Why Minder won't be a nice little earner for Five

Five's decision to bring back Minder is not for nostalgic reasons - in fact it smacks of desperation.

Minder was one of the TV shows that made the decision of the Government to strip Thames Television of its broadcasting licence all the more tragic. It harks back to ITV's glory days of the 80s - well-acted, brilliantly scripted - and more innovative (and sometimes edgy) than its pantomime pastiche of a rival on the BBC, Only Fools and Horses.

Which is why Five's decision to remake this classic looks all the more misguided; quite how Five with its miniscule programming budget (most of which it has committed to Neighbours, which it is now forced to flog to death) thinks it can make a credible version of this TV classic is absurd. Which, I suppose, is why they've had to hire Shane Ritchie to star as Archie Daley, Arthur's nephew.

I'll give it one series. If you want to watch Minder, the only place to find it is repeated on ITV4.

Burnham: U-turn if you want to....the coffee's not for drinking

After a strident attack on product placement last month when he appeared to rule out its introduction, saying that it would ‘contaminate' the editorial integrity of programmes, culture secretary Andy Burnham appears to be about to do a U-turn.

Speaking to a newspaper he now says that he is now open to persuasion that the benefits outweigh the negatives. Although this is welcome news to broadcasters and advertisers, this is obviously what he should have done in the first place before making such intemperate statements.

It is now up to the broadcasters and the wider marketing industry to put their case and they'd be sensible to rule-out a practice that has emerged in the US on an LA affiliate of Fox News (natch). On top of the desks of its news anchors as they present the morning news are two cups of McDonald's-branded coffee, albeit filled with a bogus liquid and fake ice cubes to prevent them melting under the light.

While no one would really mind if, as ITV's Rupert Howell has quite rightly argued, that the brand name Barbour instead of the generic term ‘waxed jacket' appeared in Emmerdale, the thought of Jon Snow on Channel 4 News sat there with a fake Frappuccino on his desk would probably make Burnham go 360-degrees.

The Hits becomes 4Music; but what is to become of 4Radio?

Channel 4's rebranding of its joint-venture channel with Bauer, The Hits, as 4Music was finally confirmed today.

While congratulations are in order to those readers who remember reading this first in the pages of Marketing earlier this year, what is more interesting is the reason Channel 4 has finally decided to formally announce the decision and go ahead with the change.

Initially, the rationale behind the rebadging was to extend its extant 4Music brand, which it uses for music strands on C4 and E4, was to create a music TV platform in order to promote its DAB 4Radio venture. However 4Radio has subsequently been riven with delays and uncertainty since GCap Media shut its DAB-only stations throwing the future of the platform into question.

This change shows Channel 4's commitment to DAB radio, the first stations of which are scheduled to launch this autumn. Given the grim state of the radio ad market, the poor reach of DAB-only stations and Channel 4's plea of poverty, the timing is at best odd, and at worst shows a lack of judgment.

The COI or the BBC - not both.

Does the COI expect to be congratulated for ‘increasing its turnover' by nearly 16%, while most UK companies are cutting costs, staff and issuing profit warnings in the face of declining spend?

According to the COI's annual report, the Government department increased its ad spend by £21m - or 15% - to £157m while spend on every other area, including research, PR, sponsorship and events also enjoyed double-digit percentages hike in spend as the COI's ‘clients' gave it more cash to squander. The only area where the COI sought to cut back was in publications, down 2.3%, although this still accounted for over £30m of public funds.

If this was a revenue-generating British company it would be a tremendous success story. But it's not, and as economic times get tougher the more it sticks in the craw.

But there are clear savings to be made that will help the hard-pushed taxpayer - why a large part of the COI's spend TV and radio (which was up 29% to nearly £18m) can be scrapped immediately and the BBC made to run the ads instead of paying for them to go on commercial media. The BBC is keen to accentuate its public-service roots in order to protect its monopoly on the licence fee while the COI will also find the reach of its campaigns will increase while members of the public will hardly notice the change given the number of promos it already runs, as well as being better off. Everybody wins.

Happy birthday Walker Media

Mortlake, Barnes and Hampstead must have resembled ghost towns as the middle-classes amassed at Chiswick House last Thursday for the House Festival, probably the most sophisticated music festival going. It was appropriate, then, that Walker Media, a classy outfit if ever there was one, chose to host its tenth birthday celebrations there.

