Seven’s national TV sales director has had a year like few others. After the tumult of Seven’s restructure and redundancies, which included her long-serving boss Kurt Burnett departing, Finney has been thrust into a leadership role as Seven reinvents its go-to-market strategy. Finney caught up with B&T to discuss the wash-up from the changes, and why she is upbeat about Seven’s future—despite a soft TV market and annual results. She believes Seven is now well placed to capitalise on investments in tech and digital sports rights, but accepts that competition from global streamers and an education job about TV audiences has changed the calculus for Australia’s legacy TV market.
Katie Finney hardly appears like a TV industry veteran, but having served at Seven for the past 23 years, she is certainly one of the more experienced sales executives in market.
In all of those years, few could compare to 2024, but you wouldn’t know it speaking to the eternal optimist.
“There certainly have been highs and lows, but we’ve got a brilliant team here. And, I’ve been 23 years in the company, I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t a great place to work.”
Finney’s last comment refers to cultural issues that have been exposed at Seven, which include a Four Corners investigation last August that revealed a toxic workplace culture, characterised by bullying, sexism and harassment, particularly towards women in its newsroom.
Two months before the investigation and unrelated to it, Seven made several high profile executives redundant, including long-serving chief revenue officer Kurt Burnett, and chief marketing officer Melissa Hopkins and Melbourne MD Lewis Martin redundant, amid a wider cost-cutting exercise.
Finney said she was not exposed to the cultural issues and that losing Burnett and other colleagues was tough at the time.
“It’s your own truth,” she explained. “What you read can be difficult, but what you actually are experiencing in your own day-to-day is really important. And you know, what I have communicated to my team and my people and my friends and family, are my own experiences at Seven.”
Finney was elevated into the national TV sales role after her predecessor, Georgie Nichols chose to leave the business. She now forms a sales leadership team alongside digital sales strategy director Jordan King and head of sales strategy and enablement Vikki Friscic. Henry Tajer, the new chief commercial officer, overlooks the whole team.
Finne spoke to B&T prior to the Tajer announcement, and admitted there had been “some market confusion” about the sales operation when the restructure took place. She said to B&T last month that the team operates as one and a lot of the sales team that has remained unchanged, including metro sales leaders.
“That piece of separate P&Ls in television, digital and the West did confuse the market a bit…and in the last six months we have had a lot of conversations about being one sales team in market,” Finney said.
“Jordan King and I work hand-in-glove. Our sales team is KPI-ed on delivering one total number, but we have teams that are experts in the transaction of television. Then you’ve got the teams that are digital, and then you’ve got your converged teams that are really focused on that total audience. Those teams still report into the television team because that is still the majority of revenue and we haven’t reached that tipping point with digital.
“There’s certainly not a wall in between sales teams and every deal that I work on is total TV.”
Audience is up, Revenue is down
Like other legacy TV broadcasters, Seven is going through a digital transformation. At present, digital revenues make up about 20 per cent of the overall pie, but with BVOD audiences growing at around at 30 per cent for 25-54s, the gap is closing.
At Seven’s recent Upfront event, much of the content slate talks were about beefing up its 7plus BVOD offering with “fireworks” – a new series that would premier on 7plus first, as well as a huge investment into the digital rights for cricket and AFL.
“Back in the day, it was a case of we buy our linear Seven, and then you get your catch-up on 7plus,” Finney said.
“Now there are total new audiences on 7plus. We’ve seen that with the summer of cricket, we’ve had 120,000 new registered users come to seven plus over the summer that weren’t there before.
“There’s a really big opportunity for the video market in terms of growth. We now have scale on BVOD and if you use cricket as an example, we’re getting more and more new audiences in there, advertisers are actually going to need to up-weight spends into those in the BVOD market. At the moment audiences are not being captured if advertisers don’t lean in and spend more on the BVOD market.”
It’s not just incremental reach, but also a different audience profile. 7plus typically attracts younger and lighter viewers, and this will only continue to grow as homes wean off antenna-delivered TV for digital.
“I don’t have a linear television anymore. I’m watching everything through the Smart TV, through the seven plus app, so that’s how we’re consuming it,” Finney admits. “So that’s, you know, that’s a massive opportunity for brands.”
