Advice on making your brand a marketing survivor

"You have to market your existing core brands at all times," says Mr Nigel Lythgoe, "and not ignore them just because you're developing a new brand."

It's classic marketing-speak - but the disconcerting thing is that the core brand that Lythgoe is referring to is Cilla Black's Blind Date and the new brand is the ITV series, Survivor.

Lythgoe is controller of entertainment and comedy at London broadcaster LWT and he has produced programmes ranging from the Royal Variety Performance to ITV's massive ratings hit, Popstars. Irish television producers tend to appear on arts shows but Lythgoe will be talking at this year's National Marketing Conference alongside familiar marketing practitioners such as Brody Sweeney of O'Brien's Sandwich Bars and Paddy Power from paddypower.com.

"Mixed messages are what destroy a marketing campaign," says the man the UK tabloids dubbed Nasty Nigel during Popstars. That programme was a marketing success. During the course of the series, 3,000 young hopefuls where whittled down by an often brutal judging process to five, to make up the now chart-topping pop group Hear'Say. In the process, the troubled ITV station boosted its share of the difficult-to-attract 16-34 ABC audiences - to 48 per cent.

"Popstars was a very simple idea, and from a producers' point of view it was an easy one to communicate," he says. "The trick is to make sure that everyone in the organisation is communicating the same message, from the receptionist who answers the telephone to board members."

Tabloids were drip-fed stories making individual competitors micro-celebrities; there was an interactive website and a major PR campaign to drive publicity.

While Popstars was a huge success, Lythgoe's latest production, Survivor, is the biggest TV flop of the summer. The programme, similar to Big Brother but set on an island off Borneo, cost £10 million sterling (€16.6 million) to make but has failed to reach even half of its projected 12 million viewers.

"It's the marketing that has damaged Survivor," says Lythgoe, "and the mixed messages." The programme initially went out four nights a week, all under the Survivor name, even though only two of the nights were broadcast from the island; the other two were studio-based and featured contestants who had been thrown off the island.

This, according to Lythgoe, was a classic mixed message, because the audience was confused from the start. "But the biggest confusion," he says, "is that the show is tagged as reality television when it's a game show."

He goes on to rubbish the idea of reality TV. "There is no reality television," he says. "Once you put a camera on someone they behave differently, so there's very little reality involved."

Lythgoe says that he is on the bill at September's marketing conference which is organised by the Marketing Institute, to provide "a little bit of light relief", but alongside Sir Bernard Ingram, Margaret Thatcher's former press secretary, his brief will be to explain to the assembled marketers how to form public opinion. It is something both men are expert at and something all marketers - even those whose products are a long way from the glam world of television - aspire to.