I almost fell off my chair when I learned this morning that Mick Perry, the semi-retired former Universal McCann vice-chairman, is to become Channel 4's new head of airtime sales. Not that Perry, a respected and able TV negotiater, is not an excellent choice for the role it's just that I'd assumed that, after spending the last three or four years doing the odd day's consultancy for his former Interpublic employers, he'd had enough of frontline media.
Perry, who has been trading TV since working at Scottish TV in the 1970s, is of a certain vintage. Indicated by Campaign's only shots of him being in black and white. He's a man from the monochrome age.
But I applaud C4's decision to hire him and its wider sales restructure which will involve the creation of teams to focus around agency groupings rather than, say, teams focusing separately on selling TV and online. Quite why it needed the services of Boston Consulting Group to tell it the frankly bleedin' obvious is hard to fathom but at least it's arrived at the correct conclusion.
As for Perry, renowned from his days at UM as a "stony-faced" negotiator not as prone to temper tantrums as some of his more volatile contemporaries, he could prove to be a key hire for C4's sales director Andy Barnes. In addition to his reputation for solidity he was also something of a UK pioneer in being the first agency TV trader in the UK to head a pooled negotiation unit (IPG launched Magna - which Perry led - in 2001, well ahead of WPP's Group M and Omnicom's OPera). His nous and knowledge of where the bones are buried and insight into how agencies operate will be of value.
It's a bit like Aegis' decision to hire the former Carlton sales director Steve Platt in reverse and shows that a career in media can indeed be a long one.
