By James Manning

“We have got quite a bit of good news,” said Paul Gardiner this week when talking to Mediaweek about the outlook at Bauer Media Australia.

Has the death of magazines been over-reported? How gloomy are things really?

Our interview with Gardiner comes after SMI reported magazine agency adspend dropped double digits again in February 2019.

But things aren’t that dismal at Bauer Media Australia according to its commercial director.

“We are in the best position we have been in for a long time.”

Gardiner is always one to tell it like it is. He wasn’t sugar-coating the past when he told us: “It wasn’t looking too flash 18 months ago.

“When I started [in Sydney] we were coming off 10 years of constant decline. 2017 was the worst year we ever had.

“Our teams have subsequently been working very hard and we are starting to hit our budgets and see some growth. Q1 2019 was the strongest quarter we have had in 10 years. We have managed to out perform the market and Bauer got a positive mention on the SMI Report.

“While the market was down 10% in February, we were up 10%. That is very positive considering where we have come from.”

In discussing reasons for the turn-around, Gardiner started talking about trust, engagement and attention, “spaces that magazine brands traditionally have owned”.

Bauer Media is able to report good news about readership. “Our audiences are holding. We have had two consecutive readership audits showing growth across our portfolio. Television meanwhile is reporting a double-digit decline.

“Our digital network is also going well. Now To Love has its biggest audience ever with just over 2m uniques. Our luxury cross platform audience has grown.

“We have got a good news story.”

Gardiner said Bauer Media Australia is seeing brands returning to magazines. “Marketers are going through a period where they are evaluating their spend as audiences shift. Advertisers that haven’t been in magazines are up, and others that have been out for a while, are returning.

“The challenge for us when we reset our commercial opportunities 15 months ago was we knew we would have to work really hard to get advertisers back. It is harder to get an advertiser back than it is to look after an advertiser that is currently using the medium. We have had to work really hard to give them a reason to take another look at Bauer.”

Gardiner also mentioned the success of Bauer’s content division Story 54.

“We have also done a lot of work around our purpose as a media owner. We were really clear about our purpose last year, which was around equality for everyone and a better future for Australian women. We worked hard on our 10 Million Words for a more equal female future initiative, and an amazing campaign to lobby to remove the tax on feminine hygiene products. We made a bit of a statement in the market as to what we are about.”

As to ongoing challenges, Gardiner said the mass titles are a constant work in progress. “Those titles would be the biggest issues for us as audiences find the content in other places. For us the strategy has been to go hard in the digital space with Now To Love. What we are finding is we are able to make up the potential downgrade in ad dollars from our weeklies across our digital network.

“We still have a job to do with the weeklies in educating the market about the role of weekly magazines. The role is around time out, escapism – entertainment. They still play an important role.”

Monday: Gardiner gets specific on Bauer Media strategy, titles that have been closed or sold, staff departures plus what is attracting the growing ad dollars.

Finecast has partnered with broadcasters Seven, Nine, 10, SBS and Foxtel via MCN. To explain exactly what Addressable TV is how and it works, Finecast managing director Brett Poole was a guest on Mediaweek’s weekly Your Money segment and spoke with James Manning, Ingrid Willinge and James Daggar-Nickson.

Here are some highlights from the interview.

Watch the complete interview here.

What is addressable TV?

This is where advertisers can deliver different messages to different homes, unlike what you can do with broadcast TV where everybody sees the same ad at the same time.

It is a huge advance in TV advertising, which in the past has been used for reach. Now you can start segmenting audiences.

What makes it possible?

One of the changes in recent years has been the adoption of smart TVs, which enable broadcasters to get data. That allows information about who is watching that TV and broadcasters have invested a lot of money to develop catch-up apps, or OTT apps, which allows advertisers to have the data transfer when buying television. When a viewer is logged into their favourite app we know where that viewer and they can smartly deliver an ad.

Can you do it while watching live TV?

The answer is yes with people watching live streaming. That has been more difficult for the broadcasters to enable, but most of the broadcasters can now do that. When people live stream sport you can get a huge audience watching at the same time. Which is the promise of TV – there is no other way better than TV to get such huge audiences.

How big is the opportunity for advertisers?

It is not as big as broadcast TV, which is still the biggest and the best for reach buys. OzTAM though has measured as many as 12m different devices being connected in a month, which is also a big reach opportunity.

People say that TV is in decline, it is only the measurement that is in decline, TV has never been better than it is today. It is just not measured in the same way as people choose when they watch.

What are the ramifications for the cost for advertisers – will it cost more.

The base price for addressable TV will cost more because it is more targeted. But when you work out the efficiency of the buy it is always better than broad reach campaigns.

