Why recycle TV chiefs? Look to SEO gurus for CEO jobs

Tuesday, October 27, 2009 | Posted by: Fiona Cullinan
Categories: Media sector | Tags: Alex Connock, entrepreneurs, media, Ten Alps, Manchester United, ITV, Channel 4, SEO, Audi, Real Madrid, Michael Mann, Miami Vice, search engine optimizers, content producers, Entrepreneur’s Diary

Alex Connock, CEO, Ten Alps: On Saturday night we went to a Manchester United party – held in a golf club. It was quite like a normal golf club party any time from 1950 onwards, in that there were a lot of rich men making polite conversation, a glass of bubbly in hand and a dressed-up woman on their arm.

The only differences were that these guys were in their mid-20s for the most part, the music was far louder, and the cars outside would have been perfect set-dressing for Michael Mann’s Miami Vice If there is any spec upgrade you can get to an Audi that wasn’t there that night, I’d be amazed.

But funnily enough, one Man United player told me no one actually talks about cars at the club. That’s because when everyone can afford anything on sale for well under a month’s wages, the social niceties of infinitesimal gradations in executive vehicle, so fundamental to the normal staff car park – ‘It’s an A6 Le Mans edition!’ – just cease to be relevant. What they talk about is… football. And who can blame them, because that’s what everyone else in Cheshire talks about, too.

Wrong kind of search for ITV and C4 chief execs
High-paid executives of a different kind are being sought in TV-land, however: Channel 4 and ITV each need a new chief exec and chairman.

In our business, that’s like Man United and Real Madrid simultaneously having vacancies for their entire strike force. But sadly, in TV there are all too few galácticos to go around. The same characters are recycled, like substitutions when there is no one on the bench.

Perhaps bemusing is a good word for how the executive search has gone at ITV.

They seemed to have had a willing preferred candidate before the search started, and then not made a deal with him at the end – and they seem to have conducted the entire process in public.

But in any case, there is a bigger issue. Maybe these media companies have been doing the wrong kind of search. Should they be searching for search engine optimisers (or SEOs) instead?

SEO now defining factor of business success
Content producers are spending their money on high-level SEOs because these days, in pretty much every product a media company ever makes, the position where the product comes on the search engines is the defining factor of business success.

Want your clip viewed on YouTube? Search optimise it.

Want your e-book to come up when someone wants business information on how to build a power station? SEO it.

Need to sell tickets to your concert? You guessed.

The rise and rise of the search result
The defining media outlet of our age is rapidly becoming the search result itself – Bing, Google News, the BBC search, the Autonomy-powered search within our own Teachers TV.

So non-linear and particular is becoming much of the customers’ media usage that to help them find the content at all is the overwhelming marketing priority – and that means search.

I predict that over the next year or two, many media groups will not only buy or start their own SEO companies, but one of them will actually appoint an SEO guru to the top job.

Alex Connock blogs about the media sector for Grant Thornton. Read more posts by Alex Connock