At last year’s B&T Awards, SBS’ marketing department, led by chief marketing and commercial officer Jane Palfreyman, walked away with the Best Marketing Team Award.
Working in one of the most crowded and competitive spaces in marketing, SBS’ marketing department was faced with a choice. It could continue trying to battle head-to-head with the likes of Seven, Nine and 10 for linear viewers. Or it could take a different tack and focus its efforts on its OnDemand BVOD channel.
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It chose the latter and the network set itself the objective to achieve 1.5 million active watchers through increasing awareness, new users and retention. However, OnDemand was perceived as being “hard work” by viewers, making a radical shift in SBS’ messaging necessary.
Through smart marketing tactics, the team achieved their targets, driving huge results for the network in the marketplace. We sat down with Palfreyman to find out why the team made the choice and why they entered the B&T Awards.
B&T: You took the bold strategy last year to reduce the focus on your FTA linear offering and spruik your SBS On Demand offering instead. What was involved in making that decision?
Jane Palfreyman: We made that decision after engaging in some research to understand how audiences understood our marketing efforts, and specifically the difference between branding SBS or branding SBS On Demand.
What we discovered is that when we used SBS as the call-to-action, audiences thought the content would be on our linear TV offering, however when we branded SBS On Demand it not only allowed people to understand that it was on our streaming platform, but it also provided a halo for our linear offering with the majority of audiences understanding it was on both platforms.
B&T: How has this strategy continued to evolve?
JP: This strategy largely holds as we continue as a business to accelerate our digital consumption while maintaining linear audiences.
We’ve been successful in our endeavours thus far with shows like Alone proving the strategy is working with us driving more than one million people per episode to the show across both broadcast and SBS On Demand and really showcasing for the industry what a digitally led TV show looks like.
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B&T: Why did you choose to enter the B&T Awards?
JP: I must say, we aren’t generally big on entering awards, instead focusing on the job to be done with audiences, however, we felt as a team that we had had an exceptional year – delivering compelling work that was driving results for the business, driving a fantastic workplace culture with highest ever engagement scores, alongside focussing on innovation and improvement with how we organised the work internally.
B&T: What did it mean to you to win the Best Marketing Team award?
JP: It really was the icing on the cake – as I said, we were proud of the work we had done, and to be recognised by your peers was a wonderful further acknowledgement of all that we’ve achieved.
B&T: What are you most excited about for the future of SBS?
There really is so much to look forward to at SBS… as we roll into FY25 we have the best content slate we’ve had with Alone, the last season of The Handmaid’s Tale, The Tour De France, Rogue Heroes and lots more.
We also have our 50th birthday next year in June, and we’ll be celebrating 50 years of helping Australians understand and celebrate our unique identity – that of one of the most successful contemporary multicultural nations in the world. And finally, we have the men’s FIFA World Cup in 2026 – the largest single sporting event in the World, and something we’re thrilled to be bringing to Australia again. So yeah, just a bit on…
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