The Media Column: How ITN came to work with Club 18-30 and Ant & Dec

If you thought ITN began with the bongs and ended with “and finally”, you're seriously out of date

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Its ITN Productions division, which makes everything from short clips for the Club 18-30 YouTube channel to adverts filmed live in the break of Coronation Street, has grown into a £24m business. ITN’s CEO, John Hardie, says that by 2020 it will be as valuable as the famous Broadcast News operation which makes ITV's News at Ten, Channel 4 News and 5 News.

ITN Productions makes the Suzuki ads which run alongside Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway on ITV and feature the diminutive Geordie presenters.

But the division's biggest marketing asset is ITN’s deep heritage in producing authoritative material under extreme conditions and tight time pressures. On 29 February it filmed a live marriage proposal on Corrie for First Choice holidays, and in 2014 it made an ad for the agency JWT and its client, the Ministry of Defence, live from Camp Bastion in Afghanistan. Mark Browning, managing director of ITN Productions, says no other ad production company could “cope with knowing how to operate in those conditions”.

Even its Club 18-30 branded content material, hosted by entertainment reporter Andrea Lilly from resorts such as Magaluf, has the immediacy of being produced in “real time” and is designed to be shared on social media to remind young audiences what they’re missing. In this lucrative content marketing sector ITN has a clear advantage over traditional ad agencies. “Generation Y want real time live content,” says Browning.

ITN Productions has become one of Britain’s biggest sports producers, filming Football League games for broadcast by Sky and Channel 5, and editing Sky's raw Premier League coverage into video clips for News UK titles The Times and The Sun.

A new revenue stream is in education, filming video teaching materials for schools and colleges.

Other clients are big membership trade bodies, such as the British Bankers’ Association, which are sold “news style programmes” to screen at conferences and on their websites. Natasha Kaplinsky has hosted 24 such editorial projects, which also offer opportunities of selling separate advertorial segments.

The division makes plenty of television beyond news. It was behind the hard-nosed journalism of C4’sDispatches investigation Escape from ISIS. And it made the documentary Harrow: A Very British School, for Sky.

Browning promises “very strong growth figures” in ITN's imminent annual report.