ACCOUNT DIRECTOR SPENDS ONE WEEK AT ITV ON THEIR PLANNER INSIDE PROGRAMME

Account Director, Richard Temple spent one week at ITV meeting not just senior decision-makers in their commercial teams, but also producers, schedulers and programme acquisition people. Here’s what he had to say:

“To be honest, I’ve never really quite “got” the recent fashion for media owners to have in-house planning teams. I guess I also had a few “prejudices” of what to expect. Have ITV really changed? Were the 1980s-style airtime trading ‘geezers’ really going to be all cerebral and charming? Was it going to be a typical corporate monolith with lots of silos not really communicating with each other protecting their turf?

ITV were generous enough to allow me access to senior decision-makers throughout their business from not only the commercial team, but also digital producers to peak time schedulers. It’s easy to forget about the content production side of the ITV business when on the media agency side conversations primarily focus on trading issues. However, it is in content creation that “beyond-the-spot” opportunities exist for smart media agencies to exploit.

Forget any pre-conceptions you have about ITV. The evidence from all the hugely impressive people I met are that it’s a very nimble, modern, creative media organisation and has very talented and surprisingly charming people. The purpose of the Integrated Planning team is now very clear to me: to unlock the creative potential of all ITV’s content platforms to advertisers and their agencies. From the evidence that I was presented with, these opportunities are myriad and offer huge creative potential. My time at ITV was genuinely inspiring and thought-provoking.”