Why has local commercial radio lost the plot?

Commercial radio in most cases has always been a bit of a mess. And right now it's in an even bigger mess. Why? It has a clear problem with its own identity. I started off in BBC local radio and progressed to producing the breakfast show on the UK's largest national commercial radio station so I have always had more than a strong interest in this area.

In the late 1980's and 90's local radio largely was filled with below-par nasal DJ's who weren't too far removed from Alan Partridge. Cheesy, deeply unfunny, and cringeworthy. However back then there was lots of local content in the form of roadshows getting involved with the community, commentaries from the sporting scene, travel-spotting planes (yes really!) and lots and lots of local news. In fact, it was only until recently that Radio City in Liverpool, my local station when growing up, stopped manning a local newsroom with bulletins 24 hours a day. Even stations in London took IRN at 3AM - it was a real landmark when they stopped this.

Move forward to present day and things are very different. There are lots of small community stations and all the other stations have either changed name, changed format, or gone bust. There are a few exceptions but it is not a good future for the industry when it is already fighting against the uber-cool ipod generation.

But the big problem I have with local commercial radio is with the moronic (there, I've said it) Programme Directors. Go and pick a local station and then tell me where the local content is? I was in the car with Heart playing with the local drive programme on when we had a link which went along the lines of "More music non-stop on a Friday afternoon here on Heart". End of.

My massive issue with such links and presenters using them are thus. You are a local station. Don't pretend you are something you are not. Why do these tinpot local stations insist of wanting to playing lots of songs back to back? Why? You are supposed to be giving us local news, what's on and general community issues. Play music non-stop? Nah, my iPod does that nicely and has a far better choice of music than you guys for sure.

The problem is if you want to be a dynamite music machine you can't honestly claim to be local too. You could be coming from London, Los Angeles, or Leningrad. There was a national Top 40 radio station broadcasting from Ireland in the 90's called Atlantic 252 which played the hits and nothing else 24/7. Fine, it wasn't local and therefore covered a niche in the UK which didn't have any other national Top 40 station other than BBC Radio 1 - which was decidedly cheesy at the time you must remember.

We lost dozens and dozens of local stations instantly when the Heart network was introduced across the UK. I should feel sorry for these stations which have been consigned to the history books but in reality I feel they actually have got their comeuppance at last. For years all the stations have been playing "the most music", "more music less talk", "the best music mix", "the most music", "today's best music" and so many more pathetic attempts of Programme Directors 'playing' radio.

The idea of cutting all these small local stations and creating national brands is just common sense to me. The local stations were so keen to be music machines that they lost track of their major USP - their locality. Any presenter who says to me "more music less talk" to me is basically saying to me "I'm a rent-a-gob DJ and don't give two hoots about losing my job 'cos I'm too darn lazy to create local content. All I care about it pretending I work for a big national station and tell you how much music we play." I mean, never mind networking from Leicester Square why not network from New York? Tell me about having fewer interruptions for commercials but fill the time with proper local info.You don't deserve to have that presenting job you have. You can still mix in Top 40 music if your format dictates but please don't neglect your key selling point. In the early 1990's Capital FM was the most dynamic radio station in Europe which screamed "London" so much you almost felt they went overboard. They dominated the airwaves completely and were doing a fantastic job in the community. It wasn't rocket science, they just did their job. It ain't that hard.

Now we have these local stations creating national brands and you read plenty about people complaining about job losses, station's closing down etc. Seriously guys, as soon as these stations started sounding exactly the same then the need for anything other than a national station was never in doubt.

At least the BBC local radio stations continue to offer a fantastic service but these local commercial radio stations are self-destructing all by themselves. Pointless links, a tiny playlist, and local content at an absolute fraction of what it was originally. I mean, who in a million years would willingly choose to listen to this station? Tell me please. I'm going back to my iPod personally... At least there will be more music and no talk. Thankfully.

Has Tim Lovejoy given Jonathan Ross ideas for his next move?

Well it had to happen sooner or later - Jonathan Ross departs the BBC. Whether he was pushed or resigned we may never know. However what was clear was that he would never again get the kind of pay packet from Auntie Beeb again. In the depths of the recession headlines such as 'Obscene' £18m pay deal for TV's Jonathan Ross (The Mail - who else?) made unpleasant reading for the BBC Governors as they munched on their Frosties in the morning.

Poor Jonathan was even getting a kicking from his presenter colleagues at the BBC. Newsreader Fiona Bruce attacked the money he was earning as "a hell of a lot". To be fair to him, he got lucky - very very lucky - and must have the best agent in town to have bagged that deal. I mean, if I was offered £6m a year would I say "No thanks chaps"? Would I hell - I'd take it with open arms. Plus another frequently neglected fact is that he also managed to get his own production companies, Open Mike and Hot Sauce, to produce many of the shows. Ross was not only in a win win situation - he was in fact in a win win win situation.