Will advertisers spend less to reach audiences, or more because it works better than reach?

I have never met a marketer who didn’t spend more when something worked. Because it works it will get more spend diverted to it on media plans.

Are we seeing changes in the way adspend is allocated?

Because we have been planning TV the same for decades it is now a challenge because every part of the delivery has changed – from planning to how we activate an ad to how interesting we make the creative to how we measure it.

How good are broadcasters with their data – are some better than others?

I love all broadcasters equally! They all have benefits and they all have a different strategy. They have all invested in the changing nature of TV and those experiences.

How big will on demand & live streaming become?

We are seeing way more programming being made available. Globally GroupM has forecast that up to half of all viewing could be addressable in some way.

On announcing The Future of Connected Living research project, Starcom CEO Toby Barbour said: “We’re experiencing a fundamental shift in connectivity, with consumers embracing voice technology at a rapid pace. When it comes to the use of voice technology in homes, we’re already seeing significant changes in human behaviour with the arrival of smart speakers and voice assistants in over one million Australian households.

“But so far businesses have largely focused on the technology, which only tells part of the story. To fully realise the opportunity, our thinking needs to be human centred.

“As the Human Experience Company, we believe the best way to understand people is to observe and engage with them in real-life situations. So we’ve created four fully-connected smart homes, and in conjunction with our brand partners, we’ll be studying technology through the experience of real people.”

Toby Barbour

The project is being led by Starcom’s national head of futures & product, Graeme Wood (Pictured) along with research agency partner, The Practice Insights.

Collaborating brand partners include Visa and Seven West Media, with Samsung also participating. The brands will guide the direction of the research and draw on their global knowledge and expertise to provide additional insight into the study.

Kurt Burnette, chief revenue officer Seven West Media said: “Seven West Media is excited to be partnering with Starcom in this groundbreaking research. Understanding the connected home is quite clearly an important factor in making informed decisions in the modern marketing mix. More importantly is understanding the behaviour of the people in that connected home. Like Starcom and its other collaborating partners, we are driven to better understand those behaviours to better communicate our content and our messages in the most effective way.”

The four households, based in the greater Sydney area have been chosen to reflect the complexity of Australian family life. As part of the initial stage of the 12-month project, these “natural labs” will be observed over a four-week period between March to April, with observations recorded via a mix of filmed video diaries by the households, filmed observation, and show-and-tell interviews.

Wood said: “We will bring to life what the future of family living will look like and provide an ongoing ethnographic study of human, lived experiences. Research outcomes will include gaining a deeper understanding of how and why consumer behaviour is changed by the experience of living in a smart home; and provide practical knowledge relevant to brand experience, product, service, content and commercial development.

“With forecasts that 43% of Australian homes will be smart-technology enabled by 2023, and UK/US voice commerce expected to grow from $2bn to $40bn by 2022, the opportunities for brands are enormous.”

John Broome, CEO, the Australian Association of National Advertisers added: “Marketers are always interested in how consumers react and change their behaviours in response to new technology. Emerging developments in connected home technology will be very interesting, and Starcom’s study will give us a perspective on what is to come.

“As new behaviours emerge, they will present new opportunities and challenges, particularly as existing behaviours potentially disappear. Savvy marketers will want to be in front of these changes before they happen.”

The initial findings from Starcom’s research project will be released in June.

By Andrew Mercado

MAFS presents itself as “reality” and insists scripts are never written. And that must be true, because no hack would write anything as dull as the “raw and uncut “ eight minute conversation Ritchie and Alex had on 10’s Bachelor in Paradise. So, no scripted dialogue then, but let’s get real – too many situations are being set up for maximum drama.

As Ritchie likes to say, at the end of the day, reality TV has to decide if it should aspire to being better than a “cesspit”, as ABC Breakfast’s Michael Rowland described it. MAFS’ finale reunion, where warring females suddenly switched gears to support each other in the sisterhood, was too little, too late for some.

The chance for soul-searching is now, given commercial TV is already having a holiday. The Easter non-ratings period means Indiana Jones movie repeats on Nine and Chemist Warehouse advertorial House Of Wellness in prime time on Seven. Seven also has a new US network drama, The Passage, yet another variation of the zombie genre, but with some vampiric dream travelling and a plague thrown in. It stars Saved By The Bell’s Mark-Paul Gosselar, who now appears to be the TV-lite version of Chris Pratt, and Henry Ian Cusick from Lost, in the hope you will think this is the next Lost. FYI – it’s not.

