CanWest's Mr Can-do

Brent Impey is finding that Fridays will never be the same again.

It's Thursday night. By the time the CanWest MediaWorks board finally breaks from a three-and-a-half-hour meeting the doors to the broadcaster's Mt Eden headquarters have already been locked.

Soft voices fill reception as CanWest's Canadian directors Leonard Asper and Tom Strike wander through.

A weary chief executive, Brent Impey, also emerges from the boardroom to brief the Herald on CanWest's $26.4 million trading profit for the three months to November.

Slumped on a couch in his office overlooking Mt Eden, he talks about leading a public company for the first time.

Financial analysts scrutinise his every move and the company has to make public much more information than he is accustomed to. And there is the burden of carrying the fortunes of around 4000 shareholders.

"This sounds a touch cheesy, but when we were meeting the brokering community there was definitely a growing sense of responsibility," said Impey. "People were trusting us with their money and purchasing shares to some degree on the credibility of what we were saying.

"Our Fridays have changed completely. From about midday Friday, we start to get inundated with reporters from the Herald on Sunday or the Sunday Star Times ringing with the latest media rumour.

"There seems to be an insatiable demand for information about our private business dealings."

As a media man himself, Impey can understand the clamour for the latest scoop - which celebrities have been hired or fired and how much they are paid.

"A newspaper executive told me that a really good media story adds 15,000 to circulation, so therein lies the reason."

The next day CanWest's maiden annual meeting held in a function room above a vacant Eden Park turns out to be a media event through and through.

Carefully groomed CanWest TV personalities John Campbell, Carol Hirschfeld, Hilary Barry and Mike McRoberts stand out among the crowd of star-struck over-60s and sharp-suited investors.

Their presence is explained when Impey unveils what the board had no doubt been poring over the previous night - a new 7pm current events show for TV3 fronted by Campbell and produced by Hirschfeld, and a national current affairs and talkback radio network to be called Radio Live.

Both are big announcements, the news of the TV show, ending weeks of speculation about whether TV3 would respond to veteran broadcaster Paul Holmes' move from his evening news show to Prime, New Zealand beachhead of media tycoon Kerry Packer.

"I think we'll go all right," said Campbell to journalists when asked how his new show was likely to fare in replacing popular animated show The Simpsons.

He gives little away about the format the still nameless programme will take.

"We're really excited about it. It's going to be quite different, I think."

Impey said: "It won't be a replacement of Paul Holmes on Prime or Close Up at 7." With the 7pm current affairs war several months away, news of the new show is exactly what CanWest needs to dispel market fears about suddenly aggressive Prime.

Investors welcomed the news, bidding up CanWest's share price 7c yesterday to close at $2.02, adding to a 27 per cent gain since it listed in July.

ABN Amro Craigs broker Matt Willis said the departure of Holmes had given TV3 a great opportunity to win a bigger share of the 18-to-40-year-old audience during the crucial 7 pm to 7.30 pm slot.

"That slot is one where they really were lagging," Willis told NZPA.

Even the company had been nervous. Holmes' defection had barely broken before the Canadian members of the CanWest board were patched in for a strategy meeting to discuss TV3's response.

Impey said the decision to go head-to-head against Prime and TVNZ was made virtually on the spot. He will not disclose how much CanWest is spending, but claims increased advertising will cover the costs of the new show.

Meanwhile, the start of Radio Live is covered within the group's existing budget.

On Prime's news shake-up, Impey is non-committal, more interested in seeing how Holmes' new show competes.

"[Prime] has put a substantial effort into marketing and programming over the last year and had some growth, but not substantial growth," he said. "They either had to accept that that was it or make a play. They made a play."

On the outlook for advertising, which makes up most of CanWest's revenue, Impey breaks into an optimistic discussion on macro-economics.

"The soft landing has been predicted by economists for a couple of years now and it hasn't happened," he said. "I'd be very surprised to see it in election year."

New Zealand had become a "marketing-orientated" country and advertising was booming as a result.

He expected to see the TV and radio advertising market grow 5 per cent to 7 per cent next year and continue to outstrip GDP growth.

In the radio world, there is little room for CanWest to grow except by taking advertising from rival The Radio Network, owned by APN News & Media, publisher of the New Zealand Herald, and Clear Channel.

"It's limited," admitted Impey, who in October led CanWest's acquisition of one of the few stations available, Coromandel FM in Thames.

Competition between The Radio Network and CanWest is tough. Between them, they have 90 per cent of the advertising dollar. The balance is spread among many small players.

For CanWest Radioworks, which commands around 46 per cent of radio advertising, Impey makes his priorities clear.

At the annual meeting, one shareholder stands up and calls for more jazz on the radio.

Impey responds: "Is it my job to produce formats that you want to listen to or is it my job to produce commercially viable programming? The answer is the latter."

Other acquisitions are possible. After all, the MediaWorks brand was chosen to keep CanWest's options open.

Impey is not ruling anything out, including the highly competitive print media.

"We haven't got anything on the table in terms of magazines and newspapers but we take an opportunistic approach."

In the meantime, the media veteran is just looking forward to seeing out a busy year and taking a well-earned holiday - near the sea and away from the media.