There were good parts about Seven’s Upfront – which have been running all week – but also plenty of questions that media buyers who spoke to B&T would like answered. The broadcaster landed the message that it does news and sport rather well, has a solid slate of tried and tested programs on broadcast TV, and will be supercharging its BVOD with new ‘fireworks’ each month. However, there is uncertainty about Phoenix, and confusion about Seven’s new leadership structure that splits TV and digital after years of Total TV propaganda.
A lot can happen in a year. In 2023, Seven’s all singing and dancing upfront wowed huge audiences of marketers and media buyers at a packed out ICC during SxSW. It was dripping with ambition and confidence in spite of a challenged TV advertising market.
Fast forward a year and the mood music has certainly changed. Seven let go of two of its popular stars from the 2023 show – long-serving chief revenue officer Kurt Burnette and CMO Melissa Hopkins. The business also made around 100 other roles redundant in a round of cost-cutting.
The broadcaster has also grappled with scandals about its workplace culture, which were exposed in a Four Corners investigation titled Don’t Speak, and completely restructured the business under new CEO Jeff Howard, splitting TV, Digital and its Western Australia business into separate P&Ls. More recently, Seven West Media reported a 69 per cent decline in profit.
Therefore, it’s hardly a surprise that Seven has downsized its upfront game following a year of upheaval.
Guests were received in Seven’s loading dock at Eveleigh, Sydney before being taken into the smart Sunrise studio for a more intimate presentation about Seven’s content slate, its 7plus strategy, shifting from hindsight to foresight analytics, and that its upgraded trading platform Phoenix, first flagged at the ICC a year ago, is finally ready to rise.
Nunn Media’s Sydney managing director Chris Walton summed up Seven’s predicament succinctly.
“They’ve had a tough year and hard choices to make. They could either fly in the face of that and go big and blitzy again – but then they’d be open to ‘lipstick on a pig’ kind of comments. Alternatively, they could be who they are, which is a media owner that’s had a tough time, is working through huge disruption and has had to deal with internal challenges like some of their competitors. It’s not a glitzy, showy kind of company anymore,” he said.
Howard addressed concerns about Seven’s culture upfront and that the business was determined to fix it. This resonated with PHD chief investment officer Jo Barnes, who said: “They started off with talking about their reputation and the importance of that, and how they hold themselves to account. So I think that we’ll see a focus on Seven recovering that brand reputation.”
Initiative’s chief investment officer Paige Wheaton agreed, and said the industry would “support them through tough times”.
Wheaton left the Seven presentation with mixed feelings, but said that overall, the positives outweighed the “areas of opportunity”.
Although Phoenix – Seven’s new trading platform that converges metropolitan and regional broadcast TV and BVOD inventory – is launching a bit later than expected, Wheaton told B&T that is positive a date has now been set in stone.
“I’m really happy that they’re talking about it and (converged trading) is where they’re going, because ease of transaction is going to be paramount to their success in maintaining advertiser spends,” she said.
“All of the VODs are becoming a lot easier to transact and the audience is growing quickly, so they need to make it easy to trade. What will make it even better is if they (Seven, Nine and Ten) came together as a bit more of a cohort, instead of individual strategies and solutions with similar outputs.”
Is Phoenix rising?
Seven’s national television sales director Katie Finney told the audience that testing on Phoenix had taken place in recent months and bookings will open in two weeks for a 2025 launch.
She said one of the main benefits are that advertisers can now buy audiences across the Seven ecosystem, rather than via channels, and it spells the “end of the make goods” era.
PHD’s Barnes said she is unclear about details around Phoenix, such as whether it’s a tool that plugs into media agency trading desks or has been designed as a direct trading platform for advertisers.
“Code 7+ will be replaced by Phoenix, but we haven’t tested it or tried it yet, so I don’t think Phoenix is flying just yet,” she said. “Any advancement that they make is a positive one, but they have some catching up to do to even get it to the stage that Nine’s Galaxy is at.”
Nunn Media’s Walton said that he learnt “nothing” about Phoenix except that “it’s coming”, and while he applauds the ambition of Seven eliminating make goods, decent media buyers shouldn’t need make goods in the first place.
That said, media buyers are upbeat about Seven’s predictive analysis tool REDiQ4U, which promises to predict what TV audiences will be watching across the Seven video ecosystem 28 days ahead and with more than 90 per cent accuracy.
Walton, who has previously worked at Quantium, said that TV audience prediction has been a weak spot for many years.
“The fact that networks couldn’t accurately predict their audiences has been such a drain on their business because they didn’t ultimately know what they were trading with, and so much value has been lost,” he said.
