The Home Office has managed to make something watchable with the Beat: Life on the Streets series. But then, I suppose, that you’d run into problems of which channel to run it on.

The rules governing broadcast TV advertising and promotion are extremely rigorous. TV companies can only use promotional time for messages that relate to the audience as viewers. Advertising time must be sold to any company at a fair market rate, including to Thinkbox, despite them owning us. So we would not be allowed to have free, or even discounted, airtime. And because the TV market has a fixed supply (of minutes) any advertising by a TV company owned subsidiary is open to the accusation from ISBA and the IPA of hardening the market, unless there is a clear market imperative for them to use TV. Mind you, with TV prices at 1992 levels it might be considered a bit churlish if they did so! There are other very cost-effective ways of using TV, such as sponsorship, but whatever route we chose we would of course have to operate transparently and squeakily-cleanly.

Then there is the small matter of the large slice of the ad budget that the government would take in the forms of various taxes and levies – unique to TV advertising – in the process. And, as the marketing body for commercial TV, it would be a bit embarrassing if we didn’t lead by example with fantastic creative work.

None of the above totally precludes us from advertising on broadcast TV, but the case would need to be very robust and it would be very complicated to resolve. Then again, we do like a challenge…

However, we do use televisual communication whenever and wherever possible. You’ll see that our website is full of TV content and we also make TV ‘programmes’ that we distribute on DVD. So, we like to think we are using the newer TV platforms in engaging ways, if that doesn’t sound too weaselly!