I'm not going to talk about Ross's misgivings and controversies - that's been done to death in every paper already and is frankly boring. We all know what he did and what he said. However the big question on everyone's lips is Where does Wossy go now?

Well there aren't that many channels out there with the money he commanded at the BBC. Sky One has been mentioned a lot in the news as his next destination - but in fact it's really more of a shop window for Sky Sports and Sky Movies without the big budgets the networks have to play with. ITV's worrying financial situation certainly means they won't have the ability to compete on the finances - although they would clearly welcome him back with open arms. Channel 4 and Five also will be unwilling to pay huge sums of money out - although Ross's risque personality would fit in better at Channel 4 and would probably be uncensored in the main which would help the negotiations. However, network TV is not the same anymore - the glory days of 10 million viewers will be confined to history before long. The BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and Five will be one of up to 50 Freeview channels available in every household before the year is out. And in the homes which take Sky or Virgin the number of rival channels will be in the hundreds. So TV programme budgets will most likely be cut and not increased as the battle for viewers intensifies.

So where does Wossy go? Well, clearly he's one smart guy - after all he got the biggest salary the BBC has ever paid out - so he won't be sitting on the sidelines for long. As a presenter he is a hired hand and plays to the call of the channel who hire him. However in July 2008 something rather interesting, albeit low-key, happened. Tim Lovejoy, the architect of Sky Sports legendary Soccer AM show quit to launch Channel Bee - a short-lived website he created in partnership with Spice Girls svengali Simon Fuller's 19 Entertainment. What Lovejoy realised was as a presenter he had no rights to be employed by Sky Sports, or anyone else for that matter, when his contract came to an end. He would only ever be employed there as a presenter and wanted to own a chunk of his own media. A chance meeting with Simon Fuller after he interviewed David Beckham convinced him the merits of taking ownership of a format and only when you are the brand guardian can you call the shots. Simon Cowell's production company SyCo own the rights to The X Factor and as a result they control the shots and make the real money. If Lovejoy had owned the rights to the Soccer AM format he could have sold it to numerous territories worldwide as well as being the presenter for as long as he wanted to.

So why should Jonathan Ross go to ITV or Channel 4 only to have the same shackles applied on what he can and can't say, as well as the difficulty in negotiating a new pay deal? Well I don't think he will. I think he is smarter than that - as does Simon Cowell for sure. Simon Cowell and Topshop's Philip Green are launching a global entertainment powerhouse which will be built around moulding popular culture, creating offshoots, and having concert and merchandising deals. The X Factor is just the beginning. If Cowell and Green want to start their new venture with a bang, what better personality would they want on-board as their new star presenter? Ross knows the UK TV industry intimately and brings to the table a guaranteed audience of several million viewers on any show he fronts. If you wanted to create a new global format you need someone with the calibre of Jonathan Ross just like Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? turned to Chris Tarrant when they wanted to propel the format into the big time. And yes, Tarrant was a major shareholder in the production company Celador too.

So if Jonathan Ross is smart (he is) and gets the right backer on board (he will) then the £6m a year he earned at the BBC will be dwarfed by his next pay cheque if he manages to own the next programme format either outright, or with the backing of either 19 Entertainment or SyCo. But one thing I'm pretty sure of, that he won't be a presenter on his next channel simply because he needs the work. Instead it's more likely he'll be calling more of the shots himself, plus if he has a financial stake in the format he is more likely to be careful on what he says too when we do see him. So we're all winners.

Can product placement save ITV?

It's no small understatement to say ITV is in a real mess. Their annual programme budget for 2009 was £1billion. Their total advertising revenue for 2009 was £1.2billion. It's present market capitalization is, as of today, £2.04billion. OK, to break things down their annual spend on programmes is around half the value of the company. What do they get on this in return? A £105million pre-tax loss for the first 6 months of 2009 - and I am waiting to hear on the second 6 month period in the next few days - this doesn't look too good, does it? But what is the scenario going to be like in a few years time?

The background on ITV - they still the only channel for an advertiser to reach mass-market viewers, however one can't help wondering when this will end. Conceived through the merger of Granada and Carlton, things went off to a rocky start which appeared to be a TV massacre. Heritage names, such as Granada and Tyne Tees, disappeared overnight. The brand was quickly becoming badly damaged through numerous high profile disasters - the ITV Digital collapse a year before hardly inspired much confidence in the brand to investors and advertisers. Then in the height of the phone in scandals, ITV replaced the ITV News Channel with ITV Play - a channel devoted to phone in competitions. You wonder who was making these decisions and whether they fully realized the implications of this.

