Media buyers left Sydney’s White Bay Power Station confident in the direction of Foxtel Group. In particular, buyers are clear about Foxtel’s point of difference as a digitally-led media company, and are optimistic that innovations and collaborations should deliver more effective measurement and advertising.
Five years ago Foxtel Group was in a tough position. Growing competition from a plethora of global, cut price streamers hitting the Australian market had placed pressure on a business that was once the subscription standard bearer.
This led its leadership team to transform the pay TV company towards a digitally-led future.
Last night Foxtel Group CEO Patrick Delany proudly declared, “we are now a digital sports and entertainment company” with 52 per cent of its volume now digital.
It was one of the key messages from the event and really landed with media buyers speaking to B&T.
“They have a really clear position on digital transformation, not convergence, and they are increasingly driving that point of difference from what would have been their previous competitive set or peer group,” Omnicom Media Group chief investment officer Kristiaan Kroon said.
“It’s interesting that they’re putting themselves in the space of YouTube, Amazon, Vevo, and not with Seven, Nine or Ten. It’s not so much an OzTAM piece, but more around inventory, volume and the key stat was around shifting from 12 per cent to over 50 per cent of all volume now being digital.
“When I look at where Foxtel was and what they are now bringing to the market in terms of being a highly vigilant business with very relatable consumer products, innovation, energy, and capability within their leadership teams’ it’s been a really impressive transformation.”
Atomic 212 investment chief Lorraine Woods was equally impressed by Foxtel’s digital trajectory and the new bells and whistles it is bringing to market so advertisers get the most out of it.
“They’re really gearing up to be a pure digital broadcaster for the future, like they’ve still got,” she said. “They did say that 30 per cent of their subscribers are still linear based, but they’ve got solutions around that on how we can use the digital capabilities to improve the performance in linear. They really are trying to be those market leaders and future-proof their business.”
Feel the beat
Although light on detail last night, buyers are interested in hearing more about Foxtel’s collaboration with tvbeats that it says will allow it to translate linear TV spots into digital impressions.
“I think that’s a really clever move, because it helps, from a buying perspective, to get a more consistent view of what you’re buying, of those audiences, and linking them all together,” Spark Foundry’s chief investment officer Lucie Jansen said.
Woods said she hasn’t previously heard of such tech and that it would be “a real leap forward” for the industry if they could “use those digital capabilities and how we transact and optimise into our linear, linear buying”.
All buyers welcome partnerships with Adgile to measure ROI and Commbank IQ to try and link campaign activity to sales, although would like to see more detail about how these work in reality.
“It’s a really good opportunity by industry, category and client, to see what data there is and how clients show up in a purchase on a banking app,” Kroon said. “But if CommBank only records you without any detail around campaigns or what type of account you’ve got, more work may need to be done to make that really impactful.”
Woods added: “There is a need that a lot of marketers and agencies have around ROI, particularly in this landscape and market. Whatever we can do to prove the effectiveness of a campaign in order for you know, marketers to continue to grow their brands is becoming the most critical conversation.”
Streaming siblings
In an ideal world, advertisers and media buyers would prefer a single source of truth when it comes to advertising, but with the separation of Foxtel Group and OzTAM that reality, for now, appears a pipe dream.
Media buyers have previously told B&T that in spite of this, they are happy to lean into multiple currencies.
In a short space of time, the Video Futures Collective has now grown to include Foxtel Group, Amazon Advertising, Disney, Vevo, Samsung Ads, YouTube and SBS – and several of these businesses had a presence at Foxtel’s Upfront event to explain why collaboration was important.
Spark’s Jansen said that when there is greater collaboration, “we do generally see more favourable outcomes for clients and advertisers”.
“I think it is a very wise move for all of them in the Video Future Collective, because they’re much more powerful as a group, rather than on their own,” she said. “And it also makes sense because there’s a lot more subscription services coming in, so they kind of need to group together, otherwise the competition actually will put them in a worse off position.
“Mark Frain said that reach is interesting, but ROI is critical, which I fully agree with. But hopefully what this collective will allow advertisers to see is deduplicated reach across that collective group. That will be a pretty strong offering.”
Although caveating that “two different measurement solutions coming to market is less than ideal”, Kroon contends “it does create innovation and competition, and you can see how fast Foxtel have moved”.
He added: “With Kantar, they’ve been able to bring in and create collaboration across all these diverse global and local steaming players, which hasn’t happened before.
“We we are going to work as closely as we can with both providers to get to the most granular data that serves the clients we represent… and if the VFC continues to increase the number of partners it has, it will be more and more attractive to brands because it will help them get closer to sales outcomes.”
Sports BINGE
On the content side, one announcement that caught the eye was BINGE adding sports and news properties to its platform creating what Foxtel described as Australia’s only “entertainment, news and sports” streaming service. This will kick off with the WBBL, men’s BBL and netball.
Live sport has always been Foxtel’s bread and butter, but would adding sports content to BINGE cannibalise Kayo subscriptions, especially when there is less than 10 per cent subscriber overlap between the two?
Kroon doesn’t think so, adding “BINGE is predominantly weighted towards women and it’s interesting all of the women’s sports going in. So I don’t really know from an advertising perspective if they have greater reach across women’s sport, whether it’s on Kayo or BINGE.”
Woods added: “Sport across BINGE is quite smart for them, given their biggest threats are probably the SVOD space, and some of them, Amazon Prime and Netflix, are making quite a deliberate play in that. So I thought that that was really smart and strategic on their part.”
