Beyond’27: why News Australia chose intimacy over scale

Most upfronts target the back row. In September, News Australia built one for the front row only.

“The strategy was intimacy over scale,” Monika Toth, News Australia's client partnerships event director, told Mediaweek.

Its Beyond’27 series was five invitation-only, one-hour sessions held at the company’s Holt Street headquarters in Surry Hills between 2 and 10 September. Each one covered a single category: advocacy, health and beauty, sport and entertainment, travel, and essential services.

“Beyond 27 was designed around a simple idea. If we wanted meaningful conversations, we needed a meaningful environment to create them,” Toth said.

The 5% problem

The traditional upfront gives a media company a stage to show off its programming, audiences, and commercial plans to as many people as it can fit in a room. Toth said that breadth is also the format’s weakness.

“A lot of times when you go to a traditional Upfront, it’s about throwing everything the business is doing as a whole to every single person in the room. But only maybe 5% of it would be relevant to what you do in your everyday.”

So News Australia went the other way.

“We deliberately moved away from the traditional big upfront presentation that has happened, and continues to happen, in the market. We wanted to make it invitation-only and hold it in a smaller room,” she said.

For a marketer deciding where to spend, the difference is real. A travel brand dealing with AI-led discovery faces different problems than a health advertiser trying to sound credible amid competing advice. Giving each category its own room put that category’s problem at the centre of the conversation.

“We really wanted to make sure that the room was focused, that it felt like we were speaking to them, providing solutions and ideas and information that was actually relevant to how they go about their business,” Toth said.

Welcome to Holt Street

Choosing the venue was part of the pitch. Guests didn’t go to a hired ballroom. They went into a working newsroom.

“It was a functioning working environment, but we also made it fun in the way that we engaged with them,” Toth said.

“We wanted the experience to feel unmistakably News Australia, and this is something that is connected – it is about who we are, what we’re doing, it’s about real journalism, real people, and those who are really impacted. It was about storytelling and real conversation.”

Toth said the approach came from the top, “from CEO Michael Miller, to all of the event teams that helped bring this to life. It was very considered. It was very thought through.”

READ MORE: News Australia pitches advocacy as brand growth strategy at Beyond’27

READ MORE: The sports fan has changed. News Australia says marketers haven’t

What the room said back

Toth said client feedback after the series showed the smaller format had worked.

“Without a doubt, the fact that it was intimate and it was focused on the verticals, I think that was the key for us. And the biggest learnings from our voice of client was that people felt like they actually learned something, that they actually found solutions, that they actually engaged with their colleagues and with their partners within News and outside of News.”

The biggest lesson was about the venue. “We don’t need to be grand and have an external venue when we’ve got the opportunity to bring people into News HQ and actually see how we function, how we work and have the opportunity to have the largest group of colleagues come and attend and interact with these clients,” she said.

News Australia now plans to use the approach more widely. “I think it’s something that we’ll continue to roll out across all of our events and just to be a bit more focused on who we are, being proud of who we are and what we’re producing,” Toth said.

The case for face-to-face events goes beyond the post-pandemic novelty of being in a room together again. Gus Stephenson, managing director of Funkified, which worked with News Australia on the events, said demand for in-person experiences is only going up.

“In an age of digital saturation, the need for tactile, meaningful human engagements has never been more important. Accordingly, as consumers demand a more significant value exchange than they ever have previously from brands and media, they are finding and deriving this need from IRL experiences and events in a way that will continue to increase in appetite,” he said.

“Brands are increasingly finding that they must extend their creative beyond the screen and page to genuinely connect with consumers with experiences that genuinely speak to them, or risk being left behind by competitors that do. It is the most exciting time in recent memory to be involved in live events and brand experiences, and the shift is only just beginning.”

For a B2B business like News Australia, the payoff is an exchange that helps clients make decisions, ask questions, and build relationships, and that gives them something useful to take back to the office.

“People want real connection,” Toth said.

For an industry that measures almost everything in reach, it’s an odd lesson to learn: sometimes the way to get more out of a room is to put fewer people in it.