Dr Alison Sprague is a director in FTI’s Economic Consulting practice, based in London. Alison has more than 15 years’ economics consulting experience and specialises in the media, entertainment and telecoms sectors. Her sector experience includes television, radio, film, internet, sport, music, publishing and fixed/mobile telecoms. She has led numerous strategy and economics projects, providing commercial, competition, policy and regulatory advice, including advising companies, regulators and governments in the UK and overseas. She has additionally conducted research into brands and advertising effectiveness and led a number of expert witness reports.
Experience
Alison has developed a significant number of advertising revenue forecasting models including for numerous successful franchise applications and renewals - Channel 3, Channel 5, Teletext, DTT, Classic FM, INR2, Talk Radio, and DAB. She has also developed projections for overseas markets including Eire, Macedonia, Hong Kong, several Eastern European countries, the Netherlands and Scandinavia. Contexts include due diligence, competition, deregulation, and privatisation. She has also examined funding models, public value and economic impact in relation to public service broadcasters and conducted two major studies of pay TV markets in the EU as input to a client’s submission to Ofcom’s pay TV investigation. She has also assessed possible uses, values and bidders for the UK’s ‘digital dividend’ (UHF) spectrum and has examined competition issues and values of televised sports rights. She recently examined the likely impact of changing the amount of permitted advertising minutage on TV and appraised the reach projections for the BBC i-Player. Many of her studies have been published.
Her competition experience includes a merger in the Netherlands TV market, EU roaming charges, UK transport pricing, the collective selling of UK sports rights, UK newspaper and magazine distribution, EU and UK fixed-to-mobile termination rates, the UK outdoor advertising sector, EU local loop and leased lines, GSM spectrum in the Netherlands, and EU pay TV sectors.
Alison has examined sports rights on a number of occasions - she estimated the implicit value of the rights to the Champions League in terms of advertising and sponsorship revenue, examined the revenue distribution model of the Premier League as input to an assessment of another sport, examined the regulatory and competition issues in respect of the Premier League’s next sale of its broadcast rights and reviewed an expert report in respect of the collective selling of football rights following an investigation by the OFT.
Alison has three degrees in economics and several publications. Following her first degree she began her career as a Research Assistant to Professor Patrick Minford and for her M.Phil and D.Phil theses, she was supervised by Professor Stephen Nickell. She was also a college lecturer at Oxford University. Prior to joining FTI, she was an Economics Consultant at KPMG and then at PwC.