Once upon a time, Easter was a time for religious reflection. 10 would even refrain from airing saucy material on Good Friday, like Number 96 and The Box. FYI – there is no respect today, unless you count The Ten Commandments on GEM. The ABC has the mega violent but wickedly funny second season of Killing Eve (also available now on iView) and Netflix drops Chris Lilley’s new series, Lunatics.

Will this be a return to form, given its all-new characters, or another lightning rod for controversy, after a trailer showed more blackface and jokes about disabilities? Whether it turns out to be a good or a bad Friday for Chis Lilley could be irrelevant, because the only talking point next week will be Game of Thrones on Foxtel. Fingers crossed their website doesn’t crash this year, or that’s what everyone will be talking about instead.

To commemorate the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones launching globally on April 15, a world-first experience for fans called Grave of Thrones has been unveiled by Foxtel, the home of GoT in Australia.

This final resting place, situated inside Centennial Park in Sydney from April 12-14 and spanning over 2,000 square metres, pays tribute to the bloodshed and more than a hundred thousand individual deaths in Game of Thrones over the past seven seasons.

Foxtel’s Grave of Thrones features an extraordinary collection of gravestones, including two grand family mausoleums housing the deceased members of House Stark and House Baratheon and the headstones of some of Game of Thrones’ most infamous characters, including Joffrey Lannister, Ramsay Bolton, Khal Drogo, Tywin Lannister, Littlefinger and Olenna Tyrell.

Every single grave has been created in staggering detail, closely referencing the lives and deaths of the characters featured, including Hodor’s headstone which honours one of the show’s most loved characters and depicts his tragic death at the exit of a cave.

Created for Foxtel by DDB Sydney, Revolver/Will O’Rourke and The Glue Society, Grave of Thrones is designed as a place for GoT fans to reflect on the deaths of the show’s most iconic faces, as the greatest show on earth gets set to reach its epic conclusion.

The graveyard was created by a huge team of Australia’s top sculptors, designers, painters and builders, who worked hundreds of hours to build graves richly layered in GoT stories and references.

Game of Thrones fans are invited to pay their respects at the graveyard, which is open to the public from Friday, April 12 to Sunday, April 14, from 7am – 6pm.

Visitors are also encouraged to bring tributes to lay on the tombs of their most beloved characters. Those at the Grave of Thrones will be able to download a map at graveofthrones.com, where they can also find an audio tour of the cemetery, illustrating the meticulous detail featured on each grave.

The eighth and final season of Game of Thrones premieres worldwide on Monday, April 15 at 11.00am AEST. Consisting of six episodes, viewers will be able stream new episodes every Monday exclusively in Australia on Foxtel Now or watch on Foxtel.

Visit Grave of Thrones

Friday, April 12 – Sunday, April 14 7am – 6pm
Fearnley Grounds, Centennial Park

Thursday: Week 15 2019

By James Manning

• Seven News 966,000/860,000 (No Adelaide at 6.30pm)
• Nine News 827,000/860,000
• A Current Affair 732,000
• ABC News 587,000
• 7.30 446,000
• The Project 232,000/383,000
• 10 News First 345,000
• SBS World News 123,000

Breakfast TV

• Sunrise 279,000
• Today 178,000

Seven

Home And Away dropped to 382,000 with no episodes screened in Melbourne and Adelaide with an early start to the AFL.

The football clash saw a return to form for Melbourne, which overcame Sydney after a sloppy start to win their first game of the year. The network audience was 572,000 after 675,000 a week prior. The Melbourne audience of 322,000 was down from 387,000. With Sydney playing, the audience watching on 7mate climbed from 23,000 last week to 55,000.

Nine

Nine’s night was boosted in Sydney and Brisbane by the NRL clash that saw West Tigers defeat the Broncos. The audience was 413,000 with 198,000 and 187,000. The metro audience was down a little from 443,000 a week ago.

Nine’s winning Sydney share was 23.1% while in Brisbane it was 28.5%.

10

A third evening of Bachelor In Paradise saw the audience close again to half a million, although now just under that figures after audiences above 500,000 earlier in the week.

The final episode of season nine of Gogglebox Australia then did 537,000 after 578,000 a week prior. The episode with all the Goggleboxers being super impressed with Ricky Gervais and After Life.

The two shows helped 10 to its best share in four weeks and its second best numbers in eight weeks. The primary channel had the top two shows under 50 and in key demos.

ABC

Escape From The City visited the southern tablelands with 357,000 after 321,000 a week ago.

The final of Informer then did 149,000.

SBS

Part 1 of Victoria And Albert: The Wedding drew the biggest Thursday crowd – 208,000.

The two hours of the drama Project Blue Book then did 138,000.