Rachel Tucker, Media Week, 20 May 2008, 07:30am

Strategy Verdict - ITV's planned launch of price-comparison website

ITV's plan to launch a price-comparison website did not come as much of a surprise. The broadcaster's strict revenue targets, coupled with news that its online division reported a pre-tax loss of £12m, means we are likely to see ITV expanding into online.

There are 17 million visitors to the main UK online shopping comparison sites (according to comScore), driving an estimated £7bn of UK online sales, (15% of all sales made through the internet), so there is definitely money to be made if ITV can get it right.

But this is a crowded market, and one dominated by a few key players such as Moneysupermarket and Kelkoo.

With Google becoming more expensive for the likes of ITV to use to promote new services, driving traffic to the ITV price-comparison website will not be as easy as it once was.

ITV will have to rely on its offline branding to drive visitors to the site.

Shopping comparison sites are all about increasing consumer choice. And, given that this planned site is an additional platform for ITV's broadcast clients, we may never find a non-ITV advertiser on the site.

This clearly won't offer increased choice, so where is the true value to the consumer of this planned site? While media planners are desperately keen for big, traditional media companies such as ITV to start offering different platforms, it's vital to get their online extensions right.

It appears that this whole project is still very much in the early stages; my advice to ITV is to focus on the consumer. It must put consumers at the heart of everything it does and the advertisers will follow - whether they spend with ITV's TV channels or not.

Rating: three stars out of five

Review by Rachel Tucker, associate director of strategy, MediaVest