‘Sales will never go out Scott spends more

of house. We benefit time handling

from Channel 4’s close compliance and
link with programme regulatory issues.
scheduling and sales’ He is the authority
Andy Barnes on the channel’s
history
Page 9 g This was further heightened
children when Johnson said, a tad defen-
under 10. sively, in July that the next board-
This helps room director appointed to C4
explain why would be from the creative side of

NAME:
he quit for the industry.
the BBC. Those who work closely with
At Unilever
managers are
driven to get
David Scott Lygo talk of his “visceral sense
of popular television, his almost
instinctive ability to schedule
results; it is JOB: effectively”. They say the re-
the university
of marketing, Deputy CEO arranged 4pm-6pm schedule is
his handiwork, and he is willing
just as J Walter to play hard-hitting documenta-
Thompson, which ries at 9pm, such as the Dispatches
Ofcom’s Stephen investigation into the Royal Mail.
Carter ran, is the He is clearly exercising a freer hand in programming now
university of adver- that Thompson has gone. Lygo’s blind spot is that he doesn’t
tising. always have much interest in the strands he inherits from
Duncan believes others.
several things are But the C4 programming team has clearly been doing a
not 100% right at the lot right, pre-Lygo, axing Brookside, recruiting Richard and
channel. One of the Judy, commissioning strong reality/factual strands and
early things C4 must building up drama, as the strong 4% growth in ratings and
NAME:
rnes
think through in the revenue so far this year shows.

Andy Ba
next two to three years Duncan says the BBC’s own research demonstrated that
is the further develop- C4 led on risk and distinctiveness and he reckons that Lygo
ment of Freeview and is “fantastically strong”.
free satellite. (E4, which
JOB:
l e s d i re ctor But Duncan expects his key executives to “own” the

Ad sa
is a basic pay service, is
not on Freeview but the
next new channel, More4,
aimed at older audiences,
will be.)
He says C4 will need fan-
tastic marketing and much work on the brand. Its current
strategy is quite simple: there is a mother ship, C4, and a
small family of related channels. In analogue homes, C4 has
a 13% share. In satellite homes it falls to 7% but in Freeview
homes it does much better, with a 9% share.
4Ventures, C4’s commercial wing, recently did a new,
improved deal with BSkyB for carriage and conditional
access for all channels to the end of 2007.
This, presumably, means E4 will stay as it is. Its income
split is currently 60% advertising, 40% subscription – totalling
£57m.
Free hand with commissioning
Of the top team, the person who clearly gains most from
Duncan’s appointment is Lygo, C4’s former successful con-
troller of entertainment when Ali G came along and subse-
quently director of programmes at Five.
Lygo appeared alongside Duncan at the press conference
to mark the appointment, and is key to Ofcom chairman
David Currie’s defence against the charge of downgrading
programming.
whole company’s agenda, to break out of their compart-
mentalised thinking and take a holistic view. One test will
be how flexible the current top managers are.
Premium audiences
Andy Barnes, 48, is the pragmatic and effective sales direc-
tor who joined Stewart Butterfield, C4‘s first sales director,
from the former TVS ITV franchise. Together they devised
the premium concept of 16- to 34-year-olds and upmarket,
affluent viewers, by which C4 advertising is sold. The for-
mula has delivered.
Duncan said that this strategy was absolutely correct
at his inaugural C4 press conference. “The fact it aims for
young audiences is absolutely right, it doesn’t have a remit
for universality in the same way as the BBC does… it is
more experimental, but also needs to be as broad as it can.”
The C4 sales team represents 110 of the 880 channel’s
staff. Barnes says: “Who we do a deal with, whether we do a
deal, the Channel 4 sales force can adapt itself, and its com-
puter, to take on anything”.
Some £8m has been invested in the past two years in a
powerful new system. “Sales will never go out of house. We
benefit from Channel 4’s close link with programme sched-
uling and sales.
“People have seen that by increasing programme spend-
ing you can generate more impacts”.
He says that programmers have carte blanche over mak-

10 September 2004 Television

09-11 C4 - Brown 2 5/8/04, 8:28 am