In the diminishing January daylight, Simon Pitts cuts a striking figure on STV’s main floor.
From the hall doorway, where the evening news team and the likes of veteran journalist Bernard Ponsonby, in trademark black polo neck, are preparing for the transmission of a Scotland Tonight exclusive interview with First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, Pitts can be spied beside his desk, at the end of a large open-plan office scape, which looks out onto the darkening River Clyde.
He stands tall at six foot five inches, with a slender and sporty build, helped by his daily cycle commute from his Kelvinside home, as he looks at the TV ratings. He lifts his head, lower face covered in a blue face mask, and offers a welcoming elbow to bump.
In his four years at the helm of Scotland’s commercial television station, Pitts, who spent 17 years at ITV, has taken the legacy of Rob Woodward - who set about recovering the fortunes of STV after the dark days of the expansionist Scottish Media Group - and continued on an upward trajectory, delivering a series of impressive firsts.
When we sit down, socially distanced, Pitts, now with his mask removed, is a gently spoken West of Englander, who has been taken to heart by the hard-to-impress Scottish media professionals who put our favourite programmes on television screens. Despite the trials of the Covid-19 pandemic, with many STV staff still working from home, 2021 has been a record year, with total advertising revenue up by more than 20%.
The Glasgow-based, listed company has enjoyed a share of the revitalised national advertising market, with around £80m coming from national UK advertising sold by ITV and shared with STV, and £30m from a combination of regional and digital advertising. More than 300 new Scottish businesses have embraced the £30m STV Growth Fund, launched in May 2018, to use television advertising for the first time.
With Scots consuming more television shows in their homes during lockdown, it is not just the big advertisers that have re-discovered television and been ramping up brand building, but also more local companies.
“STV delivered its highest ever advertising revenues in 2021, with brands choosing broadcast and video on demand advertising to boost their recovery from Covid.
“That’s because there is a high level of trust, brand safety and value in what we do and in the regional tone of voice we use across Scotland - our viewing for our STV News at Six is over 450,000 viewers, which is sometimes more than Channel 4 News ’ audience across the whole of the UK,” he says.
Moreover, STV Studios - formerly STV Productions - has found its mojo as a standalone division making shows for multi-channel distribution, with Murder Island , filmed on Gigha and made for Channel 4, and the recent Screw, written by Rob Williams about prison officers’ lives set in a fictional 21st century jail, with a three-storey set built in the Kelvin Hall, already garnering critical acclaim.
Big budget dramas can now cost between £1m and £5m an hour to make and require a patchwork of funding partners. New quiz show, Bridge of Lies, is being made along the waterfront path at Pacific Quay for the BBC.
“In past years, the Channel 3 regional companies such as Granada, London Weekend Television and Scottish Television would get a certain number of dramas, entertainment shows and soaps to make for the network and out of this came Taggart, Rebus and Take the High Road.
“But ITV now owns 90% of the network and that doesn’t happen anymore,” says Pitts. “We have a different set of arrangements between ITV and STV on the provision of programmes, STV Studios is increasingly making shows which are commissioned for a range of other networks, but also for STV including the likes of Clear Out, Cash In , an antiques show for Scotland.
“This is a real focus of production for us, the key is placing a number of creative bets, investing in people, companies and ideas.”
Antiques shows have become a staple diet for STV, with the BBC’s mid-afternoon favourite, Antiques Road Trip , made by STV. Road Trip is now into its 30th series, making 70 episodes a year, and giving sustained employment to 60 full-time creatives in Scotland, led by John Redshaw, the executive producer now making the new Yorkshire Auction House series.
For Pitts, maintaining sustainable employment for creatives North of the border by securing the commission of popular returning series is a primary business driver.
Furthermore, STV News , with its ability to split local news items, has overtaken BBC Scotland as the news programme of record, as viewers have looked for trusted updates on lockdowns, restrictions and factual information.
“Channel 4 are our major commercial competitor, but we are three or four times bigger than C4 in terms of our commercial audience in Scotland, we’re also five times bigger than Channel Five, and have a commercial audience larger than the rest of top 10 commercial channels combined - we’re the largest peak time television channel, overtaking BBC One,” declares Pitts.
Responsible for the restructuring of STV Studios, he is satisfied with the progress so far, but he is hungry for even more success, particularly on the digital side, and is targeting at least half of operating profit from outside traditional broadcasting by the end of next year.
“TV has been a lifelong passion and, being able to work in it, is a massive privilege,” he says in his opening gambit, while conceding he knew little about the inside operations of Scottish Television, although he’d met Rob Woodward, legal director Helen Arnot and broadcasting director Bobby Hain, and recalls relations between ITV and STV previously being not just frosty, but glacial.
“It is on a pretty even keel now and there are long-term commercial arrangements in place,” Pitts says. “Rob put the ITV relationship back on an even footing, my initial observation was that STV was a well-run business, so for me it was an opportunity to join a business with a strong brand, strong heritage, talented people, but it also a need to modernise and embrace the opportunity of digital.”
He was appointed by Baroness Margaret Ford, the chairperson, who retired last year after seven years, and he is delighted to be working alongside Paul Reynolds, a long-time industry insider, who took over as chairman at the virtual annual meeting in April last year.
Virtual meetings for Pitts and chief financial officer Lindsay Dixon have been de rigueur during Covid-19 for online presentations with the company’s main investors, such as Slater Investments, Aberforth, Columbia Threadneedle, AXA Framlington, M&G and Schroders.
On arrival, Pitts wanted the station to lift its sights and develop an ambition and appetite for future growth with programme-making in Scotland.