Finney claims that 7plus is not cannibalising Seven’s linear audiences but also concedes that the growing number of SVODs selling ad tiers, such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney Plus and Warner Bros Discovery’s new-to-market Max, is making the video advertising market tight.
She said that Seven’s competitive set extends well beyond traditional rivals Nine and Ten, although you might not know it by looking at daily media releases about how Seven has won TV ratings against its old foes.
When pressed on whether there are too many TV and SVOD players in market, especially with the likes of Max and Disney+ now offering ad tiers, she remained coy, adding: “We’re seeing a lot of consolidation globally with SVOD players. It’ll be interesting to see how it does play out over the next couple of years in this market. Absolutely.”
In fact, Finney is optimistic about the year ahead, despite Seven only this week revealing its TV advertising revenue was down six per cent in the half year to December.
Part of this is due to Nine’s Olympic Games bump. But also Total TV audiences increasing 1.5 per cent for the half, with a 43 per cent lift in BVOD.
Who are the real competitors?
In fact, Seven increased its Total TV revenue share by 0.5 points to 41.5 per cent, not a bad feat for the non-Olympic broadcaster.
But should Seven be marking its performance against Nine and Ten, or the video market in total?
“It’s not Seven, Nine, Ten anymore. It’s more Meta, YouTube and all of the SVOD players in Amazon, Paramount+, Disney+ coming in with different ad tiers. And of course you have Foxtel,” Finney said.
“We’re now competing in that pool and for us, it’s no longer about what’s your share of television budgets. It’s how do we show up in a total marketing budget in a meaningful way, where we’ve got the audience reach and scale? And why is that more powerful?”
The reality is that total viewing is up, including year-on-year lifts for tent pole shows like Australian Idol, Farmer Wants a Wife and My Kitchen Rules.
So why are revenues not tracking with audiences?
“I think there’s a perception that TV is dead, which is just so false; it’s not true. Decisions are being made by media buyers that are really young and using their own audience consumption to plan and buy, and we have a big job to do to prove our effectiveness,” said Finney.
There is no doubt that the TV fortunes during COVID-19 when audiences swelled as people were forced to spend more time indoors, created a false audience economy that the industry has struggled to reconcile since.
But Finney is confident that Seven is making the right bets, bringing more fireworks to its BVOD, and providing huge opportunities for growth in its cricket and AFL digital streaming rights.
A look at its summer of cricket partners shows a growing commercial program (see below), and Seven’s digital coverage of the AFL is expected to follow suit.
“All of the research shows that TV is the most effective channel, yet money has been slipping and at pace. So we just need to prove that effectiveness and keep getting the messaging out that we’re not losing audiences at the levels that people believe and that it we have started to really hold linear and then grow digital,” she said.
“In the case of cricket, we have been attracting younger audiences also coming to linear, so it’s not necessarily just to the BVOD audiences. So we need to have great sport, we need to have great content and cultural moments that Aussies care about.”
Phoenix, which has finally risen, and is now being used to trade across the whole Seven ecosystem is also helping to make trading far more efficient (replacing three transaction systems with one) and the us AI audience predictive tools should help provide stability to how campaigns are being delivered with fewer unexpected fluctuations in audience numbers across metro, regional and digital buys.
Finney, who exudes a sense of cautious optimism and passion for TV, the year ahead should be bigger than in 2024.
“I love the industry. I love television. I’m passionate about growing brands and to be able to have this opportunity,” she said. “The work in this role has been the most enjoyable six months of my career,” she says.
“I feel really excited about streaming and what that’s going to mean for Seven and for the brands that partner with us. It’s a lot of change and consolidation in the market but really interesting times. Every day is new, and we just need to embrace it, embrace the change, and be excited for what’s next.”
Summer of Cricket Partners
KFC, Toyota and Harvey Norman.
Our Sponsors
Woolworths, NRMA Insurance, Commonwealth Bank, NBN (New), Lion, Bunnings, Youi, Bundaberg Brewed Drinks, Weber and Anaconda.
Major Package Supporters
Chemist Warehouse, Canadian Club, Cancer Council, Mitsubishi Electric, Panadol (New), Liquorland (New), BKT, Cabots (New), British Sausage Company
