Content area
Full Text
IF Dr Phil drives you to distraction, you've lost the plot on Days of our Lives and re-runs of Blue Heelers can't fill the gap, the launch of Ten's new daytime cooking game show Ready Steady Cook may provide an hour's respite from the programming wasteland that runs from 10.30pm most nights until the following day's evening newscasts.
That's not to say Ready Steady Cook, hosted by celebrity chef Nick Stratford, will be great viewing, or even successful, but its launch in April, underwritten by advertisers Unilever and IGA Supermarkets, will mark a few milestones in Australian television.
Ten plans to commit an hour a day, five days a week to the show, making it the first high-quality, viewer-centric, advertiser-funded program to attract significant airtime in daytime television (apologies to Bert and Kerri-Anne).
Ten estimates the proportion of its weekly schedule dedicated to advertiser-funded programming will increase by 50 to 100 per cent with the launch.
The additional advertiser funding on the show, according to Ten's head of production and development, Tim Clucas, will go to improving production values -- the beginning of what all three commercial networks hope will be an injection of life, as well as money, into weekday daytime TV.
Meanwhile, the underwriting advertisers are hoping their on-air involvement with the show's content -- exact details are being kept under wraps -- will provide a connection with their audience far beyond what a 30-second commercial could do.
"[We] don't have the money to put a huge investment into daytime TV," Clucas says. "IGA and Unilever on Ready Steady Cook want good programs to put their ads in.
"In this case [their involvement] is so natural you would be hard- pressed to think that there's anything different from a fully network-funded show."
All three commercial networks are banging the advertiser-funded programming drum this year for the simple reason that it offers them a new revenue stream at a time when advertisers are complaining long and loudly about advertising rates that go up each year while audiences decline.
Each network carefully monitors advertisers' television budgets to ensure they're not diverting funds away from their traditional advertising spending.
"It's a commercial reality that we need commercials to survive," Clucas says. "The advertisers know that....