ITV has the same problem as Guy Hands did yesterday, in that it has had to write down its value in a post-recession world, leading to a goodwill impairment charge that contributes massively to the aforementioned loss. “The world is a very different place from where we were a year ago”, said controller Michael Grade, doomily. ITV’s response doesn’t stray from the familiar recession hymn sheet – cost-cutting centered around job cuts, in their case 600. It’s trying to restructure its payment for costly football contracts, and may close its Manchester studios, adding to the closure of its Leeds base. And it’s getting rid of Friends Reunited, Scoot, SDN, and ITV Local, the last of these unsurprising given ITV were recently allowed by Ofcom to drop their level of local news coverage to four hours a week.

They’re also planning to cut back on expensive drama by an hour a week, and also focus on entertainment shows in evening primetime while cutting back on daytime programmes. So The Bill is being cut from two hours to one, and This Morning could potentially be axed for the summer. Well, every cloud and all that!

It comes in a month where investors are starting to wonder when they’ll ever see returns again as dividends stall worldwide, hence the fresh ruptures in the stock market as they start to pull out. The front page of the FT today tells tale of BP freezing its dividend this year, the first time since 1999, despite their recent 39% profit increase. BP faces low oil prices for a good 18 months, with costs having doubled since 2004  - it’s going to have to borrow to pay its dividend this year, as well as carry on with its £15bn capital expenditure program. It’s dealing with the problem with, you guessed it, job cuts of 5000 and rising, as well as cancelling the future by ditching its alternative energy investments. As the Green Sheet notes, the latter of these cost-savings makes ads like this seem a bit rash now.

General Electric in the US cut its dividend last week from 31 to 10 cents a share, giving a saving of $9bn annually, despite CEO Jeffrey Immelt assuring investors back in November that the dividend would stay the same. Other American megabrands to cut dividends recently include JP Morgan Chase, PNC Financial, Pfizer (insert your own Viagra pun here), and Motorola, who as the FT reports today are one Android-implementing misstep away from disappearing from view completely. Even safe ports like Unilever are warning of profit slowdowns in the coming months, and as an analyst interviewed by the WSJ says, “companies are not going to increase [dividends] right away” – even if earnings go back up, they won’t translate into dividend payouts for a while after that.

Still, 45 companies in the S&P 500 index have increased dividends this year, compared with 34 that have cut them. Let’s just give them another year or so…

Kip doesn’t work for Ofcom any more, but as Chairman of Ingenious Consulting, the consultancy arm of a company that also provides investment, venture capital and asset management to the media, telecoms and creative industries. Basically his guys go in and make everything better, in exchange for money. So we can presume that through him, Phorm can attempt to get itself a pretty wide client base in exactly the right areas.

More sketchy though is his paper “Public Service Broadcasting in the United Kingdom: A Longer Term View”, published this week by independent research unit the Social Market Foundation, with an intro by Greg Dyke. In it, the problems created by the financial crisis coupled with a broadband-enabled Britain are seen to create a situation where no-one wants to pay for anything, and that people will be able to choose exclusively whatever they want to watch online. Public Service Broadcasting (PSB), programming created for the public good like impartial news and quality drama, will have to adapt.

Meek and co-author Robin Foster propose that “key existing commercial players like ITV and Five should be given as much flexibility as possible to develop their commercial strategies”, ie not have to make any PSB output anymore. They also propose that Channel 4 be privatised, with the BBC acting as the core PSB provider while the others diversify their revenue streams to keep up. They mention spectrum access, getting the 1-5 channel spots, as being less of an incentive to have as the internet levels the playing field; therefore ITV for example won’t be persuaded to make PSB output merely by giving them the number 3 slot on the spectrum. And as everyone knows, ad revenue are down, so they’ll need “alternative sources of advertising”.

Bunch all this together with the fact that Meek is in bed with Phorm and we can presume that the advice to commercial broadcasters will soon be: don’t bother making PSB output anymore as only the BBC can afford to do that, and if you do want to, then get your money not from sticking Direct Line ads in daytime, but by getting personal information about your viewers off Phorm and advertising what they like back at them for a higher premium. Meek paints broadband as being full of “community and shared values”, and suggests that “ensuring access to high-speed broadband should play a much larger role” in spending from broadcasters. That’s because once everyone is signed up, Meek’s cosy community will be ripe for exploiting cash from via Phorm.

Is this the only way? It would be a cruel irony if it was necessary to give up civil liberties to keep Dispatches funded and on the air. Furthermore, giving up PSB creation to market forces is dangerous. Meek suggests “new media developments will allow a much wider range of perspectives and opinions to be accessed by citizens than ever was possible in the old world of four large highly regulated PSBs”, but in reality, it’s much cheaper to show reruns of American sitcoms than it is to commission truly public-service output. 

Even the licence fee doesn’t seem safe in Meek’s hands: “policy-makers should be working out now what its long-term future is and how it can be changed to respond to future public concerns – especially as we continue to move into a world in which consumers expect more choice and control over what they choose to consume and to pay for”. Yes, the internet will breed choice – but we have to try and avoid revenue models that reduce quality items to choose from, and that are in thrall to the advertiser rather than the producer.

Oh dear. The UK’s biggest commercial TV station today bowed to the inevitable, and announced a deal with Google that will see Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Co. handle a large portion of ITV’s online advertising through it’s AdSense application.

