In an interview published yesterday on BusinessSpectator.com.au, the nation’s number one business website for people who like to watch, current Network Ten boss and the man with the most thankless job in the country, Hamish McLennan, has elaborated on the well documented programming blunders made by his predecessors in an act one could loosely describe as finding a long-dead cadaver underneath a school bus then throwing that corpse under another bus until it evaporated into dust, shame and nothing.
Those blunders which are making his job super hard to do right now? The pursuit of Gen Y eyeballs which aren’t even watching free to air television anyway, shonky programming, and a move away from sport.
McLennan says:
“Look, we historically have gone for a 16 to 39-year-old demographic. It was adjusted to 18 to 49-year-olds. But the simple fact was that the orientation of the business was focused around the youth market and statistically if you just look at the numbers, the biggest body of viewers – and the most profitable body of viewers – are 25 to 54-year-olds. But we were chasing a market that was just declining in overall numbers and we were producing shows like Being Lara Bingle, I Will Survive and The Shire that were alienating our older consumers, and those kids don’t watch free-to-air television the way perhaps we did when we were young. There’s not a lot of money to actually capture them anymore – they’re ripping stuff off the net and watching YouTube. They just don’t consume free-to-air television the way they used to. We were just chasing the wrong demographic.
Interestingly, when you look at some of the shows that had worked very well for us in the past – like Masterchef – the viewers were falling well into the 25 to 54-year-old demographic and picking up a wider pool of people. We were chasing the wrong demographic and we had the wrong shows – hence the wrong strategy. Now putting the focus back on programming like live sport, I can’t underestimate the value of things like the cricket, which we’ve secured at the right sort of price as we did with the Winter Olympics. It’s live programming that doesn’t get PVR’d (recorded on personal video recorders).
At its core Ten still has very good roots. Its DNA is very, very strong. I’m impressed by the quality of people, we’ve just got to reorientate the ship around a more profitable market and that market is 25 to 54-year-olds. And let’s not forget too that we also launched our digital channel, Channel 11, which was also cannibalising the mother ship, which was Ten. So we had strategically two channels that were fighting against each other with even more fierce competition and it wasn’t working for us.”
He also notes that “we’ve inherited some programming which will take time to work out of the system,” which, correct us if we’re wrong, sounds a lot like the description of a bowel movement.
In other words…
