Week commencing 19th November 2007
 ITV's
ad revenues could be down by as much as £10m following the
failure of the England football team to make it through to the finals
of next year's European championships. A run of fortuitous sports
results, such as the England rugby team making it to the Rugby World
Cup final and Lewis Hamilton's remarkable debut season in formula
one, has seen ITV benefit on paper by tens of millions of pounds
in ad revenue. But the broadcaster's luck ran out as England lost
its crunch qualifier to Croatia. ITV chiefs had been banking on
benefiting from the massive interest in England matches at next
year's European championships, for which it shares the TV rights
with the BBC.Media experts estimate that the diminished audience
interest could translate to as much as £10m to £12m
in lost ad revenues. However, the impact is a guideline at best,
as it can be hard to predict the precise ad revenue performance
of a football event. Last year's football World Cup, for example,
failed to deliver the expected level of ad revenues despite high
audience numbers in key matches. Alavy said the type of audience
that football delivers is also hugely valuable to ITV. "The
audience profile [of Euro matches] is quite different from what
is usually seen on ITV1," he said. "Euro delivers young
and upmarket men, valuable demographics ITV has traditionally struggled
with, which in turn helps with negotiations with media agencies
over advertising."He also said that audience growth watching
Euro tournaments had been fastest among women. ITV is banking on
the increased interest in European football to go some way to salvaging
viewing - and ad revenue - for next year's tournament."Figures
from recent international tournaments suggest there is a demand
for European football not featuring a home nation," said a
spokesman for ITV Sport. "For example, during the 2006 World
Cup, the group game between Poland and Ecuador - on paper perhaps
not the sexiest of ties - averaged almost 6 million viewers and
peaked at 7.3 million on ITV1." Source: Media Guardian
Virgin Media is set to make improvements
to the Virgin 1 channel line-up in the wake of early viewing figures,
but is celebrating a trebling of Dave's audience after it replaced
the UKTV G2 channel and launched on Freeview. Jonathan Webb, managing
director of Virgin Media TV, has highlighted several areas in which
improvement is needed on Virgin 1. "It takes time for programmes
to come through, even in Freeview where there is a tiny slice of
the channels available," he said. The Sunday night comedy zone
has been highlighted as an early problem area for the channel. Webb
added that "huge investment" in Star Trek was an indication
of the channel's aims for Freeview: "Freeview viewers are not
as exploratory as your average digital viewer. Star Trek had no
exposure on Freeview before." He added that the Tuesday night
movie strand could also be improved with bigger films next year.
Despite having a male skew, Virgin 1 intends to keep its male audience
base to under 60% of its total viewers. UKTV has hailed Dave the
number one channel of choice among 16-44 men, beaten only by the
UK terrestrial channels. Attracting three million viewers every
day in its first month, it has delivered a 1.32% share of total
multichannel homes and 3.2% of the target audience of 16-34 males.
In pay-TV homes, the channel has attracted 1.8 million new viewers,
increasing its viewership by 35%. Source: Mediaweek
Sky News has reached out to students around
the UK by striking a deal with student union TV provider Sub.tv.
The two companies have agreed a strategic partnership that will
see Sky News broadcast to 1.8m students through Sub.tv's network
of 160 student union bars in the UK. 95 student unions have agreed
a 10-year deal with Sky News. Sub.tv broadcasts music, film and
sport content as well as airing programming generated by students.
The firm sells advertising locally to each university in its network.
The deal is part of Sky's ongoing strategy to increase the distribution
of Sky News, having already built a presence on YouTube and Facebook.
A site designed specifically for Apple's iPhone has also gone live.
Source: Mediaweek
 Hello! magazine is getting a £4m revamp and is launching
two print brand spinoffs in a bid to win more luxury advertising
as the UK edition nears its 20th anniversary. The magazine will
be going into direct competition with luxury supplements brought
out by the national newspapers, including Stella and Luxx, and trying
to broaden its appeal to young thirty-somethings with a fresh design
and more A-list celebrity content. Two 400-page brand extensions,
labelled "bookazines", will be launched next spring in
order to develop the brand. The two new titles - Hello! Couture
and Hello! Pret a Porter - will be published biannually to coincide
with the major fashion collections and will be sold on news-stands.
