Predictably enough the appointment of - shock, horror - a marketing man, Tim Davie, as the BBC's director of audio and music has brought the usual whingeing from the broadcasting elite that the job should have gone to someone with a ‘creative' background.
As well as being utter rubbish, I think this is rather offensive. While I certainly hold no brief for Davie, it shows that in the media fraternity generally, and the bitchy world of TV in particular, marketing is still viewed with a large degree of disdain, if not revulsion, among programme makers.
Any hope that Andy Duncan's elevation to the chief executive of Channel 4 would have proved this clique wrong, has sadly not come to pass. Perhaps this is indicative of the current malaise in media, where marketing is viewed as a function rather than a creative art in its own right. If marketing isn't about conceptual alchemy then I don't know what is; creativity is certainly not the preserve of people who ‘make' things, whether listeners and viewers are interested in them or not.
