By James Manning

Stephenson was asked if the new-look Nine was writing more business for its new assets: “I hope so, otherwise I am in real trouble!

“Everything has gone as smoothly as it could have. When you have two significant media companies coming together there is much to do. We co-located sales teams around the country from January 7 in each metro capital.

“Stage two was completing our sales transformation which we have done. We have aligned teams in television and digital, in publishing, and we have created a new team called Nine Plus to focus on the small to medium business market and Powered is the glue that brings everything together.

“The strategies that Nine and Fairfax had are aligned. That was to create the greatest content – video, written word, journalism on news, sport or lifestyle content – and distribute that across every platform you can to aggregate the greatest number of eyeballs to engage audiences and advertisers. That is what we had both been doing independently. To bring the two companies together and accelerate that strategy has been the focus.”

See also: 
Melissa Hey and Michael Stephenson examine the business of TV
How new sponsors clamoured to be part of TV’s hottest property

Listen to the Mediaweek podcast: 
TV Business: How Nine rules Q1 2019

Pitch to new advertisers from Nine

“The focus to advertisers is that they can come to Nine now and have a conversation with us about creating a marketing platform for their brands. As opposed to coming and buying advertising.

“We have proven media at the top of the funnel in television, in print, magazines plus radio. In the middle of the funnel we have our addressable advertising product with 13-14m unique IDs across the entire business from newspaper subscribers to 9Now subscribers to Domain to Stan.

“We use our performance based advertising at the bottom of the funnel to deliver sales outcomes.”

When asked if Nine was doing better with the Fairfax assets than Fairfax was achieving previously, OMD’s Melissa Hey replied: “Yes. Before they had Fairfax, Nine had a strong team selling the content and the partnerships.”

Stephenson said there had been some good cross platform success, not all initiated from the TV side. “We have a campaign coming for a brand with a foundation in Good Weekend. We have extended Good Weekend into Nine’s broadcast and the print brand will have a video and television presence.”

Does Nine having print – via newspapers and magazines – make the medium any more appealing for advertisers?

Hey: “Print is in decline and I don’t think that is going to change because consumers aren’t reading. If Nine can show in their data that people are reading, then that could mean it will be reconsidered.”

Stephenson: “We do have print revenue that is growing at Nine and I think we can do a better job with what I call proven media in the eyes of advertisers. As an industry we can do a better job of marketing, researching and proving the impact it has in terms of real sales outcomes which is a huge opportunity for ourselves and News and Seven West Media to align on communicating that much more effectively.”

Transforming TV trading

Melissa Hey: “From a buying perspective on TV, 9Galaxy in market is the strongest. The other networks are still in development and not anywhere near where 9Galaxy is. That earns Nine business because it makes the process easier.”

Cross platform audience measurement

Stephenson: “We will be launching progressively from July through until the end of the year, the ability to measure the consumption of all of our content across linear, live streaming and on demand. Inside and outside of the house on a national basis.

“That will give our media buying clients the ability to measure cross platform reach and frequency for the very first time.

“We are literally leading the world when it comes to this type of measurement.

“There will also be new audience segments – new car buyers, home loan intenders etc. As an industry we will have 40 demographics, 30 to 40 audience segments, one currency measured from one source.

“That is a real game changer. Outside of going from black and white to colour, this is the biggest change in television we have seen for many, many years.

“That is part one of the future of TV. But that doesn’t mean anything unless you have the technology to be able to buy it and sell it.

“Galaxy 2.0, which we launched in February this year, has all of our video on demand inventory – all of 9Now. Anyone in any agency can come to Nine and buy linear TV and BVOD in one transaction.”

2019 adspend outlook

Hey: “I’m surprised the market is softer than what we were expecting.

It was interesting seeing the out-of-home numbers year-on-year. I don’t think we will be seeing [overall] the growth of what we were expecting. We have metro TV up 1-2%. The results over the past couple of months is a sign that TV should be relatively flat.

Nine would be hoping for a bigger share and they will [get it] if they can keep their Q1 momentum going.”

Stephenson: “I have every expectation we will continue to dominate the ratings in share and thousands. None of us can control the market, but I am optimistic post-election that things can return to normal and the market settles down.

“Through challenging times comes massive opportunity for those willing to take it. We have the right assets, the right content, the right data strategy and the right technology. It is now up to us to create really big ideas for brands to leverage all of the content and the assets we have.”

Thoughts about regional media’s Boomtown campaign

Stephenson: “It is an awesome campaign, looks fantastic and is the right message. People should invest more into regional Australia and they should take that money from Facebook and Google. They should invest where they can get the best possible return on the investment.

All of the people representing the regional assets have done a brilliant job coming together and creating a platform for advertisers in another part of Australia.”

Hey: “I agree. Regional is way under invested in and has been for some time. Regional is the first to go when people are cutting budgets. This is a great campaign and it should invigorate why regional is such an important part of marketing.”