“If they’re saying they can more accurately predict, then that is important and interesting, especially given the myriad of spots, if you like that now make up, you know, screen or TV or video schedules.”
PHD’s Barnes also believes predictive analysis would be valuable if Seven is able to seamlessly integrate that data into their own planning and buying tools.
“The move from hindsight to foresight is an advancement and it will be interesting to see how accurate that actually ends up being,” she said.
Setting off fireworks
Seven’s Upfront was heavy on content; it almost flipped Nine’s approach with 45 minutes of content talk upfront before moving into tech, data and tools.
Media buyers welcomed Seven doubling down on local news, sport and entertainment, which includes the digital rights to its AFL and cricket coverage, as well as beefing up its daily news output.
“AFL and cricket rights on 7plus is a positive for me and will be good for viewers and clients,” Barnes said. “Their content slate is already pretty strong and they are investing $700 million in content; the shows that they already do have do quite well.”
Wheaton said that she would have liked to hear a bit more about new shows on broadcast TV as only one new program, Once In Lifetime, was presented to the audience while more time was spent previewing the next season of Seven classics like Home & Away and Australian Idol.
The lack of focus on broadcast TV provided plenty of space to outline Seven’s plans for its BVOD, 7plus.
Seven has doubled down on its ‘bonfires and fireworks’ content strategy first mooted a year ago, but with far more ‘fireworks’ planned for 2025. Bonfires refer to the premium content library that already exists on 7plus, while fireworks are first run shows that Seven has acquired the rights to and will roll out each month. The aim is that new exclusive programs from the US and UK will attract new audiences to 7plus and they will stick around for the premium content bonfire.
In 2025, this will include the highly anticipated Suits LA, Grosse Point Garden Society, Stag, Murder in a Small Town, and the Tom Hanks narrated documentary The Americas, among others.
Seven also spoke about how its audiences on BVOD are growing rapidly – daily active users are up 20 per cent year on year – and also skew much younger than on broadcast TV with 74 per cent in the 18-54 year old demo. These were powerful messages to remind the market that Seven has a rapidly growing number of younger eyeballs that advertisers can reach who may not be watching broadcast TV.
“What I liked about that was that they are investing in a younger audience and looking to diversify the audience breadth, because the average age of their broadcast audience is only getting older,” Wheaton said. “And so that diversification of content, I thought, was smart.”
Hear not, see not
The 7plus content strategy was well received, but buyers warn that Seven now needs to back that up with marketing dollars to attract audiences to the platform.
“If no one is watching the fireworks, that’s just a waste, right?” Wheaton said. “People won’t know what to watch if they don’t know that it’s on. Marketing drives a level of watchability that the SVODs do really well.”
Barnes said that Seven now has a critical job to do to educate viewers about 7plus.
“That’s probably something that’s dropped off for a couple of years,” she said. “The networks have not been that great at telling their own story outside of their own platform. It‘s interesting to compare yourself to a Netflix or an Amazon Prime, but they need to invest in a really robust marketing plan to promote their content and also their Seven brand to change that consumer perception.”
Nunn Media’s Walton said the old adage that TV networks should spend a quarter of their inventory promoting their own programs is no longer good enough, and that Seven will need to promote its content offering on other platforms if it wants to take on global streamers.
Breaking up Total TV
It’s not just content that Seven needs to do a better job of marketing. Media buyers are confused by Seven’s leadership structure, and in particular why the media company decided to separate its TV and digital businesses and sales teams.
“From a content perspective, I can understand it, but from a sales perspective, it surprised me when they made that announcement,” Wheaton said. “When we talk about ease of transaction and total TV wanting to consider all eyeballs equally in a converged world, to separate these teams feels like a move that needs some consideration. I would really like more clarity.”
Barnes was more forthright about her views on the new structure. “They’ve moved to a head of digital and a head of TV, and whilst they claim that’s coming together as one and they’re working seamlessly, I’m still unclear on how that actually works in a practical sense,” she said.
“We’ve done a lot of work with Seven in the past, pioneering the total TV trials. We were the first agency with one of our clients to do that on a broad scale. I feel like they have taken a step back and I don’t know what the future looks like in that sense.
“I’m uncertain on the strategy going into 2025 and we would like more clarity about the structure, strategy and developments in the data and AI space.”
Nunn made the observation that trading conditions for TV are still “very tough” and while “there’s an uncertain future” Seven would pull through.
“Seven has decided to play to their strengths, and their best strengths are live and local,” he said.
Wheaton said that although Seven’s Upfront was “a mixed bag”, albeit mostly positive, the industry would be there to “support, help and provide feedback” as the company comes through a challenging period of transformation.
