“Know your audience, know your competitors.” That’s the succinct view of Channel 5’s Ben Frow about how to succeed in commercial television.
Frow, the UK chief content officer at Paramount, has overseen five successive years of audience-share growth at C5 as the channel, whose ad sales are managed by Sky Media, continues to punch above its weight alongside more celebrated free-to-air competitors.
“It’s a very different channel to what it used to be but we always say ‘we’re of the people for the people’,” added Frow during a fireside chat that kicked off the recent Campaign TV Ad Summit. Last year, when accepting a Royal Television Society fellowship, Frow described the audience as “the great love of my life”.
Loud and proud
Frow first joined C5 in 2004 from Channel 4 where he commissioned hits such as Location, Location, Location and How Clean Is Your House?. He returned to the channel in 2012 and clearly revels in the challenge of trying to deliver to an audience who are not “Guardian-reading, young, metropolitan and too cool for school”.
“We’re ‘old ITV’, very regional, very family-orientated, but with a big dash of BBC2 through it,” explained Frow. “We’re increasingly upmarket. And we’re increasingly driven by house people with children.”
Channel 5’s broad slate does not include reality shows (Frow cancelled Big Brother) but has a bedrock of consumer shows (Lidl vs Fortnum & Mason; Bargain-Loving Brits in the Sun), history (Jay Blades: The Midlands Through Time), travel (Cruising with Jane Macdonald; Michael Palin in North Korea). The mix also includes police and medical factual entertainment shows, children’s programmes and drama.
But Frow feels the channel has not been bullish enough about its offering nor its success. “I don’t think we’ve shouted enough about Channel 5,” he said. “The day I started, I was very clear: we can be a big digital channel or we can be the public service broadcaster that we are and take on Channel 4. Last year we beat Channel 4 one day in every three.”
Linear lives on
“It’s a numbers game,” said Frow. “To me, it’s about the bums on seats. It’s about smart pricing, impacts and revenue. Why does TV still matter? Because you can still reach millions and millions of people.”
And while our TV-watching habits are fragmenting across digital channels, Frow believes linear still has an unmatched power to deliver big audiences. “Linear television is on fire! We’ve seen some of the biggest audiences across ours and our competitors’ linear portfolios of recent years with our competitors have had some of their biggest audiences of recent years with Mr Bates vs the Post Office (ITV), The Traitors (BBC), Gladiators (BBC).
“It used to be just about the overnights but now you look at consolidation and the seven-day catch-up and also how it performs across the portfolio because there’s life beyond the initial showing.”
Frow admitted that Channel 5 had been “slightly behind the curve in terms of pivoting completely to our BVOD offering.” However, My5 is set to combine with Pluto TV later this year, creating a single advertising-supported platform for the UK market with a new user experience spanning BVOD, FAST, AVOD, and Live TV. Campaign covered this here.
AFP: open to ideas
Ad-funded programming (AFP) is a hot topic for obvious reasons. “Everyone’s looking at making more for less or how we can spend less of our own money by bringing a partner on board to enable us to make the content we want to make.”
The key to a successful AFP partnership, Frow says, is for a commissioner or content person like him to be in the room with a brand and thrash out mutually beneficial ideas from scratch, rather than receiving a brief or wish-list with unreasonable or impractical ambitions.
“Ask the brand what their criteria are,” he said. “What do they need from this pot of money? Give me a week and I’ll come up with three ideas that I think will reflect what they are trying to do. So we’re both on a journey together rather than a ‘push me, pull you’.”
One AFP success story for Channel 5 was Halifax's sponsorship of The Sunday Times ‘Best Places to Live’, a two-hour special presented by Fern Britton, Ore Oduba and Sunetra Sarker, that aired in May last year. It was Halifax's first AFP and built on their existing partnership with The Sunday Times.
Ads and the triangle of life
“I’ve always thought that part of my job, whether I like it or not, is to go out and tell the story,” said Frow. “I welcome the chance to clear up any misconceptions about who, and what we are, what we’re good at and why people should spend money with us, and how we can work closely with advertisers in order to have more impact – creatively, inspirationally, educationally.”
Frow depicted the relationship between content and commercial as ‘the circle of life’ or, more specifically, the triangle of life where content, marketing and audience feed off each other. “The idea is to reach as many people as possible in order to make as much money as possible in order to make more content. It’s very, very simple and I bring it all back down to that.”
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