TV Industry looks to launch trade marketing body for both commercial and pay-TV
Australia about to get an industry body along the lines of Thinkbox.
The major Australian television networks are looking to launch a new trade marketing body that would promote the power of the television medium.
The move would see the free-to-air and pay-TV networks put aside their traditional rivalries in an effort to create an organisation similar to Thinkbox in the UK.
“We are always looking at better ways to market television as we have a great story to tell,” Julie Flynn CEO of FreeTV told Mumbrella this morning.
From the ‘better late than never’ department… This is a very smart move. However, it will require a greater degree of collaboration than we’ve seen so far in the case of Freeview, which has never really achieved the hoped-for outcomes. The fact that the top 25 most popular FTA programs last year were all local is a clue that Netflix is not invincible. A local version of Thinkbox would be a timely response.
Remember the Television Bureau of Advertising? Plu ca change…
Yes, it’s a good idea but perhaps the answers aren’t really that elusive… let’s face it, what other industry could dream of survival whilst treating its “customers” with such disdain? The industry has been hiding behind the “viewers aren’t our customers” mantra for so long it has forgotten the fundamentals of customer service and the ‘trust’ or ‘promise’ once implied. Free to Air’s EPG is close to useless, weekend newspapers no longer carry weekly schedules and daily newspapers simply don’t reach the market so viewers miss the programmes they want to watch and are deliberately mislead by improper descriptions of others. Traditionally, Foxtel made hey over the Summer hiatus but this year, presumably due to lack of competition, instead of the usual two hour repeat channels, it chose to repeat the same programming on several channels and repeats those two hours later. At least in their case, they probably knew what they were doing and we should assume they were keeping their powder dry for ‘close to first broadcast dates’ for new US and UK content. FTA has been in deserved decline for most of this century; despite the excuses, it didn’t need to happen and, if they don’t wake up and treat viewers with something resembling respect, they deserve all the misery they get. Remember the old radio adage; “You don’t win audiences, you only send them away,” well most of that also applies to TV.
No doubt a good idea but getting this disparate group together will be like trying to herd cats in the rain.
TV does have a good story to tell but until they stop copying each others programs, programming against each other, ignoring viewers and generally fighting among themselves they haven’t a chance.