In Media Guardian’s review of the year, they’ve got a piece celebrating the success of “Dave.”
Dave, you’ll no doubt recall, is the channel previously known as UK TV G2. And in an “inspired” piece of marketing, it was renamed Dave; minimal changes were made to programming, and success has followed.
The numbers are hard to refute. In November 2007, Dave achieved a 1.2% share of total viewing in multi-channel homes. That mind sound poor, but that puts it ahead of Sky One, BBC Three, E4 and ITV4 amongst many others. Indeed, aside from the terrestrial channels, only ITV2, Sky Sports 1, Cbeebies and ITV3 are ahead of it. And compare it with November 2006, when the channel was only achieving 0.4%.
So an unqualified success.
Well, a success, yes. But a qualified one. There are a couple more factors. According to Nielsen Media Research, Dave spent about £700,000 marketing themselves in the press and on posters. Then there were all the ads for the service across the UK TV network, and Virgin Media channels. These were probably worth millions more.
Finally, even with all that marketing, the real reason for Dave’s success is Freeview. That’s not a word that appears in the Media Guardian piece. Basically UK TV rejigged their Freeview offering, dumping UK TV Bright Ideas from its daytime only slot. UK TV History replaced that service, and Dave took on the far better 24 hour slot that History had been using.
At a stroke then, Dave was suddenly available in 9.1m Freeview homes.
And let’s not forget the elephant in the room (to use a phrase popular in the current series of QI) – Dave is basically all BBC2’s popular shows in one place.