Media Week

So ITV’s director of television Simon Shaps has finally been forced to fall on his sword in a similar fashion to the departure of the broadcaster’s commercial director Ian McCulloch last year.

Both had served the broadcaster for significant lengths of time - more than 25 years - and both were expected to find their positions under threat when Michael Grade arrived back at ITV as executive chairman at the beginning of last year. Both were also said to have made their own decisions to move on and to have left the broadcaster on amicable terms, with ITV saying goodbye to McCulloch in May last year.

At around that time, Grade said Shaps was having an impact and that the end of 2008 would be the right time to judge him. And when I interviewed Grade for Media Week TV last September, he said: "I don't think Simon Shaps has ever had anyone to talk to who really understands the creative business. I can talk to the talent for him if he wants me to." But, despite having this new "mentor" to call on, Shaps is departing less than six months later.

In Rupert Howell, Dawn Airey and Shaps’ replacement Peter Fincham (displaying an impressive comeback from his Crowngate difficulties at the BBC last year), Grade has pretty much got his own team in place now. There is no-one else left to blame if the broadcaster’s next tranche of programming efforts don’t find more favour with the viewing public.

The ABC has introduced a monthly multi-platform report that measures newspaper print circulations and website unique user figures in a single report.

Latest ABCe figures show that the Daily Mail is continuing to exponentially increase the amount of traffic it attracts to its web site.

This is despite the fact that the Mail only launched a significant online presence in 2004, a lifetime in web years after The Guardian.

Apparently, the Mail is making excellent use of search engine optimisation to entice traffic from all over the world to its site. So if a big international story breaks, such as actor Heath Ledger committing suicide, the Mail is high up the search engines and garners more than its fair share of global traffic for a story such as this.

Smart strategy, and one that seems to be paying off big time for the team from Derry Street that came to the internet party relatively late in the day.

It proves once again that the Holy Grail of first-mover advantage that was trumpeted to the high heavens in the dotcom era is not necessarily the be-all and end-all of building a successful online business strategy.

The world's population is increasing at about 1% a year, which leads geographers to speculate that the number of human beings running around the globe will double in around 60 years.

But while the global population grows inexorably larger, the world is actually becoming a smaller place, and the influence that far-flung regions such as Asia have on the economy - and especially the media economy - is increasing as fast as the world shrinks.

China is readying itself for this summer's Olympics, which will act as a virtual coming-out party for the major economic force of the 21st century. India's economy is also booming, driven by the services and technology sectors. And the oil and tourism-generated boom in Arabia is adding further fuel to the shift in the tectonic plates of the global economy.

In this context, the US, engulfed in an inward focus on its presidential election and continuing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, is almost in danger of becoming a forgotten backwater in the scheme of things - an exaggeration maybe, but America is certainly going to face stiff competition in remaining the world's foremost economic superpower.

What's this got to do with the UK, and specifically the UK media industry, I hear you ask? Around 20% of the world's global media operations are centred on London, so our capital plays a pivotal role in reflecting, shaping and responding to the changes outlined above. A lot of this work goes on in isolation, as international arms of media agency groups operate largely independently of the home operations. But rather than this "never the twain shall meet" approach, progressive media businesses will recognise the global nature of our business and the opportunities that are opening up.

English is still the business language of choice around the world and British media professionals are among the most skilled, adaptable and valued - hence why so many are already plying their trade productively abroad. This trend is only set to continue, which opens up opportunities for media people who want to spread their wings and spend time working overseas. But it also opens up new horizons for those progressive media planners who recognise early the way the new shape of the global economy is going to change all our lives.

Am I the only one who finds it thoroughly depressing that ITV's dual programming venture Moving Wallpaper and Echo Beach was beaten in the ratings by Alex Zane's web clips compilation broadcast on C4 in the 9 o'clock slot last Friday night?

Moving Wallpaper and Echo Beach is a brave, genuinely funny and innovative programming venture by ITV that would be lauded to the high heavens if it had been imported from a trendy US producer, rather than being home-grown.

Rude Tube was a rehashed bunch of stuff from the web that most people have seen dozens of times before.

I guess, as always, the real proof that matters is in the ratings pudding, but let's hope ITV has the guts to hold firm and re-commission Moving Wallpaper/Echo Beach at the end of its current run. It's the kind of programming initiative that deserves to be supported.

