STAYING SWITCHED ON

CNN's global head of sales Jonathan Davies - who has had 17 years of experience in advertising, media buying and marketing - contemplates the future of TV, the rise of online and the holy grail of return on investment with Debbie Cai.

Has the industry changed a lot since you first started out?

Yes. A lot of it has been driven by technology. What you want is the now consumer - that now to you might be one thing but it might be another thing to someone else so you have to be available on any platform to service all those needs and that takes scale of resource and infrastructure to deliver so not everyone can do it but we're lucky CNN can.

What are the main challenges you face?

To some extent one of them is media agency structures. Fragmentation of budgets is also a difficult thing for me. Probably the biggest challenge would be ROI, that's the message we're getting more and more from advertisers and their agencies - how can you prove that what you offer has a dollar value. We spend a lot of money trying to do just that. I'm sure in professional media, we're the biggest spender on research by a long way.

The measurement systems that we have aren't very robust.

Well, it's not perfect and I don't think it ever will be and to some extent people are looking for a holy grail that isn't there. Advertisers and consultancies have spent millions trying to develop complex econometric models of how the system works. You'd never build an econometric model that developed Google, sometimes it takes insight, inspiration and judgment to do certain things, and you can't model everything.

What you can't measure is, what is the power of what an exclusive interview that we had with Tony Blair and Bill Gates? We're the mouthpiece for these types of people and that's difficult to quantify.

How do you attract more ad dollars for CNN?

Numerically, we've had growth in both audience on TV and particularly online and money tends to follow where the audience goes. Just by being strong in the market it will generate some extra dollars. Also, being more creative in the solutions you offer advertisers - developing editorial partnerships and commercial partnerships which go beyond just ads.

Now, we've got stuff that happens on air, online and through dedicated events. We've come a long way from just taking ad dollars for spots and that market has grown to 20 to 30% of our business.

How big of a threat is online to traditional media?

People exaggerate the death of TV. We've seen consistent levels of growth at CNN for the last three or four years. In fact, industry data suggests print is the medium that is suffering the most. People aren't watching less TV. If anything, they're watching more. TV viewing isn't going down; online viewing is going up.

What suffers is time, so people are spending less time watching TV, plus due to the internet, they spend less time talking to their families, less time in leisure and that isn't necessarily a good thing. Media consumption in its broader sense, is just taking a larger part of people's lives which is great for a media owner.

The broad messages for us are the growth of multiplatform consumer opportunities that we're providing more of. Technology allows us to do different things and because of that it gives our clients more engaging and communicative ways to engage with their consumers.