More imagination needed to make ad-funded shows work

The industry needs to rethink the way that TV is traded, while production companies must change the way they work with advertisers and broadcasters to make advertiser-funded programming work, delegates at this year’s Edinburgh TV Festival were told.

Agency and broadcaster heads attending the festival urged production companies to include advertisers in programming conversations from the outset and to stop bombarding marketing directors with poor ideas.

Advertiser-funded programming – often just called AFP – is still expected to be huge by the broadcasting fraternity, despite the fact that the industry has been discussing and exploring the concept for a number of years with few actual examples to show for it.

“We’ve got a media spend that needs to work a lot harder,” Stewart Mison, managing director of marketing agency Octogan, told delegates. He warned that, unless TV started to deliver better value for advertisers, brands will move elsewhere.

US broadcaster Discovery Networks, which makes $3bn in revenue annually, expects a third of that to come from AFP over the next five years, according to third-party speakers at the “How to Get Cash from Advertisers” session.

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