‘Now, what I want is, Facts… Facts alone are wanted in life.’

Raymond Snoddy considers TV now and in the future with reference to Thinkbox, ITV and Charles Dickens…

Anyone in the media who hasn’t yet paid homage to the Dickens bicentenary could do worse than read Hard Times and introduce themselves to Thomas Gradgrind – if they are not acquainted already.

For Gradgrind facts are the thing and he is ready to measure and weigh every parcel of human nature. For him knowledge and wisdom is “a mere question of figures, a question of simple arithmetic”.

Gradgrind’s attachment to facts is, of course, satirised by Dickens – and demolished by his own daughter Louisa, who belatedly discovers the power of dreams, inspiration and the human imagination.

Yet when it comes to understanding the future of television the Gradgrind approach to facts is no bad thing and is certainly serviceable, if not totally inspirational, for the immediate future.

For now at least we can leave the flights of fancy to those who instinctively feel, time after time, that the next new thing – almost whatever it is and despite the evidence – will take over the world and bury channel loyalty and linear television. Traditional advertising will be interred at the same time. It’s only a matter of when. Surely it is inevitable. No other future is possible.

While acknowledging that facts can sometimes be a bit boring when endlessly repeated, sometimes you just have to beat the drum for Gradgrind. One of those occasions is the latest annual advertising revenues from Thinkbox, the television marketing and lobbying body, which came out today.

The Fact is that total TV ad revenue in 2011 grew by 2.2% to a new record of £4.36 billion, including sponsorship – and that came on top of revenue growth of 16% the previous year.

It is also a Fact that there were 887 new or returning advertisers last year including Google, Avios and Majestic Wine, although it has to be said they only accounted for 2.6% of the total.

Who could not still be impressed by the previously announced Fact that the average viewer last year watched four hours two minutes of live linear TV a day – and that as a result commercial impacts were up by 2.6% last year after increasing by 19.6% over the past five years.

Those are facts we are talking about, at least if you are prepared to accept that BARB knows what it is talking about.

And moreover the BARB data does not include TV programmes watched on laptops and smartphones – clearly a growing activity, but such out-of-home viewing is hardly having any discernible impact on linear viewing at the moment.

It is also a fact that what is a fact now can become a very different sort of a fact in a few years time but when, or more properly if, the facts do change then we can with total respectability change our minds also. Dickens, whose dialogue seems as though it is written with a television script in mind, would almost certainly have agreed with that hypothesis.

When you come to ITV the basic facts such as the year-on-year increase of 4% in overall revenue are not in dispute. As Enders Analysis points out the facts show that ITV has outperformed the rest of the television market for the fourth year running in terms of its share of net advertising revenue.

The consultants are even so bold as to find “transformational buds” when looking at the broadcaster’s 2011 performance. But the mist starts to descend when the conversation turns to ITV’s five-year “transformational plans”.

Here the management objective has always been to transform the company from being an old age broadcaster, overly dependent on linear advertising into a new age, fit for purpose communications leader in the digitally converged world of multiple devices in general and pay-TV in particular.

We all believe in totally converged digital devices and even have most of them but ITV is a leading member of Thinkbox, which clearly believes that old age linear television is doing rather nicely thank you and showing no obvious signs of mortality yet.

Makes you think doesn’t it.

Although the world of newspapers is different from commercial television and suffering more seriously, the search for digital revenues is a troubling process. A US report out this week found that for every digital dollar the newspapers made, around $7 was lost to the paper edition. You’ve got to be careful what kind of transformation you wish for.

No-one could fault ITV’s commitment to growing its content production business around the world because that’s exactly what the company should be doing. A 10% increase in revenues is a decent step in the right direction.

Historically though ITV’s efforts have been rather blighted by parochial blinkers and it’s not absolutely clear they have been totally cast aside. Setting up new production offices in France to add to Australia, Sweden and Germany is positive but there is a long way to go to break away from dependence on sales of top programmes made for the ITV network such as Julian Fellowes’ Titanic.

Seriously increasing pay TV revenues will be an even more difficult task. ITV does not break out pay revenue as a separate category but Enders estimates that revenues totalled £15 million last year – mainly coming from HD carriage fees of its digital channels on Sky. It is a Fact that just over 70% of ITV revenues comes from broadcast advertising.

Perhaps it would be useful if the top brass at ITV set aside their spreadsheets just long enough to read Hard Times. It might help them get the balance right between the hard facts of linear television advertising and transformational online and pay-TV fancies.

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