Channel 4 is to start bids to sponsor The Great British Bake Off at as much as £8m as advertisers salivate at the prospect of cooking up the first commercial relationship with the biggest show on UK TV.
The broadcaster has its work cut out to recoup a reported £75m in a three-year deal for up to 40 hours of programming a year, including professional and celebrity specials, with potential for spin-off shows beyond the current 10-hour run of the main programme.
Last week, ITV’s director of television, Kevin Lygo, said Channel 4 had paid for “baking powder and a tent” by failing to secure the full current star line-up in its deal to take the show off the BBC.
“There will be all sorts of stuff like ‘8 Out Of 10 Cats does Bake Off’ to squeeze more value from it,” said one TV industry executive.
The final of the seventh series of The Great British Bake Off is due to air on the BBC on Wednesday.
The show won’t move to Channel 4 until 2018, unless a contractual issue between its maker Love Productions and the BBC is resolved, but advertisers are understood to be queuing up already for commercial tie-ups with the show.
Channel 4 has not yet officially gone to the market to offer the headline sponsorship, but if a bidding war were to ensue it could potentially eclipse the approximately £10m a year TalkTalk pays to sponsor The X Factor.
“We have a number of clients hugely interested in Bake Off and I can see there being a bun fight for the prime sponsorship,” said one senior executive at a top UK media agency. “It could go for as much as, or more than, X Factor, because there is a much wider, and obvious, range of potential big sponsors for a cooking show than for a general entertainment show.”
A deal of £8m-plus would make Bake Off one of the most expensive broadcast sponsorship deals on UK TV, particularly given that it is a weekly show, with only one or two programmes such as Coronation Street, which airs five days a week, fetching significantly more.
Even with only Paul Hollywood signing up for the move to Channel 4 – Mary Berry and co-hosts Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins have ruled out a move, and the popular winner Nadiya Hussain recently ended speculation that she might join by pledging to remain with the BBC – Bake Off will be Channel 4’s biggest brand.
It could be the most monetisable franchise for Channel 4 since it axed Big Brother in 2009.
The 2015 final of Bake Off, won by Hussain, attracted a record audience of more than 13 million viewers, making it the highest rating show of the year. The final of The X Factor, won by Louisa Johnson, was the second lowest ever recorded in the 11-year history of the show with 8.4 million.
Channel 4 is likely to see a huge fall-off in viewers when the show moves, but media industry sources believe the broadcaster can probably get the overall format to “wash its face” with as few as 3 million viewers on average for the main show.
Many observers believe it is likely to hit 4 or 5 million, putting it on a par with, or slightly ahead of, Channel 4’s biggest rating show, Gogglebox.
“On top of the ad revenue received directly on Bake Off the show will create a ‘halo effect’ on the rest of the schedule,” said one senior media industry executive. “Clearly Channel 4 can trade on this and generate more revenue. Obviously the key variable is the audience. Losing all presenters bar Paul Hollywood is a blow. If viewing drops too far then it begins to look a much less attractive deal.”
