Its behaviour seems a little to me like that of the bloated Roman emperors who threw money into extravagant games at the Coliseum to appease the unsettled plebs (last week, a government report revealed that 43% of the public feel the BBC doesn't deliver good value for money).
Post Hutton Inquiry, the BBC clearly feels the need to rally support but its commercial rivals should be concerned that the intensity of this will affect their business.
The ad industry and its trade bodies the IPA and ISBA have always had a problem, not just with the BBC's encroachment into commercial areas (with its online and digital TV services), but also with the large amount of free on-air puffery its runs to support these services.
And, despite the BBC chairman Michael Grade's recent comments that it would try to be a "better industry neighbour", it's a problem that shows no sign of going away. For instance, commercial radio companies could be forgiven for thinking the BBC is out of order in running its TV campaign to support the digital radio station 6 Music with such frequency. The channel, to my mind a piss-poor rip-off of Capital Radio's Xfm (also a national digital station), is receiving massively disproportionate free exposure given that it attracts fewer than 200,000 listeners a week.
It seems that the IPA, in particular, thinks this is a big issue. In its response to the opening of the Charter Review, it criticises the "relentless cross-promotion of BBC programming across all elements of the Corporation's output", arguing that it is part of BBC activity that aims "to attract the largest possible audiences to the BBC, regardless of how wasteful this might be in public resources".
However, some in the industry feel that the IPA and ISBA should be pushing harder on the issue of cross-promotion, especially as the likes of ITV and Sky are fighting so hard for audience share.
And they are faced now with a corporation that became much more marketing savvy under the recently departed marketing chief, Andy Duncan.
It's vital that both the IPA and ISBA lobby hard to reduce the level of on-air cross-promotion used by the Corporation, as it can't be trusted to do this itself. And this needs to happen soon, not merely because so much self-congratulatory BBC tosh is painful to watch, but because it continues to afford the corporation an unfair advantage over its commercial rivals.
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