Evidence has emerged from the Competition Commission's inquiry into the Contract Rights Renewal (CRR) mechanism that ITV may have misled clients over the effectiveness of advertising on the network.
In appendix D of the Competition Commission's report, titled "Quality of Impacts", the commission alights on the stark differences between what ITV told its clients – while trying to talk up the singularity of advertising around "event" programmes on ITV – and what it subsequently told the commission while trying to argue the opposite.
In paragraph eight, entitled "Event TV", the commission notes: "In 2008, ITV developed the concept of event TV. ITV's marketing presentations observed that certain programmes were watched by a higher proportion of viewers with a greater degree of 'engagement' with the programme (so-called 'true fans'), which in turn indicated a greater engagement with the programme's advertising content and thus a higher propensity to purchase the product or service being advertised. The presentation noted that ITV1 showed the majority of event TV programmes across almost every genre."
In the next paragraph, however, the CC reveals what ITV told them in the course of their enquiry into CRR: "ITV told us that this research was only undertaken for marketing purposes, that it had significant methodological flaws and that ITV used the results that are most favourable to ITV. ITV submitted that many of the results of its research in fact showed that, when compared with other commercial channels, ITV1 did not have a more engaged audience nor was there any specific sales uplift attributable to ITV1. Further ITV told us that ITV1 did not fare well in terms of 'water-cooler' moments as viewers who strongly like ITV1 are also least likely to say that TV gives them something to talk about."
The contrast between the two versions of events might go some way to explaining why, at almost every turn of the argument, the Competition Commission noted the case put forward by ITV but was not for the most part convinced by it.
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