adding multiplatform responsibilities for interactive TV, online and mobile phones to her management of all non-sports programming and advertising revenues - is bursting to raise her external profile again.
Crucial services
Aside from running a £900m programming budget and £329m of ad revenue, she now oversees the rollout of broadband, video-on-demand, mobile and HDTV services, made easier through Sky's £211m Easynet acquisition. In short, she has Sky's very future in her hands.
While generating welcome new sources of revenue, these services are also expected to be crucial in attracting and retaining TV subscribers in meeting a highly publicised target of 10 million by 2010. Allowing for the churn of lapsed subscribers, this will require the recruitment of some six million new customers. Surely, you think, a daunting prospect in the face of competition from the faster growing Freeview platform, along with as yet unknown threats from a rejuvenated NTL/Virgin and the launch of broadband TV services from BT.
Airey is undaunted by the scepticism; she's clearly well practised in addressing it and launches into corporate-speak. "We will meet (the target) in the same way we have achieved others in the timescale we said we would, by continuing to offer fantastic content, a huge amount of connectivity through mobile and broadband offerings and first class customer service. There's nothing to suggest that we won't hit the 10 million with ease. If we thought we couldn't achieve it we would have to tell the City now, because we'd go to jail otherwise."
A robust defence indeed, and there are ways that Sky could ease its task. It could offer cheaper subscriber packages, perhaps even enticing customers in for free by aggressively using Sky Freesat as a counter to Freeview in the run up to digital switchover. The damage to its average revenue per user, once Sky's most vital performance statistic, might be a price worth paying. Yet Airey is unconvinced by the potential of the tactic. "We prefer people to pay and Freesat customers are going to be damn hard to convert into pay TV."
Challenging targets
Nevertheless, she seems to hold up more hope of getting pay-TV converts over the longer term.
"One would hope that Freesat and Freeview customers, in time, will see it is an interim choice, and if you want HDTV and the full range of niche TV content, they will have to migrate to a pay-TV platform."
Whether such organic migration will occur in time to help the 2010 target - digital switchover doesn't happen until 2012 - remains a question.
Guy Di Piazza, director of technology, communications and entertainment at Ernst & Young, says the definition of what constitutes a subscriber will be crucial in measuring Sky's achievement of its goal.
He adds: "In presentations to analysts, Sky hasn't defined this. It's going to be a challenge to hit the target. Young marrieds are the most likely new customers, but there are only around 300,000 of these a year. So Sky may have to employ a looser definition of a subscriber."
Currently, video-on-demand is a free service to Sky subscribers, but that may change in the future. Will these customers be counted as subscribers? Then there are multi-room subscriptions to a second digital box in the same household. Currently there are one million of these - 12% of the total of 8.1 million subscribers - but Sky expects 30% to be multi-room customers by 2010.
Of course, providing must-watch content to people who have failed to be enticed by Sky's USPs of films and football will be crucial in converting pay-TV refuseniks. Recently Sky has been promoting the breadth of its niche programming in areas such as nature, the arts and travel. This may add viewers at the margin, but to attract the masses, some believe it needs a stronger general entertainment proposition than currently offered by Sky One, Two and Three.
Airey's first task on joining Sky was to revitalise Sky One. Her initial ambition was to turn it into a mainstream entertainment channel to rival the terrestrial networks. That hasn't happened - a budget thought to be around £100m was never going to be enough - but she has succeeded in improving the channel's once tawdry Ibiza Uncovered image, appealing to more up-market viewers with award-winning drama like Deadwood. Yet the schedule - once witheringly described by Airey herself as the 3 s's: "Simpsons, sci-fi and shagging" - may have ditched the latter, but is still rather dominated by the former two.
The success of ITV2 has seen Sky One challenged as the pre-eminent entertainment multi-channel and the growth of Freeview homes - Sky One doesn't air on Freeview - will likely see ITV2 soon overtake it. At present, its audience is holding up. Commercial impacts among 16 to 34-year-olds were up 5% (8% among females) on last year in the first five months of 2006.
Airey is more concerned by the quality, rather than the number of eyeballs viewing her channel, and their contribution to subscription revenue. "Sky One is the key commercial driver of our entertainment package. If you've got Pop Idol, Celebrity Love Island and extensions to Coronation Street and you throw them onto ITV2, then fine, but that is a different model. I'd much rather have a subscription model for my income than an ad revenue model, particularly in the current environment."
Airey warms to her theme: "Whatever bollocks Simon Shaps (ITV's director of television) may have told you, look at the data of Sky One versus ITV2 and you'll see we're ahead of them on all the metrics. There's so much rubbish written and I don't want you to add to the cumulative crap that's written about Sky One."
