Newspapers & live events: There’s money in affinity

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 21 August 2009 at 15:02
Tags: BBC Worldwide, Daily Mail & General Trust, Guardian Media Group, Media, News International

Simon Jenkins went to four festivals this year: Glastonbury, The Hay Festival, the Welsh Eisteddfod and the CLA Game Fair.

(The CLA Game Fair? For metropolitan types among you, the CLA bit stands for Country Land & Business Association, and its Game Fair is a three-day festival of country pursuits.)

Last week, Jenkins found himself marvelling at the vast crowds that attended each of these events — vast crowds “being parted from considerable sums of money in the cause of affinity”.

Sensibly, Jenkins went on to argue that newspapers should emulate the music industry, which has “cast off its enslavement to recording studios and recast itself, almost in Victorian mode, as a mass movement for live audiences”.

At EMI, Guy Hands wouldn’t recognise this description of an industry “casting off enslavement”, but one thing’s for sure: if it doesn’t already, the music industry as a whole will soon generate more revenue from live performance than it does from the sale of CDs and MP3 files.

The increase in performance revenues is compensating for the decline in physical music sales. The lessons for publishers are obvious.

As our lives become more virtual, as the number of shared national moments on telly dwindles, we crave live experience more than ever. It’s partly a tribal thing: attending Glastonbury or Glyndebourne says a lot about who you are.

It’s also partly about the increasing importance of experiences as opposed to products. Not for nothing does an entire sub-sector of the marketing industry devote itself to experiential marketing. In an increasingly digital world, retailers need to find more ways of getting their products in front of us so that we can look at them, touch them, smell and taste them.

Broadcasters have been quicker than newspapers to satisfy this craving. Apparently, the public’s taste for Top Gear has been sufficient to sustain “a £20m world tour”, produced in associated with Clarion Events.

Like Top Gear, Kevin McCloud’s Grand Designs started out as a reviews-based show, only to become a vehicle for all sorts of collectively-held aspirations. The original TV programme (produced by Fremantle Media and broadcast on Channel 4) has given birth into a huge exhibition (organised by Media 10).

Along the way, there’s been a massive expansion of focus. On telly, Grand Designs concerns itself with self-build homes. At the NEC, in October, it promises to interest “anyone who has an interest in design, build, interiors, shopping, home wares, gardens, kitchens & bathrooms, and innovation”.

Who’s to say that the Mail, the Guardian or the Times or the Telegraph can’t mobilise similar numbers of fans? Grand Designs is watched by around 5m viewers eight times a year, with repeats driving up reach. But the whitetops reach several million readers every day, and their brands have been around a lot longer.

Intrigued, I decided to look up the financial performance of the four festivals that Jenkins mentions in his column. The results were interesting:

Glastonbury: As the great-grandaddy of them all, Glasto is an exception to the rules in terms of size. But its size hasn’t restricted growth: even this well-established event is growing rapidly. In 2005, revenues were £16.3m. As you might recall, there was no event in 2006. But in 2007, revenue shot up to £22.3m. The numbers make me wonder whether Glastonbury broke through the £40m barrier this year.

The Hay Festival: Here, too, there’s significant growth. In 2005, Hay Festival of Literature and the Arts Limited generated £1.2m in revenues. Revenues grew by 22% in 2006, and by a further 26% in 2007. But 2008 was the breakthrough year, with revenue expanding by 53% to £2.9m – probably due to international expansion. Whatever the reason, the company behind The Hay Festival has more than doubled in size in the space of three years.

The National Eisteddfod Of Wales: The only registered charity on the list, and the only one that describes itself as “a process rather than an event”. Eisteddfod has reputedly been dogged by financial problems. But its topline looks healthy enough. In 2008, it generated revenues of £3.8m.

The CLA Game Fair: According to the most recent set of accounts at Companies House, the Game Fair generated revenues of £3.2m in 2006. The event was called off in 2007 “due to the appalling weather”. But in 2008, it generated £3.8m. Once again, the growth rate is impressive: 18%.

The story is consistent and obvious. Simon Jenkins is correct: there’s money in live events. Investing in them should be a no-brainer for newspapers.

Far from Google’s slick conference, an awkward squad of media owners and agencies starts to protest

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 28 May 2008 at 17:34
Tags: BBC Worldwide, Google, ITV, Media, Trinity Mirror

Was James Ashton of the Sunday Times invited to meet Sergey Brin and Larry Page at Google’s high-falutin’ Zeitgeist conference in a hotel on the outskirts of Watford last week?

It doesn’t look like it.

Last weekend, Ashton chose not to focus on Google’s own version of the World Economic Forum, complete with cameos by Gordon Brown and Queen Rania of Jordan.

Instead, he latched on to something that Google would rather not see mentioned: its evident monopoly of the search market.