I worked on the ITV merger, especially on the ITV News at Ten relaunch - the history behind the previous 50 years of news coverage was awe-inspiring. The footage on the tapes from the Vietnam war, the moon landing (note to Americans: this REALLY did happen...),Locherbie and so on was simply priceless. I watched much of it in complete silence - especially as I had the 'raw' footage and not the edited reports so got the full effect of these emotional pictures. You can't help and think back to what ITV was back in the day. Just think back to Spitting Image, Inspector Morse, The Benny Hill Show, Prime Suspect, Cracker, World In Action, The Avengers, Rising Damp, and now The South Bank Show were all ITV made programmes - alas no more. Fine Ed, things move on and channels evolve, no? Well, yes, channels do evolve but I think ITV's movement into their current programming strategy of celebrity-obsessed shows has done so much damage to the ITV name I wonder whether they can ever recover.

ITV's investments have been questionable to say the very least. They bought the Friends Reunited website for £175m in 2005 and in 4 years did pretty much nothing to it and then sold it for £25m this year. Whilst Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace for $580 in the same year it is clear to see who got the bargain and who overspent on a major scale. The problem with Friends Reunited was it was a website with a huge number of people registered to basically brag about how rich and successful you were now compared to 20 years ago. They made their money from charging you to email your friends which put people off from the start. So the majority of the registered members only ever browsed, infrequently at that, and never spent any money. ITV had a huge database of relatively social-savvy customers but never really used this to their advantage. They could rebranded Friends Reunited as a more Facebook-style site and kept people on the site for longer and incorporated programmes. But they didn't - the most drastic thing they did was to remove the pay wall so people could email for free. By which time Facebook and MySpace have already made deep inroads into the online social networking market and gave no-one a reason to go back to Friends Reunited. Just the logo alone put you off for life:

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Digital switchover is already underway and this will make before long ITV just one of many channels available to the 23 million households in the UK. When digital switchover is complete I wonder how many of the viewers will migrate over to the additional channels? The problem ITV will have is that viewers buy into brands - they know what to expect - you want news you put Sky News on, you want a movie then Film 4 will sort you out - you get my drift. ITV is very dependent on a handful of shows which give them both ratings and newspaper column inches - The X Factor and Coronation Street being the obvious two. But in a multichannel world how would things change? Well I'd expect Coronation Street would still be there will healthy ratings and make them a good profit. However The X Factor's future is less secure on ITV. Unfortunately for ITV The X Factor format is owned by Simon Cowell who could sell it to Channel 4, Five, or even Sky, so you can see how badly this would affect ITV should it happen. The point I am making is that the value in ITV is decreasing so much because the shows they owned and created are few and far between when we look back to it's glory years. When we are getting used to using catch-up services such as the BBC iPlayer and You Tube to get our TV content it will be harder for ITV to get their new shows in front of the eyes of their viewers as people are more discerning on how they spend their time. The likes of Virgin and BT Vision are already providing catch-up and VOD through the TV so the warning signs will already be flashing over at ITV's South Bank HQ as their shows start to decline at an alarming pace. Less viewers means less advertising rates can be charged onto advertisers, which in turn means less money is reinvested into new programmes and risk-taking will become a thing of the past. Everything made will be aimed to suit their advertisers and not their audience.

It's all very negative so far but there is a ray of hope. After many years of lobbying, first started by Charles Allen, the government gave in and allowed product placement making a very major U-turn on the issue. The bottom line really is that without product placement ITV would have no chance of surviving in the digital-only marketplace. The bill is still being amended and will exclude children's programmes but will be very radical in the way we watch ITV in the future.

It is expected that product placement will be worth around £30million a year to ITV and therefore will be something they simply can't do without. But what will it really be like? Well have a look at American Idol in the US:

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Advertisers such as Coca Cola, AT&T, and Ford are paying up to $35million a season each to be included in American Idol. The tune is clearly being played by the advertisers here and Fox, the US network airing the show, is clearly delighted with this arrangement. The programme will be aimed so you can fit more sponsor messages around them in future - thus affecting the credibility of the programme. I think it's a real shame that this had to happen as a viewer you want to know when you are being sold things and when you're not - product placement will make it much harder to actually tell the two apart now.

But with catch-up services and PVR's zipping through the commercials becoming everyday items in households nowadays along with the households with 5 channels being confined to history it's very clear that ITV needs a new source of income. And fast. Perhaps, just perhaps, product placement can save them...or is it just delaying the inevitable? With their share of viewership in an all-time low and fewer people watching the ads something has to give. Whatever will happen, only time will tell. This is going to get very interesting...