Daytime television - that entertainment preserve of housewives, pensioners and hungover students - is undergoing a renaissance. The sepia-tinged Norman Wisdom comedy capers and endless derivative makeover shows are being jettisoned, to be replaced by a raft of new reality shows and quizzes.
ITV1's schedule will receive the most radical overhaul, with a 拢50m investment in 20 programmes, supported by an outdoor and online campaign worth more than 拢1m. Airing from April 11, the line-up will be rebranded 'ITV Day' to change viewers' perception of daytime fare. It will use yellow, orange and red idents (representing the sun) to differentiate it from the blue and yellow of the ITV evening brand.
Channel 4, meanwhile, is adding four shows, including The Coach Trip, which features a coach-load of Brits travelling around Europe who vote off the most annoying couple each week. Five has responded by moving queen of chat Trisha Goddard from the afternoon to the top of its schedule at 9.25am.
ITV's daytime schedule has been on the slide for some time, having lost stars such as Goddard, Richard Madeley and Judy Finnegan, and Jerry Springer (although he returns to ITV1 in the summer). But there is plenty of scope to win back daytime viewers, according to ITV director of programmes Nigel Pickard.
'We got left behind by the BBC and were hit by the drift of viewers into multi-channel TV,' he says. 'We need to stand out more and provide the same programme quality, range and diversity that people expect from ITV during peak time.'
Protecting revenues
What Pickard does not say, but many observers think, is that, faced with declining ratings in the even more competitive peak-time schedule, daytime offers ITV1 an easier way of picking up viewers and commercial impacts for advertisers. With the advent of the Contract Rights Renewal system, it is crucial for ITV to retain its audience share if it is to avoid a damaging loss in ad revenue.
The commercial necessity is not lost on Pickard: 'ITV is a commercial channel,' he says, 'and impacts are valuable wherever they occur in the schedule.'
MediaCom director David Jowett points out that increasing commercial impact during daytime hours will help ITV to deliver on its contracts with its biggest customers, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. For these companies, daytime TV provides an acceptable and cost-efficient environment in which to target housewives with commercials for their FMCG brands.
'If daytime is performing poorly, and ITV is struggling to deliver its P&G and Unilever deals, then that puts huge pressure on the rest of its advertising book,' adds Jowett.
This pressure is likely to increase next year when Unilever's existing four-year deal with ITV comes to an end. The company wants the recently-appointed media agency MindShare to generate significant savings from its 拢109m TV spend, with no loss of coverage. MindShare has also just picked up ITV's own media account, so next autumn's round of TV negotiating promises to be the toughest and most intriguing in years.
ITV will want to accommodate its second-biggest customer as best it can, but the only way it can do this, without losing revenue, is to provide more impact for the same money; hence the need to increase daytime audiences.
Direct-response advertisers, the other staple of daytime TV ad breaks, will also be hoping that the investment generates more impact. Their desire for cheap ad rates, together with unattractive creative executions, have led to their ads being virtually excluded from ITV1 and Channel 4, limiting them to Five and multi-channel.
A rise in impact inventory might see direct-response advertisers return to ITV1, however. At the very least, it could safeguard their presence on Five, which is threatened by the Unilever negotiations. If Unilever cannot make a deal with ITV, it is likely to shift spend to Five. To accommodate Unilever's more lucrative advertising, Five might be forced to ditch direct-response ads from terrestrial TV altogether.
Price drop
It is not just pressure on the schedules from giants such as Unilever that is threatening direct-response advertisers. A major increase in daytime impacts should lower prices, making TV an affordable avenue for smaller brand advertisers. Mark White, Five's executive director of sales, cites the example of cleaning products brand HomePride, which has just signed a 拢500,000 deal with Five to advertise its Oven Pride product (Marketing, 31 March).
'Daytime is a big commercial development opportunity to bring in new advertisers, sponsors and telephone revenue from game shows,' he adds.
Matt Blackborn, executive buying director at Starcom Mediavest, is sceptical of the real value of daytime. 'Most advertisers are trying to limit their exposure to daytime,' he says. 'You can find better programming environments in peak time on multi-channel for the same relative cost as daytime on terrestrial. The quest is to find people who don't watch much TV, and you won't find them in daytime.'
Carol Smillie, Claire Sweeney, Gabby Logan and Jenny Powell - all hosting new daytime shows - will be hoping to prove him wrong.
DATA FILE - NEW ITV1 DAYTIME SHOWS
Chef v Britain
A cookery show in which TV chef Gino D'Acampo competes with amateurs to prepare their signature dish or family recipe. A panel of local people decides whose is the best.
The People's Court
A judge hears small-claims cases and disputes between neighbours. The show's viewers act as the jury, and then the judge awards damages against the party they decide is guilty.
Date My Daughter
A young man picks one of three young women to date by going out with their mothers. Having never met the daughters, he has to base his choice on the charms of the mothers.
Mum's On Strike
The mothers of two families do no shopping or laundry for a week, and are driven off in a limo for a weekend of pampering. The rest of the family has to cope with daily life without them.