Should advertisers support ITV during recession?

In these difficult times, ITV wants advertisers to think of its predicament. But does it need, or deserve, special treatment?

Don't panic. One day the advertising industry will get around to dealing with its Corporal Jones. Or Joneses. There's more than one of them about. As any semiologist will tell you, Corporal Jones has become a British cultural icon for the disjunction between sign and signifier, form and content, the medium and the message. Saying one thing and doing another.

Corporal Joneses should be fairly easy to spot. They're the ones telling people that they're prepared to put their house or houses on a hunch that the UK economy will only be mildly touched, if touched at all, by recession, while at the same time laying off the future of their agencies. They're the ones telling their clients that companies which maintain a commitment to marketing through the tough times will emerge from a recession in the finest fettle. While preparing to decimate their account teams.

And (no, really, don't panic) they're absolutely right. In their belief in brinkmanship. In their assumption that recessions trigger the most significant changes in any given pecking order. There's never a better time for number two to try harder or for number three to bust a gut.

Ironically, perhaps, the organisation that realises this most clearly as the recession approaches (or, don't panic, perhaps doesn't approach) is perhaps the least well-placed to do anything about it. Not an advertiser, not an agency, but a broadcaster. An aggressive, sometimes arrogant broadcaster -- the industry's equivalent of the German national football team (and one that is also suffering from a similarly humiliating defeat). Also known as ITV.

Last week its programming boss, David Liddiment, certainly wasn't panicking. But he was asking advertisers to think long and hard about the long-term implications of their continuing failure to invest in ITV during these troubled times. Network sources argue that ITV is continuing to suffer disproportionately within the broadcast market. They want advertisers to stop using the current situation to settle old scores. Because if ITV is wounded too deeply, much of its unique offering -- big peaktime audiences, quality programming environments--may be lost.

But are they right? Sort of, John Blakemore, the UK advertising director of Glaxo SmithKline, admits. He says: "In one respect Liddiment's right--we all have to be concerned about the quality of the television medium and one of the possible consequences of the situation is that at some point we'll see lower investment in programming."