It is not clear what the circulation or cover prices will be. Within
the weekly magazine, content will be freshened up with better design,
more white space and a further emphasis on A-listers and young royalty.
Eduardo Sánchez Pérez - the son of !Hola! owner Eduardo
Sánchez Junco - is currently spending three days a week in
the UK to help remodel the UK brand.A radio, television and print
advertising campaign will be unleashed over the next few weeks and
continue into next year. The Hello! cover price has also been dropped
from £1.90 to £1 in an attempt to hook in new readers
ahead of the 1,000th edition on 11 December. Publishing director
Charlotte Stockting said editorial would also be written in a "lighter
and frothier tone" to help attract a younger readership. She
said: "These changes are about bringing the title up to date
and making it even more upmarket. We've seen what the nationals
are doing and the advertisers they've been getting - and, in a way,
they are doing it better than other glossies. We want more than
a piece of that." The new editor of the UK edition will be
Kay Goddard, formerly of the Daily Mail and Closer magazine, who
aims to give the title "more of an edge" when reporting
on celebrity, royalty and society. Former editor Veronica Whelan
has been appointed international editor of Hello! and will work
to tie the UK version in more closely to other Hello! brands. Source:
Mediaweek
 Emap
Radio could be sold off piecemeal, with some radio brands sold
to the buyers of accompanying magazine or television brands to speed
up the sale process, according to City analysts.The radio division
is known to have attracted significant interest from Global Radio
and GCap, but competition issues that would arise from a trade sale
could delay finalising the deal by as much as six months. A number
of private equity bids led by former Chrysalis chief executive Phil
Riley and Tim Schoonmaker, ex-chief executive of Emap Performance,
are also on the table. The Global bid remains favourite, but would
create questions of monopoly, both in the regions and in London,
as Magic and Heart cover the same total survey area and target audience.
Source: Mediaweek
 Virgin
Media and BSkyB's battle for TV audience and broadband
users has spread to the internet, with both media owners ramping
up their online presence. Virgin Media has turned to food shopping
in its latest bid to drive revenue streams online. It has teamed
up with shopping comparison site Mysupermarket, which has provided
a dedicated shopping channel on Virgin Media's portal. The link-up
offers Virgin Media users the chance to shop at Tesco, Sainsbury's,
Asda and Ocado, as well as comparing prices of goods from each store.
Mysupermarket's tools enable users to fill a trolley, and compare
the prices of the goods, before directing them to the supermarket
where they will get the best deal. Virgin Media has also added a
Christmas Shop feature on its portal after partnering with gift
and gadget site Prezzybox. As well as shopping features, the company
has been investing in online content. Virgin Media is attempting
to develop its advantage over Sky in the online stakes. It attracted
5.5 million unique users in September 2007, compared with Sky's
4.9 million, according to research company Nielsen Online. Sky's
drive to develop Sky.com from a corporate site into a consumer-facing
portal has been raised several notches in recent months, however.
The site now has 12 channels of content - largely through third-party
deals. Mysupermarket's deal with Virgin Media is the second high-profile
deal the site has signed recently after launching on The Sun's website
last month. The comparison site is seeking to strike deals with
more national newspapers, as well as a range of portals. Source:
Media Week
Google is set to leverage the video power of its $1.65bn
subsidiary YouTube to boost its offering to online publishers. Google
AdSense, the search behemoth's product that provides online publishers
with text and image ads relevant to their content, will this week
be available with a YouTube video player. Google plans to run text
ads around content on the video units, providing publishers with
another source of income from advertising. The upgrade of AdSense
enables publishers to identify categories of video content they
want delivered to their site. The content will come from YouTube's
partners that it has set up in an attempt to develop revenue streams.
The deal will see AdSense publishers, YouTube and YouTube partners
receive a share of ad revenue. The development comes two weeks after
YouTube was identified as the worst-performing digital media owner
on sales service performance in the second Digital Media Owners
Image Survey, commissioned by the Institute of Practitioners in
Advertising. Source: Media Week
 UK
Cinema Top Ten:
1. American Gangster
2. Beowulf
3. Ratatouille
4. Stardust
5. Good Luck Chuck
6. Elizabeth: The Golden Age
7. 30 Days Of Night
8. Om Shanti Om
9. Lion For Lambs
10. Brick Lane
Edited by Fiona Mansfield and Leila Gould
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