ITV revenues fall in disappointing City debut for new boss Carolyn McCall

ITV boss Carolyn McCall on Wednesday claimed Comcast’s £22 billion bid for Sky would spur more deals in her sector despite a disappointing City debut as the broadcaster’s new chief executive.

As she unveiled a fall in advertising revenue and embarked on a “strategy refresh”, the former easyjet and Guardian boss said Comcast’s move on Skywas “really interesting”.

“It shows how valuable content businesses are,” the head of the Broadchurch and Coronation Street maker said.

NBC, owned by Comcast, is rumoured to have pondered a bid for ITV in the past. She said: “I think everybody has had a look at everybody,” suggesting that consolidation in the face of the threat from Netflix and Facebook is likely to quicken.

But her comments came as shares in ITV plunged 7% on the back of underwhelming results.

Advertising revenue fell 5%to £1.59 billion in 2017, earnings per share dropped 9% to 10.2p, and there is no special dividend for the first year in six.

McCall, in post for eight weeks, blamed “political uncertainty” for the fall in ad revenue and said ITV would spend more than £1 billion on programming this year.

City analysts note that this amount seems puny compared with the firepower of Amazon et al. Some fear ITV may be simply unable to compete. She said: “Creating and owning quality content is a huge advantage. We have a great opportunity to make content famous on our channels.”

McCall downplayed the switch to “catch-up” TV watching, saying: “75% of the population watch live. It is very resilient. If you have live sport, great drama, then live TV is very robust.”

McCall thinks ITV has masses of consumer data it can sell and use to generate content.

“I was amazed that ITV had 100 million interactions with customers last year. Currently we are not really doing anything with that data,” she said.

McCall also thinks ITV, the broadcaster of Broadchurch and The Voice, can push harder to raise ad rates by building on her strong relationships with agencies and being more aggressive.

“TV is so powerful that it often has not had to do that. We can be much more on the front foot. ITV has this amazing ability to deliver audiences,” she said.

This summer’s FIFA World Cup should help ad sales. The shares fell 12p to 161p, valuing the business at £6.5 billion.

Analysts at Liberum said ITV would use the money from not paying a special dividend to do an acquisition. “We believe STV would make sense,” said the broker.

McCall didn’t elaborate on the strategy shake-up, saying only “I have my views and ideas.”