The journey that Walker Media has gone is remarkable by any standards and it is to the credit of the tenacity of the founding partners Phil Georgiadis and, the now sadly absent, Christine Walker that they have managed to build a media agency of considerable scale and more importantly with an intelligent planning-led positioning where others have failed (and apparently continue to do so).

The festival itself resembled something like the West Car Park at Twickenham but with better food - Red Wedge it certainly was not. Funds from the event were used to help restore the conservatory rather than going towards striking miners, and rather than shouting obscenities, the most contentious statement came from Sophie Ellis-Bextor who challenged the audience to beat her husband's feat of eating more than four lobsters. But all this seemed to fit Walker Media's unique positioning as a more sophisticated media agency.

Ofcom broadcast report: plenty of hubris but no hair-shirts

Ofcom's Broadcast Bulletin, published today, provides scant evidence that the media industry has gone anywhere near managing to clean up its act after the hand-wringing following the PRTS debacle of last year.

GMTV, STV and Westcountry TV are all censured for failing to adhere to sponsorship regulations, with Nestle breaching clear rules that sponsorship credits should not carry explicit advertising messages in its sponsorship of GMTV Weather in March this year and Flybe doing the same on STV and Westcountry TV's weather broadcasts.

ITV is also admonished for broadcasting profanities, including the strongest one that begins with the letter ‘C' that went out at 9.25am in the pre-recorded Jeremy Kyle Show, and by transmitting the word ‘***' in Rock Rivals, show that compliance is nowhere near as rigorous as it should be.

Perhaps the most shocking transgression, however, was from the Christian TV channel Passion TV, where viewers were offered ‘free' Miracle Spring Water that could aid healing. Although the sachet was ostensibly free, recipients were subsequently subjected to a mail-shot campaign pressing for financial payment. Not very Christian to those who are most likely to be vulnerable viewers.

If Passion TV, ITV, GMTV, CGap Media as well as C4 and the BBC, which are not mentioned in the report but are all guilty of sins against their audience, really want to show that they have undergone a Damascene conversion, then perhaps they could borrow an idea from Thomas a Beckett and don a hair-shirt.

Does anyone really get anything from Touchpoints?

In his column in last week's Marketing, our media columnist Ray Snoddy made some digs at the volume and quality of, usually self-serving, research that emanates from trade bodies.

Some may have thought it unkind but it is understandable why these bodies churn out this stuff - it's their job to try and attract increased spend and, viewed with a healthy degree of scepticism, there are very occasionally the odd nugget of useful information in them. And, even if they contain nothing of interest, they are not the basis for any form of trading so are harmless enough.

But what are we meant to make of the IPA's Touchpoints survey, of which the latest tranche of research emerged today? 'Insights' such as younger people are driving the adoption of digital media and that the BBC dominated our media consumption are hardly revelatory and contribute little to our understanding of the shifting sands of consumer behaviour.

This, cobbled together with snippets of information about various apparently random and general lifestyle information such as travelling -‘overall, we are travelling less by bicycle' - and family - ‘57% of adults think looking after a family is the most satisfying job that a person could do' means that personally I can't find much in it of use.

Luke Johnson's book of quotes

So now we all know what Luke Johnson got for Christmas; a book of quotations by famous people.

Johnson, Channel 4 chairman and one of the few people, along with Stelios, to be inevitably granted the irritating epithet ‘serial entrepreneur’, was guest speaker at today’s ISBA annual lunch and attendees cannot have failed to have been impressed by the way the he managed to shoehorn into his speech on ‘success’ an endless stream of quotes from different people.

Certainly it was amazing how he managed to cobble together a speech that seemed to rely on quotes from sources as diverse as Walter Bagehot, Teddy Roosevelt (‘my favourite US president’), Dr Johnson and virtually any other person who committed their thoughts to paper, that all had a vague relevance – with the right interpretation - to achieving and sustaining success.

While there is no doubt that as a businessman, Johnson has undoubtedly enjoyed success. But whether he lives his life and runs his businesses – not least Channel 4 – by these mantra I’m not so sure. It would have been nice if he’d put the book of quotes away and given us some real insight. But then the fact that he called ISBA the 'I. S. B. A'. showed that perhaps he wasn’t that interested in the first place.