Originally Posted by Agent F:
“I'd love to know who makes all these strange scheduling decisions at ITV. Corrie at 9pm again tonight is another odd one. Just completely strange and random.”
His name is David Bergg - also nicknamed The Prince of Darkness and/or The Master of the Dark Arts. He sits in a dark little room by himself scheduling Itv programs months in advance:
Quote:
“It's not surprising that most people consider TV scheduling one of the dark arts. Locked away in a dimly lit room for hours on end with nothing but spreadsheets for company, constructing a schedule designed to maximise both breadth and scale of audience while largely blind to what your rivals are up to, the job has been described as akin to playing a giant three-dimensional game of chess.
ITV's own practitioner, David Bergg, is famously known as the Prince of Darkness, which helps to confirm the air of mystery associated with such a job. Softly spoken, with a preference to avoid the spotlight, he brings an analytical and systematic mind to a job that has been described as one of the most powerful in British television.
Bergg, as one of the ITV big guns wheeled out to agencies for the upfronts, has skills not normally associated with the arcane world of programme scheduling - most noticeably commercial astuteness - and has thus become a familiar and popular figure among the media buying community.
Like others of his ilk, Bergg talks at great length about the schedule. And, using the tools of his trade, he usually illustrates his points with a spreadsheet.
Bergg likes spreadsheets. A lot. He has divided each of ITV's dayparts into half-hour segments that show its year-on-year audience performance.
Different colours illustrate the results so far and thus he has created an ITV battle grid. The idea of the game is to convert those red blocks (audiences down 2 per cent or more) into cream (static) or, even better, blue cells (audiences up more than 2 per cent).
With characteristic optimism, Bergg describes these rogue red blocks as "opportunities for growth". As well as allowing him to monitor the channel's performance, he says the charts also allow ITV to focus on the year ahead.
"The thing about this job is I'm schizophrenic - I'm looking at last night's ratings, the week we're about to bill but also already I'm thinking about next summer and what we can do to improve on this summer's performance," he says.
In a display of glasnost, these charts are shown to the agencies in order to demonstrate ITV's commitment to its programming - the decision to field Bergg, and his spreadsheets, has been welcomed by agencies who seem to have warmed to his quiet, considered , but open manner.
Mick Desmond, the joint managing director of ITV, says that it was a deliberate policy to give Bergg a wider remit and put him in front of agencies and clients. "He has the unique ability to be able to straddle the commercial and creative world," he says.
It is a role Bergg relishes. "The main thing that came up in the upfronts is that we must not rest on our laurels. I hope that when these charts go up in front of the buyers that they acknowledge that we don't like red any more than they do. In the past, there has been a detachment between what the Network Centre has been trying to do and what the agencies need. This process shows that they are in fact identical goals," he says.”
