Ben Ayers

An ace Hugh Macleod cartoon

In the summer I left the ample bosom of ITV Publicity to join the broadcaster’s corporate communications team. Communications director Mark Gallagher gave me the perfect opportunity to channel my enthusiasm for all things web into the corporate engine room of ITV by appointing me as PR Manager for what was then ITV Consumer. I’d be working to Sophy Silver, the head of Press who had just joined ITV from Gumtree.

A lot as happened in the last six months. Sophy and I set about creating a clear ‘messaging matrix’ for the division which would prioritise messaging according to its importance to the business. It would help to strengthen and refine what we say about the core businesses while also improving their visibility to the trade, corporate and, perhaps most importantly, consumer press. Shortly after arriving Sophy had seen an opportunity to promote the phenomenal growth of video across ITV’s portfolio of sites. A press release trumpeting the growth was picked up everywhere and showed that the appetite for news about the web properties of the UK’s largest commercial broadcaster was there. It just wasn’t being too well fed.

Although I was also working on ITV Mobile, ITV Interactive, ITV Local and Price Terrier, it was ITV.com that took up most of my energy.

I set about getting under the bonet of the site in order to understand what the team were up to. As it happens, they were up to a lot. And over the last six months there’s been no shortage of stories to tell. Improvements to the site and the popularity of the big shows has meant that video take up and user numbers really started to take off in early Autumn.  In November page impressions for The X Factor section were up by 267% year on year and I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here! was running an impressive 211% increase in video views compared to  last year.

Overall the site has doubled users since the relaunch in August 2007 and monthly video views reached 15.7m in November, up 598% year-on-year.

A month ago acting head Dominic Cameron was appointed MD of the site, with former BBC web ace Kate Bradshaw adding deputy MD to her title of head of online commissioning.

Marc Webber, the excellent head of content, has continued to refine the editorial team, culminating recently with the appointment of Tom Kenyon from the BBC to head up the soaps and drama coverage - a great move as the soaps will play a big part in the success of the site going forwards.

About a month ago we learned of the decision to bring ITV’s website into the Channels part of the business. It made sense and I was pleased as for a long time I have thought that if the website is to become the place for fans to engage and immerse themselves in a programme brand, then it needs to be part of the programme making process, not a separate floating entity. This move will also no doubt bring ITV.com closer to other parts of ITV that will help propel it forward, like publicity and marketing.

A rebrand of the catch up service to ITV Player makes sense, as do the changes being implemented under Project Penguin which guided by the mantra ‘fewer, bigger, better’ will see the site evolve into a more social, immersive experience for users focussed around key ‘pillars’.

In terms of online PR, ITV’s efforts have gone from strength to strength. We worked hard to promote our football content to fans and bloggers, engaging in a genuine two-way conversation, which has gone down well. ITV press site editor and blogger Gary Andrews has been great at moving this along, due in no small part to the fact that he is a genuine fan and writes for Soccerlens. We have seen the football section triple its users while the brilliant FA Cup initiative has received praise from far and wide.

We have continued to engage journalists and fans of ITV content on a regular basis via the ITVinsider Twitter feed which is followed by TV bloggers, critics from the national newspapers and even analysts.

The I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here! Twitter feed was also a big hit, generating some great feedback and, combined with a Facebook fan page which hit 68,000 fans, helped to fuel excitement around the show.

We have continued to explore various ways of measuring the online buzz around our shows, conducting some in-depth analysis around Britannia High with Nielsen and exploring the buzz around the ITV brand with Mediagen, our news monitoring service. They’ve been experimenting with some excellent tools.

We have continued with the social media news release though in the long term I suspect that the ever-improving online press centre will take away the need for SMNRs being handled externally (though Webit PR provide an excellent service).

In the early new year Gary and I will be holding some social media workshops for the ITV publicity department where we’ll focus on some of the big shows coming up, giving examples of the best tools to use to reach out to fans. There are a couple of exciting plans in this area which I’ll be sharing when I can.

A key strength going forward is the alignment of myself with the editor of ITV’s PR website (and social media whizz) Gary and the brand marketers for ITV’s websites – it’s a good example of PR and marketing working hand in glove as they should. We, in turn, work closely with the analytics, search and research brainboxes on the web side, meaning we can be smart when it comes to campaigns.

Add into the mix a programme publicity department equipped to promote our web based content on and offline and a more social website in 2009 and we should have a pretty tasty recipe for increasing users and engagement with fans of ITV’s big shows.

With a rocky year ahead and ad spend forecast to be seriously down, PR is going to be more important than ever in fighting for attention and helping users discover what we have to offer.

With the ongoing drama of Kangaroo and the various discussions around video-on-demand partnerships it really is going to be one hell of a year.

So here’s to 2009 - a year of challenges…and opportunities.