Break out

LONDON - Hailed by some as the future of television, and by others as the end of programme quality, advertiser-funded TV production is experiencing a boost from an unlikely source: central government.

COI Communications, the executive agency that advises government departments and related agencies on how best to spend their marketing money, has developed In Good Company, a four-part series that will air on ITV1 in peaktime from next Thursday. It is the fourth COI-backed TV series on British television in recent months. The format may sound familiar - four struggling businesses are teamed with well-known business mentors who assess how they could do better - but the programme's evolution is a model that a growing number of advertisers now hope to emulate. In Good Company was conceived and paid for by Investors in People (IiP) to spread its message - that business success comes from investing in people.

Working with the COI, IiP approached the media specialist Drum and the production company Enteraction TV to create the programme format. This was then offered to and accepted by ITV. In return for funding and developing the series, IiP will be credited within the programme titles and use the programme as the centrepiece of a promotional campaign. "We considered broadcast sponsorship and conventional TV advertising but they were either too costly or unable to deliver the message we needed to convey," IiP's director of marketing Nicola Maine explains.

Another significant public sector funder of TV programmes is the National Blood Service. It paid for and conceived Blood Matters, a factual series about blood donation among different ethnic groups which has just aired on Channel 4. And it was also behind two daytime factual series, Lifeblood and Extra Time, both of which recently went out on Five.

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