‘So what?’ you might ask. Well, regular BAD IDEA readers may remember that in issue five we reported on Google’s attempts to stake its claim on the advertising money that currently supports commercial television. ITV has been slow to recognise that Google has been aggressively stalking its main revenue stream in the past, but when Google overtook them as the UK’s top company for advertising revenues in the third quarter of 2007, they soon came alive to a fearsome new rival.

Now they appear to have reverted to solipsism. Has it been just two months since Michael Grade, ITV’s cigar chomping exec chairman, was downplaying Google’s threat in a comical piece of propoganda worthy of former Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf? Addressing assembled media bigwigs at the IBC Conference in Amsterdam, Grade declared himself not at all worried about the barbarians at the gates.

“Google and YouTube are just parasites. The day they start spending £1 billion a year on content is the day I start worrying.”

Grade, a creature of the long-dead television ‘golden age’ where laughable un-talents like Timmy Mallet could actually have a career, just couldn’t get his head round it. But why would Google spend £1 billion on TV content, when they can just create web applications that cream the ad-revenue generated by the companies who do?

The disturbing fact for Grade and ITV is that this process is only in it’s infancy: as Niku Banaie, now in charge of strategy and innovation of leading digital ad agency Isobar, told us last year, AdSense is just a small part of Google’s aggressive designs on TV ad spend. The next generation of Google advertising applications will be even more sophisticated, introducing a range of innovative technologies and applications that target consumers in far more social, interactive, and personal ways than a TV channel could ever hope to compete with – largely because they have their hands tied producing ‘content’, an expensive and time consuming activity that they are unfortunately compelled to do by the government.

“Once they set this up, it’s going to become difficult for traditional TV broadcasters,” Banaie said. “Sometimes you sit watching ads in a TV commercial break thinking ‘Why the fuck am I watching that? Why is that even being fed to me at this time?’ Google say this won’t happen with their online TV advertising: they’ll know more about user behaviour, the stuff you watch, and about you as a person. With targeted ads like that, it’s a no brainer for advertisers really.”

Google have already signalled their intention to move into the developing field of mobile phone advertising, and who knows what Minority Report levels of uber-personalised advertising treats they have in store (see the vid below for a sample).

So wake up Michael Grade and ITV: getting Google on-board might sound like a smart idea right now, and even placate a few anxious shareholders, but harbour no illusions: it’s YOUR milkshake that Google will be drinking in the coming years.

With the weakening pound causing all sorts of bother elsewhere, it’s not hurting Pearson thanks to the strengthening dollar bringing greater returns on its US education business. And despite saying that the business will inevitably take a dip in the next year or so, chief financial officer Robin Freestone said that they were well positioned to weather the storm, having lessened the amount they’re relying on advertising. He also said this week’s 30p price rise of the FT to £1.80 still made it “very good value”, and that it might be increased further. I suppose the moral of the story is that if you’re a media company in a recession, you better be selling something people need, rather than merely want – since the beginning of the shit-hitting-fan period of the financial crisis in September, the FT’s circulation has risen over 5%. 

So far, it seems to be the “Shareholder Reassurance Conference”, as advertising giant WPP said they’d be surprised if ad budgets shrank (good luck with that one!), TomTom said everyone still loves sat-navs, and Vodafone said they would hang onto their Verizon stake, and were looking to expand into Nigeria (which is officially the safest place in the world to invest right now). Today there’s chat from ITV, Virgin Media, and dinner at the National Maritime Museum! Jealous!

But hang on. A Morgan Stanley conference in Barcelona? The same Morgan Stanley that had to be bailed out, become an ordinary bank, and cut jobs thanks to the crisis? Are they doing an AIG and hanging out by the pool while the world burns?

Actually no. In fact rather than grating truffles over their eggs in the morning, no one even had eggs. Or bacon. Just pastries and fruit apparently. “Clearly some concessions must be made”, said a Morgan Stanley rep at the start of the conference. Oh, the humanity!

The good times are over boys. Michael Grade announced to the Sunday Times yesterday that overpaid TV talents like Ant and Dec (£5 million a year) and Simon Cowell (over £6 million p.a.) are going to have to take a pay cut in the face of tough market conditions. The TV station is set to cut between 1000 and 5000 jobs by early next year, including 430 from regional newsrooms, while Brand Republic reports that several Coronation Street actors have already had their contracts renegotiated.

“When there is a downturn of this severity, everybody has got to share the pain – the talent, the independent producers, the in-house producers,” Grade told Times journo James Ashton. “Undoubtedly, the natural trend of the talent market is down because the BBC is not that flush with money and Channel 4 is hurting. Who else is in the bidding for the big talent?”

In the face of the advertising downturn, ITV are gasping for cash. In fact, they’re so desperate they’ve recomissioned piss-poor 80s assault course gameshow The Krypton Factor, mainly because the business software company Sage has promised to bung them some money for it. Generous, eh? ITV entertainment controller Claire Horton says the channel will be bringing The Krypton Factor “bang up to date with state-of-the-art technology,” provided by…

Where this leaves Ant and Dec is another question. Maybe they’ll end up busking on the streets of Chiswick? Or perhaps they’ll ask British Telecom to fund their next light entertainment extravaganza…