±±¾©Èü³µpk10

A remarkable thing happened at the Royal Television Society’s

biennial beano at Cambridge last weekend. Marketing got a look in - and

right up at the front, too. There was of course the usual inexorable

fixed points.

The latest technology was wheeled out to scare the delegates half to

death and prove absolutely conclusively that television as we know it is

already finished.

This time it was the man from Microsoft with his new Web TV dollars 300

machine who played the role of bogeyman. You could see the delegates

plotting mental graphs - the collapse of television against their likely

retirement dates. ITV did its usual whinge about not having any money.

It was slightly more heartfelt this year because Peter Rogers of the ITC

was in the audience, and ITV was pitching to recoup some of the pounds

400m a year it pays to the government on the relicensing roundabout. The

appearance of Melvyn Bragg to argue that with pounds 1.7bn ITV cannot be

expected to afford a decent arts programme and that subsidies from the

BBC are urgently needed, over-egged the pudding to a ludicrous

degree.

What delegates did get was a comprehensive view of how their market had

changed from Martin Hayward of BBH Futures. Everyone knows Britain has

changed and that it makes more sense these days to invest in the future

of Dutch flower growers than in ITV companies. But here was a powerful

bringing together of why and how the audience rarely sits down as one to

watch any programme put on offer.

Hayward warned the teletubbies that everything has changed in Britain,

from household patterns - if we know what a household is any more - to

working patterns. His thesis is that we are moving away from a

time-bound society; people now do the strangest things at the strangest

times. The 1200 calls First Direct received last Christmas Day is the

scariest change.

Apart from more pressure and fewer common events, Hayward explained that

classifying consumers doesn’t work any more and that people are acting

neither their age nor their class, and indeed want to be different

things at different times.

The implications for the television industry are very clear - that there

has to be a move from sales to marketing and from product to customer

focus and that broadcasters have to make the transition from being

’schedule managers to mood managers’.

Other industries have already realised these simple truths. Retailers,

or at least the successful ones, are far ahead of the broadcasting

industry.

But maybe it is starting to learn. It was initially surprised by the

reaction to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, but caught up quickly

enough to respond to the public mood, if not actually qualify as mood

managers.

As they return to their deliberations on whether or not to move News at

Ten, the ITV bosses would be well advised to pay more attention to BBH

Futures and a little less to Microsoft.