Another key plank of Airey's programming remit is Sky Movies, which faces a new Freeview threat with the free-to-air debut of Film Four and the launch this autumn of two Five digital channels airing US movies. With so many movies available free and the advent of video-on-demand allowing viewers to "pay as they go" rather than pay a monthly subscription, the future of Sky Movies as a top-tier subscription service seems shaky.
The suggestion draws a nervous titter from Airey, who is clearly aware of the threat. "It's a legitimate question; all linear movie channels are asking that question." She claims that no other broadcaster in the world can match Sky's output deals with the major movie studios and Sky can air movies earlier than rival media. She also places great store in the Sky Movies By Broadband service which offers 300 movies for download.
"It's an unbelievably good service and it's free to subscribers. We've had more than a million downloads to date for films and sport, and as the speed of bandwidth into the home grows, the demand will grow."
Airey also oversees Sky Media's advertising sales activities. Advertising only accounts for 8% of Sky's revenues, but will it become a growing income source? "It's important, a very nice ingredient within the cake, but we are a subscription business. I am tasked with growing our share, through online as well as through commercial impacts. But the ad market is in a shocking state and I'm damn glad that we're not advertising reliant."
She can't resist a dig at her more reliant rivals. "ITV, even with the World Cup, is going to see its revenues fall below £100m for the first time this month - who would have thought that? But it's not really surprising. There are more impacts available and advertisers aren't going to say 'Oh, because there are more impacts we'll buy them'. They're going to buy what they have bought in the past, so there is (price) deflation because there's over-supply."
Unsurprisingly for an advocate of Sky+, Airey is dismissive of the threat to ad revenues from PVRs. "I read pieces in Media Week where people are wringing their hands about the death of spot advertising because of PVRs, but I think there is an unbelievable opportunity. We know that PVR viewers watch more TV and the best creative will always cut through. The 24 sponsorship bumpers for Nissan are hugely valuable because as soon as you see them you know the show is about to start, so you take more notice of them. And in time you will be able to push specific commercial content through the boxes, targeted at groups of viewers."
On product placement she is more ambivalent. "ITV has been pushing hard to have product placement rules relaxed, but the idea that it will provide a slew of new money is naive, since most of it would come out of spot advertising. As a life-long fan of Coronation Street, I can see that replacing the fictitious Newton & Ridley's beer in the Rovers' Return with John Smith's makes sense. But if product placement becomes so obvious, then that could be a turn-off for viewers."
Sky Media has been busily expanding its revenue earning capacity by representing more and more independent channels that are carried on Sky - they now account for 45% of its sales inventory. In the last six months it has added seven channels including ESPN Classic and Attheraces, so does it have its eye on more channels - perhaps a biggie like Five or Flextech?
Cue another guffaw: "I'm not going to pass comment on that. But I am always keen on having scale, and I'm always saying to Nick Milligan (Sky Media's managing director and Five's former head of sales) go and look for opportunities. Read into that what you like!"
Although Airey relocated from Lancashire to Devon as a child, before going up to Cambridge (she read geography at Girton College), she describes herself, emotionally, as a northerner: "Dead straightforward, more front than Selfridges, friendly, open, energetic and fun, with good taste." She's also said to be a workaholic, though she doesn't like the term and insists she has a work-life balance.
For relaxation, she gazes at the statue of Buddha sitting on her desk, yet she denies being a Buddhist. She works out in the gym every morning, while watching Sky News, of course, plays tennis and collects antique maps - she has a "pretty definitive collection of maps of the British Isles," which grace the Oxford and Chiswick homes that she shares with her partner, Jacquie Lawrence, Sky One's executive producer.
Airy joined Sky after turning down the ITV Networks chief executive job. She says the pre-merged ITV job was clouded with a lack of autonomy that she would have needed to do it. She loves to work on "challenger brands" and, having learned all about pay-TV and multi-channel, she might now find ITV more of a challenger brand than Sky. If ITV came courting again, would this Coronation Street lover reject its overture a second time?
As for a move out of TV altogether, Airey says she could envisage it, and uses the term "entertainment in its widest forms", rather than media, as the territory she would consider.
From such an unabashed entertainer, you wouldn't expect anything else. Could we yet see Dawn Airey, the movie mogul?
CV
2003 Managing director, Sky Networks, promoted to MD channels and services in 2006
1996 Director of programmes, Channel 5, promoted to chief executive in 2000
1994 Controller of arts and entertainment, Channel 4
1993 Controller of networked children's and daytime, ITV
1985 Management trainee, Central TV, promoted to director of programme planning and joins the broadcasting board in 1989.
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