ITV has said demand for advertising plunged 42% in April as marketing spend ground to a halt amid the coronavirus crisis, while it confirmed ITV Studios has had to pause most of its productions due to lockdowns worldwide.
The broadcaster said that it had furloughed around 800 colleagues, broadly 15% of our UK workforce, the majority of whom work in ITV Studios.
Carolyn McCall, ITV Chief Executive, said:
“ITV has taken swift and decisive action to manage and mitigate the impact of COVID-19, by focusing on our people and their safety, and by continuing to reduce costs and tightly manage our cashflow and liquidity. We are also ensuring that we continue to inform and entertain our viewers and stay close to our advertisers. Everyone at ITV has responded extremely well to the challenges we are facing. We are now very focused on emerging from this crisis in a strong position, continuing to offer advertisers effective marketing opportunities and making preparations to restart productions safely.”
The results for the first quarter showed otal external revenue was down 7% at £694m ,and total ITV Studios revenue was down 11% at £342m , impacted by the phasing of deliveries and restrictions on working practices due to COVID-19.
Broadcast revenue was up 2% at £500m with ITV total advertising up 2% as originally guided, and online revenues up 26%.
ITV total viewing was up 2% with very strong growth in online viewing up 75%, simulcast viewing up 112% and reach up 40% on the ITV Hub and ITV main channel’s share of viewing (SOV) was marginally up at 17.9%, its best quarter since 2009 while ITV Family SOV was down 2% at 23.6%, partly impacted by the volume of the BBC’s news output