“I wanted STV to re-establish itself as more of an independent creative force, rather than just being a franchise of ITV - by investing in the growth areas of digital, in particular, and with STV Studio’s production taking more control of its own destiny, we’ve set out a path of growth over the next few years.”
With a turnover of around £120m, Pitts is aiming to quadruple production revenue to £40m by the end of 2023.
“First and foremost, this is a people business - on the creative side, it is about people, ideas and intellectual property, there is no algorithm for a hit television show - it's about ideas, hard work and a bit of luck.”
Over the course of his 17 years at ITV, Pitts undertook a series of eight different roles, each with increasing responsibility, moving up to joining the executive board of ITV in 2011.
He specialised in the transformation of television in the digital age, becoming managing director of the ITV’s digital multiplex business SDN, which was bought from NTL and S4C in 2005. SDN was one of the Freeview multiplexes, where ITV would lease digital television channels to broadcasters, such as Discovery, QVC, and Channel 4, which wanted to be on the free-to-view platform.
“I was keen to move across and do something that was more business-focused,” says Pitts. “Our job was to maintain the technology and the infrastructure to deliver signals into people’s Freeview television sets. Our aim was to make a margin.”
Quite a margin: SDN delivered £60m of profit on turnover of around £100m.
The main issue was managing the switch-over from analogue to digital between 2008 and 2012. Pitts, in his early thirties, and his legal team, were involved in ensuring the success of the £1bn long-term switchover contracts, which run until 2034. He reported into chief executive John Cresswell and then Michael Grade, when he returned to ITV.
Over this time, Pitts got the opportunity to find out what he liked doing and “what I was reasonably good at doing, moving from being an adviser to becoming more of a doer”.
He was appointed to ITV’s management board as director of strategy and transformation in 2011, aged 35, with Archie Norman, the former Asda boss, as chairman, Adam Crozier, former FA and Royal Mail boss, as chief executive, and Sir Peter Bazalgette, famous for the Endemol production company, then a non-executive director, before taking over the chair.
“Having run SDN, I liked the challenge, responsibility and accountability for delivering things - I then enjoyed helping Archie and Adam write the transformation plan for ITV and it worked well.”
After this, Pitts took on the technology department which became more aligned with the rest of the business, launching new channels and re-enforcing their online presence with better infrastructure. He jumped to managing director of ITV’s digital businesses, including Pay TV and streaming service ITV Hub.
Then the opportunity came to take on one of the biggest media jobs in Scotland.
“Media CEO jobs don’t come around very often, and I’ve always been excited about TV and wanted to stay in TV,” explains Pitts. “My wife, Cecilie, and I had lived in London for nearly 20 years, and whilst we love London, we liked the idea of a change, and spending more time together as a family as we have little boys.
“We haven’t been disappointed, this is a fantastic country, Glasgow is exciting, fun and full of friendly people - we feel very settled.”
It’s been of mutual benefit. Four years on, STV is in an enviable position on several scores.
“We’re in a privileged place where we have a big platform that we can use, a big shop window that we can shout about and make other people’s brands famous.
“On the advertising side, it’s about relationships, particularly with local Scottish advertising,” he says.
STV prides itself in its ability to build personal relationships with its advertisers, expanding this to the large SME sector in Scotland.
“While we have a strong relationship with Scottish businesses, there was a perception in some places that TV advertising was out of reach and too expensive, so we needed to make sure we were as accessible and affordable as possible.”
The STV Growth Fund has attracted firms at an earlier stage in their cycle and busted the myth that television advertising was out of their price range.
“Since launching, we’ve done over 700 deals with 300 brand new advertisers onto TV for the first time,” says Pitts. “This has been through match funding where we will top up the value, of say a £25,000 to a £50,000 campaign, plus the client can work with our creative team to make a high-quality advert, and engage ScotPulse, our 32,000-strong online consumer panel, to research the value of your advert,” he says. “It’s a one-stop shop that has really worked out.”
Pitts, now 46, is also delighted with the progress of the STV Children’s Appeal, which has been supported by Sir Tom Hunter and the Hunter Foundation, raising more than £25m for good causes since its foundation in 2011.
The beauty of STV’s digital platform, which is run by Richard Williams, is that viewers can choose either the advertising-supported version, STV Player, or STV Player Plus, which as a subscription service of £3.99 a month, cuts out all the advertising in recorded programmes.
Pitts points out that this service is already in profit, while STV Player VIP also gives registered users the ability to “fast play” their programmes, taking viewers straight to the content they want.
Ensuring home-grown content and ‘sustainable employment in Scotland’ is imperative for Pitts. The revitalisation of STV Studios has been about putting the right people in place, with David Mortimer, creator of the Dragons’ Den, as managing director, Paul Sheehan, chief operating officer, and three creative directors, Sarah Brown, for drama, Gary Chippington heading up entertainment, and Craig Hunter, head of factual programmes.
They set about building a UK network of partnerships and stakes in Primal Media, Two Cities, a Belfast and London based drama producer, Hello Mary, a Brighton-based producer for younger-leaning audiences, Barefaced TV, developing content for younger platforms like Snapchat, and a joint venture with Vera creator Elaine Collins’ Tod Productions.
“There is no reason why we can’t build a world-class production business headquartered in Scotland making the biggest shows, whether it’s drama, entertainment or factual for the big UK networks and the global streamers,” says Pitts, who points out that during 2021, 80% of the programme hours produced by STV Studios were made in Scotland.
“People across Scotland still watch around four hours of TV per day, the average Scot watches about half an hour more than the rest of the UK.
“So this is a good place to run a TV company – it’s a nation of telly addicts, who are also earlier adopters of things like Netflix and Amazon.”
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