The NRS figures released yesterday made for interesting reading, especially the observation that The Mail on Sunday, which has recently been relaunched, fell by five per cent to 5,775,000.

This was in total contradiction to the recently released ABC figures for January 2008, which showed that the Mail on Sunday had posted the biggest year-on-year circulation increase of any of the Sunday newspapers, up 1.2% from 2,303,472 in January 2007, to 2,330,366 in the same period this year.

One bigger question though was why the good people over at NRS decided to release their figures on the same day as the half-yearly magazine ABC figures, which were bound to swamp any awareness and coverage of the data that NRS could expect to get. Better planning required next time methinks.

Today’s ABC figures for July-December 2007 provided further evidence of the challenges facing magazine publishers but also provided some oases of good circulation news amongst the hard-luck stories.

Northern & Shell had a set of frankly astonishing ABC results, with OK! putting on almost 22% of readers compared to the previous period, and 11.3% year on year. It attributes its success to aggressive TV advertising, exclusive buy-ups such as Jordan’s baby and Ziggy and Chanelle and US brand extensions. In contrast, Hello was down by about 5% period on period and year on year.

Richard Desmond’s Star performed equally as well as OK!, if not better, rising just under 20% in terms of active purchases period on period, almost 18% year on year.

Good Housekeeping performed well in the period, as did Glamour. ShortList gave an artificial boost to the men’s sector, by adding 463,000 copies to the overall circulation that wasn’t there before.

German magazine firm Bauer was left under no illusions about the challenge it faces with the new titles it inherited into its consumer magazines division via the recent Emap acquisition. Closer, Heat, Yours, FHM and More all almost uniformly posted period-on-period and year-on-year falls. Bauer had some better news amongst its existing portfolio, with TV Choice taking over from IPC’s What’s on TV as the UK’s most popular actively purchased magazine, but there wasn’t much in the way of good news for its other high-profile titles, Take a Break, That’s Life, Bella and TV Quick.

On the face of it, it is the controversial Desmond who will be one of the happiest magazine publishers tonight as the dust settles on another ABC statement.

The iconic communications planning agency Naked is set to embark on the next stage in its adventure, having been bought out by Australian marketing services group Photon last week for an initial payment of about £17m, plus deferred payments linked to future performance.The founders and key executives at Naked are tied in to four-year earn-out clauses, a relatively long period that signals the importance of the key people in delivering the essence of what Naked is all about.

Media Week’s agency of the year in 2002 and 2003 burst on the scene in 2000, threatening to completely reshape communications planning with its strictly media-neutral approach. It had a distinct impact on the way other agencies operate, but in recent years suffered familiar growing pains as a start-up business evolving to the next level without diluting its unique selling points.

Clients wowed by initial contact with inspirational characters inevitably grow disenchanted when they drop down the food chain as busy founders spread themselves more thinly. And a reliance on strategy and consultancy tends to result in more project work and fewer lucrative monthly retainers that are the meat and drink of traditional media agencies.

Times have changed since Naked emerged, and other agencies have caught on to the importance of Naked’s strategic approach and integrated it into their own offers. It was significant that Boots shifted its media planning from Naked into MediaCom last year, to add to the WPP agency’s existing media buying work. Boots seemingly no longer saw the need for a stand-alone comms planning partner, and was happy MediaCom could deliver on both counts.

Hence, the sale of Naked is not the greatest of surprises. It will allow the agency to invest and try to lever itself up to the next stage of its evolution. However, the identity of the purchasing company was somewhat unexpected. Photon has some presence in the UK, and was last week also being tipped to take a stake in Naked’s Farringdon direct marketing neighbour Kitcatt Nohr. It is the biggest indigenous marketing services group in Australia and is spreading its tentacles into Europe.

Naked’s founders are adamant that Photon shares the same radical, swashbuckling, independent philosophy as themselves. If this really is the case, maybe the acquired company can buck the lessons of history that suggest the media-neutral approach is on the verge of being consigned to the dustbin. But it won’t be easy.

Outgoing media minister James Purnell played a big part in influencing the Government's volte-face on extending the regulation of advertising of foods that are high in fat, salt or sugar to a blanket ban, but the role industry lobbying played should not be underestimated either.

The industry, including Isba, the IPA and the media owner trade bodies, rounded up its chariots behind the Advertising Association - led since January last year by chief executive Baroness Peta Buscombe - and is finally starting to take on the opposing lobbying forces at their own game.