Friday, 16 September 2011

ITV boss lambasts advertisers for failing to connect with audiences

Commercial and online head Fru Hazlitt says advertisers need to be more creative with 30-second ad spots

ITV's managing director of commercial and online has lambasted advertisers for not being more creative with the 30-second ad spot.

Fru Hazlitt said advertisers had to come up with more imaginative ways of connecting with audiences, using examples of an Ann Summers tie-up with ITV2 reality show The Only Way Is Essex, and an interactive Argos promotion in an ad break of ITV1 soap Emmerdale.

"ITV is the country's most powerful marketing platform and it is appalling that the advertising industry has not moved on with what they do with the 30-second spot," Hazlitt told the RTS Cambridge Convention.

"If they say this 30-second spot is connected with something you can do online, then hey presto you are engaged with the consumer," she said.

Asked if advertisers had to get more creative, Hazlitt said: "Entirely."

Recent examples of more imaginative campaigns included a hunt to find the new face of high street sex shop Ann Summers, which will be featured in The Only Way Is Essex; and an Argos promotion in which viewers were encouraged to look up which page of the Argos catalogue featured a present just given to a character in Emmerdale.

The present ? believed to be a digital audio broadcasting (DAB) radio ? would have been welcomed by the radio industry as it inches towards digital switchover.

ITV's Argos promotion, which offered the opportunity to win �10,000 of vouchers ? attracted 40,000 entries in the following 24-hour period, Hazlitt said.

Hazlitt added that despite the growth of online and on-demand viewing, linear television still remained "massively powerful" and was "still growing".

"What this isn't is the earth was flat and suddenly it's round and that's the end of it," said Hazlitt. "We continue to have a very big free-to-air business, which we are monetising through advertising.

"It's a bit like if you were a poet or a writer and then the printing press comes in, you might have thought, oh no, I still want it to be written by a monk and you're frightened that it's not written by a monk. But the opportunity is that your very fabulous programme gets distributed in many different ways."

She said the broadcaster had initially not realised the success of The Only Way Is Essex online. "We didn't notice at first that it had the same size of audience online as it had on air, which was actually a first, and that was a big audience."

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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/sep/15/itv-boss-lambast-advertisers

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