A weekend report says that some of the network's major advertisers, including B&Q and the mobile phone operator 02, are considering moving their multimillion-pound ad budgets to rival stations, namely Five and BSkyB.
David Roth, marketing director of B&Q which spent £25m on TV advertising last year, told the Independent on Sunday: "ITV's audiences are declining and its rates are going up. That doesn't shout 'good value' to me. We are looking at what ITV can offer. We are deciding whether to take some of our money out of ITV and place it elsewhere."
The news comes at the end of a bad week during a bad year for the broadcaster and the two companies that operate it, Carlton Communications and Granada. Both were hard hit by the news that Dawn Airey, the chief executive of Five who was tipped to take the same position at ITV, had been stolen away to be managing director of BSkyB for less money than ITV was thought to have been offering.
Prior to this, it has been criticised by shareholders for the running of ITV Digital, which collapsed after costing the companies over £700m. ITV has also been found itself on the losing end of ratings war with the BBC, whose flagship channel BBC1 has been beating ITV for the first time.
ITV has upped its programming budget by £25m to £825m as it seeks to combat the fall in audience figures, broken only by a few bright spots such as the recent success of 'I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here'.
Mick Desmond, ITV's joint managing director, said: "We know it's been a bad year, but we want to draw a line in the sand and put all the problems behind us."
Shares in both companies fell when the market opened this morning, as London stocks followed the downward trends set on Wall Street on Friday. Carlton fell by 7%, or 8p, to 105.5p while Granada was down by 4.7% to 71.5p, a drop of 3.5p.
Roth added: "ITV had it so good for so long that it seems to have forgotten who it is that pays its bills."
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