Ashton’s piece kicks off with Neilsen’s suggestion that Google’s market share has risen from 57% all UK-based searches in July 2005 to 81% last month.

Google, he adds, is used on average 23 times a month by every person in Britain. Ashton writes:

It has got to the point where media buyers cannot afford to exclude Google from their online campaigns by relying on the smaller search engines of Yahoo and Microsoft.

Against this backdrop, Ashton wheels out an impressive cast of malcontents. There’s Sly Bailey asking The Lords for lighter touch regulation. (“I am not arguing that they should be regulated more, I am arguing that we should be regulated less.”

Alongside her, there’s Sir Michael Grade of ITV who (in Ashton’s words) “regularly invokes Google’s liberty when campaigning to overhaul contract-rights renewal”.

Or how about John Smith, chief executive of BBC Worldwide, who recently wondered aloud at an industry conference whether regulators “might start to gain an interest in search engines.”

Here, too, is Jason Carter, the UK managing partner for digital at mega-agency Universal McCann, asking for relief. (“We would like more competition in the marketplace.”)

At this point, it’s worth stepping back and looking at the anti-Google coalition stitched together by Ashton.

It’s cross media (from Trinity Mirror to ITV). It’s both public and private sector (from ITV to BBC). And it includes both advertisers and media owners (who typically agree on something — anything — with about the same frequency as our planet receives visits from Halley’s Comet).

The problem, as one of Ashton’s sources put it, is that regulators “aren’t sure” how to regulate Google.

With good reason. The challenge is international — and complex. And for all the regulators know, Google’s plans to move into other forms of advertising might not bear quite so much fruit as its ventures in search. That would leave a company dependent on rapid growth in a difficult situation.

For all of that, Ashton’s piece does point to a coalition in the making. Yes, it’s blurred round the edges and unsure of its aims — but it’s a coalition none the less.

Big Brother boss says: Kill off TV news to fund my Chirac-style folly

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 23 April 2008 at 17:18
Tags: BBC, BBC Worldwide, BSkyB, Google

Whatever happened to David Elstein?

Once upon a time, Elstein was head of programmes at Sky. As part of his job, he regularly called for the abolition of the licence fee.

In the market for ideas, Elstein’s purpose was to say the unthinkable — and get it incorporated into debate, to his employer’s advantage.

These days, Peter Bazalgette, the former public school boy responsible for a raft of trash TV, including Big Brother, seems to have taken Elstein’s place.

There’s only one slight problem. Like a lot of blokes in their mid-50s who have made lots of money from Big Media, the founder of Endemol hasn’t got much of a clue about the emerging digital universe.

At a Royal Television Society dinner last night, Bazalgette blithely called (among other things) for the government to abolish the news and current affairs obligations of both Five and Channel 4

By doing this, both channels would (presumably) become cheaper to produce and more popular.

HM Government, Bazalgette suggested, could then cream off some of the resulting expansion in profits by charging both channels for their use of digital (Freeview) spectrum.

In addition, Bazalgette proposed the privatization of BBC Worldwide, BBC Radio 1 and 2 and Channel 4.

After raising £3bn+ from such ruses, Bazalgette wants the government to launch something called, er, Boggle.

What Bazalgette has in mind is a “public service distribution platform and search engine”.

And its purpose? As Bazelgette sketchily framed it, Boggle would “link the existing online offerings of museums, galleries, theatre companies, opera houses and concert halls”.

It would also give all of these venues “seedcorn monies” to “improve” their “content offerings”.

But that’s not all. Boggle would also allow the “next generation of comedy talent” to post videos. The most popular would attract “some Boggle funding”. Last but not least, Boggle would create “a search engine to market it all”.

Confronted with this dim-witted slew of half-baked concepts, it’s hard to know where to start.

“Seedcorn monies” for museums? Fine. A few hundred million wouldn’t go amiss. But do we need a new quango to distribute it? What does the Arts Council do for a living?

Hasn’t Bazalgette heard of YouTube? Remarkably enough, young comics already use it to post videos of their gags. And then there’s Google, which owns a perfectly good search engine already. . .

In his haste to embrace a broadband future that he patently doesn’t understand, Bazalgette — the free market provocateur — actually ends up sounding like former President Chirac, who decided that French taxpayers should foot the bill for a French language search engine designed for French people.

A blizzard of straight-faced reports accompanied Bazalgette’s speech. Somewhere in them, I read that Ofcom will “study” this plan for a new quangocracy whose birth requires the death of much of what remains of news and current affairs on independent television.

Toss it into the nearest litter bin, more like. If this reflects the standard of debate within the TV industry, Big Media is in more trouble than we thought it was.

Come back David Elstein; all is forgiven.

PS: According to his biography on the Royal Television Society web site, Peter Bazalgette is currently “building a portfolio of investments in digital growth companies”. On the evidence of last night’s speech, widows and orphans would be well advised to invest their money elsewhere.