Seven network sales director Natalie Harvey and Seven digital sales director James Bayes
Why has CODE7 returned now?
NH: We used CODE7 initially two years ago. To make sure it was right we rested it for a while, but we are ready to go now. We have some campaigns locked in.
CODE7 is live now and will halve the workload of the agency and works across broadcast and digital. It is how we deliver on dynamic trading campaigns based on a CPM and we guarantee an audience outcome with no more make goods. The dashboard we have allows people to make sense of our audiences as its shows our audiences by day and by week. It is the start of the future of trading.
What are you aims for 7CAP which enables contextual ad placement?
JB: 7CAP is a broadcast product but the digital team has been intimately involved.
NH: We put a brief through 7CAP this week looking for family moments and we got around 14000 moments within our content with family moments coming up. That gives the advertiser specific opportunities to align the brand with those moments in the linear broadcast and we haven’t been able to do that before.
JB: We know it works. You put your spot in the right contextual environment adjacent to relevant content and the cut through and brand impact of that is going to be greater.
What 7CAP allows us to do is to automate that and do it at scale.
We run all of our schedule through AWS artificial intelligence machine learning and every five seconds it takes a frame out of the content and then codes it.
Seven West Media’s chief revenue officer Kurt Burnette
Seven reported that it had already signed off on most Olympic partnerships
KB: Having 11 major sponsors already, and the last one to be completed before the end of the year, is unprecedented. I have never seen that many commitments this far out of the games.
This gives us a signal that 2020 is going to be a much better year than 2019. This year has been a tough year with advertisers unsure and the Olympics represents a known entity they can commit to. The people I talk to say it gives them a chance to forward plan and go long for a change instead of short term [trading].
With paywalls in 2012 [Foxtel] and 2016 [Seven], Seven is promising everything for free from the Tokyo games
KB: This is the first time TV audiences will get to see everything at an Olympics for free.
We will be covering Tokyo on Seven and 7TWO with six additional curated channels and then another 35+ streams of multiple sports that give viewers the chance to choose and athlete or a sport.
Improving the FTA drama viewing experience
KB: We launched Secret Bridesmaid’s Business with solace 60 second spots where the break would countdown with the ad running. We did some preliminary research that showed that Westpac had a recall rate of 80% from those spots. Our dramas next year will have shorter breaks – we need to make drama a better experience and that’s what we will be doing.
More advertising opportunity during Big Bash League
KB: Cricket will have strategic timeouts in Big Bash League matches. Cricket Australia spoke to the players about it and we saw it as a great opportunity to get not just ads, but also on ground activations and strategic messaging. We will give it the special treatment it deserves.
—
Top Photo: Kurt Burnette with Seven’s Charlotte Valente and James Warburton