Celebrity Big Brother ad revenue in peril from E4 switch

Monday December 24 2007

Celebrity Big Brother's move to E4 next month as a temporary "safety valve" to protect the programme following this year's racism row and could cost the programme at least 30% in ad revenue, according to media buyers.

The decision to move the programme to digital channel E4 in January and change its format was born from a need to "rest" the CBB format after the Shilpa Shetty racism scandal, but one media buyer has criticised the move as "landfill" programming in place of a more permanent solution.

Channel 4 wants to refresh the programme, avoid controversy, but also honour its three-year deal with Endemol to air two series per year.

Advertising on E4 is at least 30% cheaper than on the main Channel 4 network and audiences are guaranteed to be somewhere between 33% and 50% smaller, according to media buyers.

"Channel 4 will sustain audience decline year-on-year, it is inevitable because Celebrity Big Brother ironically did really well, for all the wrong reasons, but the reality is that Channel 4 wants to get the summer right," said the director of one media planning and buying agency.

"This is like a test, a safety valve, to protect a key audience year-on-year. However I think that it is a landfill rather than a solution, it is not an alternative [to CBB]".

In commercial terms, Big Brother on Channel 4 means mass audiences that equate to sizeable revenues from advertisers keen to reach the valuable, youthful fan base, but this scenario cannot be replicated by running a version on smaller digital channel E4.

From a narrow, commercial point of view, the Shilpa Shetty racism row in last year's Celebrity Big Brother was a success for Channel 4 - the departure of Carphone Warehouse as sponsor notwithstanding.

"Big Brother is a very important show for Channel 4 and the network, it is very popular with a core part of our audience," said a spokesman for Channel 4. "We felt that airing it on E4 is a good way to refresh the format and have more fun with it".

The programme will be refreshed partly by a change of team - the E4 version will have a largely different from the crew from the flagship summer series.

In the new format, Big Brother: Celebrity Hijack, celebrities will act as Big Brother for a group of 18- to 24-year-old housemates.

Scandal aside, the key audience who tuned into CBB last year was usually between 2 million and 3 million says the media buyer, and E4 will be doing well to capture 1 million per show in January.

One media buyer said that the move to E4 would help Channel 4's long-term strategic move to continue to build the star performer of Channel 4's digital portfolio.

"Being on E4 is part of a strategy to make E4 well developed in the digital world," argues Chris Hayward, the head of investment at ZenithOptimedia.

"It may not be as developed as the main channel but it is becoming increasingly important, over the next five years the strategy has to be to make the family of digital channels as strong as can be".

ZenithOptimedia predicts that the "digital offshoots" of ITV, Channel 4 and Channel Five will account for 21% of total ad revenues by 2012, up from 10% last year and just 2% in 2002.

E4's ad revenues have experienced near 20% year-on-year growth since 2006 climbing from £81.6m to a forecast £115m by the end of next year.

To underline the importance of the channel within Channel 4's overall digital portfolio, which includes channels such as More4 and Film4, total ad revenue is predicted to be £144m this year and up 20% to £171m by the end of 2008.