After a long, safe life in consultancy, Ben McOwen Wilson's move to ITV proved a baptism of fire.
"On 1 March, 2006, I became director of strategy for ITV," he says, "and everyone was asking me what my job involved. About a week into the role, a [Greg Dyke-led] bid [for ITV] from Goldman Sachs and Apax Part-ners came and it was clear what my role was - make sure these guys don't take us over." He laughs briefly. "But that meant I could examine every aspect of the business in detail and work out where the challenges were."
Having fended off the predator, McOwen Wilson settled on chief operating officer of ITV Consumer for his next move last November. From the outside, it might seem like, if not a poisoned chalice, then one with contents you wouldn't rush to drink.
ITV Consumer includes Friends Reunited, rebranding itself as a mainstream social networking site by abandoning its lucrative subscription revenue; Kangaroo, the video-on-demand joint venture between ITV, the BBC and Channel 4, which is currently stalled at the Competition Commission; ITV.com, which has to make online telly appealing to people who've barely heard of YouTube, and ITV Local, a regional news and information service the BBC is preparing to launch against with a bigger budget and highly aggressive strategy. Add to that his stated aim of increasing revenues from £35m to £150m a year by 2010 and it's a surprise his youthful features aren't lined with worry.
"It's one of the areas where we have the most potential to grow," he explains. "It's starting small, we've set an enormous growth target assuming Kangaroo gets through, and the Kangaroo delay makes that more challenging. But ITV needs and wants to have 10% of its revenue coming from online. That's realistic and ambitious. And we have great channels to promote that content as well as our ad sales resource to maximise it."
It was McOwen Wilson who cut the subscription revenues away from Friends Reunited two months ago. "There are three businesses in there," he explains. "There's the reunion site, the dating site and the genealogy site. Some 60% of the earnings come from beyond the reunion site, which makes it one of the first social networking sites to build sustainable revenues. But with the arrival of Facebook and others, people's expectations changed - they wanted stuff for free and were prepared to share information about themselves using their real names.
Long-term value
"The ad-funded model was the only way to sustain our long-term value. The other networks skew very young with 85% under 35. Friends Reunited's average age is 42, female and upmarket. It's a chance to hit middle England online."
The move seems to have boosted use - although McOwen Wilson acknowledges there's a marketing job to be done. ComScore's figures for June show 1.2 million monthly visitors.
"Advertising accounted for about 10% of the site's revenue, so we have to increase that," he agrees. "But it won't happen overnight. We're going to offer more targeted ads, so people who put a birth or a wedding on their timeline, for instance, will receive very relevant ads."
He's impatient over Kangaroo. The service began as an idea on the back of a breakfast napkin at the Electric Cinema in Notting Hill, where McOwen Wilson dreamed it up with Ashley Highfield, then BBC director of future media, now chief executive of Kangaroo. "We felt that together we might be able to create a consumer proposition that could counter the power of global monopoly players such as Microsoft, Google and Apple," he explains.
The idea is simple: all UK broadcasters and producers club together to provide long-form programming to the website, available on an ad-funded model for streamed programmes. "Typically, the download-to-own rights are the producers," McOwen Wilson shrugs. He sees data mining adding crucial value - allowing viewers to watch, say, all David Jason programming, or all satire programming independent of the original broadcaster. "Kangaroo sells ads on site, while broadcasters handle ad sales for their programmes - we sell ours, BBC Worldwide sell theirs, and so on."
ITV took Kangaroo to the Office of Fair Trading because it wanted investment certainty, but the complications of defining video- on-demand meant it was booted over to the Competition Commission for a closer look. The Commission should report back in December - but he's optimistic and, in the meantime, he's still recruiting staff for Kangaroo. "Many of the complaints were from producers hoping it would be an open platform, and it is. Perhaps we should have made everything clearer from the start," he says dryly.
Priceterrier launch
He's also launching Priceterrier, a shopping comparison site. "There will be more examples of us adopting low-risk low-investment approaches to see if we can build brands online - like ProSeiben, a Germany channel that is more experimental than anyone in the UK. If we're going to deliver that £150m revenue target, we have to look robustly at these things and find opportunities to pursue."
His main role is steering ITV's flagship ITV.com. "We had to make it free and ad-funded, and it needed to be click and watch - the ITV audience wouldn't necessarily be sophisticated net users, so installing download managers would terrify them," he argues. "And that worked - on 1 June we had 1.1 million views. We need to develop areas where ITV could legitimately enter from the TV consumer perspective and offer something for advertisers, our primary customers. And it's better for us to own UK content than Google, which will always be less sympathetic to UK players."
CV
2008 Chief operating officer, ITV Consumer
2006 Director of strategy, ITV
2002 Partner, head of media and entertainment practice, Spectrum Strategy Consultants
2000 Interim chief executive, UEFA New Media - secondment
1999 Senior manager, Spectrum Strategy Consultants
1997 Head of internet strategy group, Renaissance Worldwide Consulting
1994 Consultant, Andersen Consulting
Family Wife, Clare; daughters, Lily, 4½, and Anya, 2
Desert island media Laptop, The Economist, Champions League football, Radio Five Live
Hobbies Climbing, travel, Manchester United
McOwen Wilson on...
The power of television: There are lots of arguments bandied around about television being in decline or even dead or redundant, which I believe is a lot of rubbish. What is key is the power to deliver mass engagement, which we at ITV, one of the largest contributors to the UK's creative economy, are best placed to do. For broadcasters in the internet age, control is temporary, but the power to engage an audience is permanent.
The online market: American players are clearly dominating, and it is important that the UK's creative community doesn't get sidelined. That's important for advertisers and producers alike.
London-centricity: UK media is very inward facing - very London-centric. I grew up outside London in a small village, so I see more value in regional views - more value in alternative perspectives and audiences - which is why I see the value in ITV Local. There's little appetite for looking outside the UK for models that might work here. I spent nine years, as a consultant, in other markets - Brazil, South Africa, Australia, Netherlands - and it really helps to challenge your assumptions.