By James Manning & James Daggar-Nickson

Some of Australia’s biggest companies rely on its expertise to invest their marketing spends. That list includes Coles, Target, Qantas, Estee Lauder, Hasbro, Mazda, McDonald’s and Telstra.

To talk about the agency and the advertising climate this year, OMD chief executive Aimee Buchanan was Mediaweek’s guest on Your Money recently. Here are some of the highlights from the interview.

“We had a very good year in 2018,” Buchanan told the Your Money audience. “Winning Suncorp was the pinnacle which we won in December. It was a fantastic achievement from the team because of the challenges they posed to us.

“Some of the 2018 successes that weren’t as widely spoken about were some of the client extension work we were given like Qantas awarding us their international business and Tabcorp awarding us UBET.

“We try not to talk about it as a wave of success, it is more about a sustainable, long term approach. We don’t want to grow in a way that compromises our people or existing clients. You can get a little bit too greedy and all that happens is that your people and your clients suffer.”

Many of key roles at OMD are filled by woman, which is part of the media agency’s success story.

“About 77% of our workforce is female. There has been a long-standing challenge getting representation at senior levels, but 73% of our executive team are female.

“We have done a lot of work supporting women through different life stages. When women have children, or get into their 40s, which is considered old in our industry, they tend to leave. We have done a lot of work on retaining them. We have doubled our parental leave policy and introduced a flexible work policy for all staff and we have seen our rates of retention of women returning from work after having children go from 29% to 89%. That is experienced, great talent we didn’t want to lose.”

Aimee Buchanan

Buchanan said there is roughly an 8% talent shortage in the industry so there is a big demand for talent. “It is known as an industry with high burn out. We are a people based business and we are only as good as the people sitting behind the desk.”

2019 Q1 ad spend and outlook

“It is a bit of a surprise in that we didn’t anticipate a decline in the first few months. We did anticipate a slowing of channels that had a lot of growth. Our view is the year will probably end up flat.

“Digital is coming back to 12-13% growth as it reaches maturity after historically being in a 20%+ growth cycle.

“None of our clients are indicating a massive decline in budgets. The only interesting shift we are seeing is a lot of clients seeing the need to invest in a digital data technology ecosystem which is taking a little bit of budget to invest in the infrastructure required. But that is not enough to tip the numbers.”

Regional media spend

When asked about the regional media Boomtown campaign, Buchanan said regional was “a totally overlooked part of the market”.

She added: “There is a big opportunity and the Boomtown initiative is a fantastic thing. We have lacked an industry body in that space for a while and there is an educational job to be done for both marketers and agencies.”

Buchanan was asked digital viewability, accountability and safety.

“You need to separate them out. I would say there is a massive education job that is being done with the first two with advertisers, publishers and agencies to measure and manage. Brand safety poses an interesting moral dilemma for advertisers. Do we support and promote platforms that are user generated content based and not moderated or editorially controlled. Do we do that or do we compromise on the efficient scale and reach that we can get through those channels.”

Buchanan said the agency and client share equal responsibility in those discussions.

Has the consolidation in print with Fairfax now part of Nine changed the outlook for that sector?

“We are seeing the decline of print slow. But I don’t think that is a result of consolidation. It is a result of the people who were reading newspapers still reading newspapers.

“We won’t see massive volume shifts off the back of consolidation. People won’t suddenly be booking a lot of ads in newspapers because of the Fairfax-Nine relationship.

“What I think we will see is the Fairfax-Nine team [offer] really great strategic solutions that meet the needs of a client which will make them reappraise it.”

Television spend and audience habits

“There is always opportunity and challenge in these things. The challenge is how do you maintain reach and scale with increasingly fragmenting audiences. That is every advertiser’s challenge and I’d be lying if I said we didn’t struggle with that day-in and day-out.

“The opportunity is we are seeing consumers go to the content that they want to watch when they want to watch and they have control over that.

“That opens an opportunity for us to buy at an audience level versus a demographic level which comes with is own challenges.”

Watch Mediaweek on Your Money Thursdays at 2.30pm

After an electrifying finals series in 2018, Suncorp Super Netball’s third season will again showcase the best netballers from Australia and around the world.

Netball fans can follow their favourite teams and enjoy four live games a week with coverage starting from 3.00pm on Saturdays and 1.00pm on Sundays on Nine, 9Now and Telstra TV.

Fresh from her appearance on The Block, former Australian netball vice-captain Bianca Chatfield will be joining Nine’s commentary team along with Collingwood netball and AFLW star Sharni Layton.

Queensland star and golden girl of netball Laura Geitz, who led the Firebirds to back-to-back premierships, will be on the sideline, bringing her expertise and expert comments to the coverage.

With a knee injury keeping her sidelined for the season, Abbey McCulloch of the NSW Swifts will take time out from her captain duties to provide insight to the coverage as a current player. Megan Anderson, a former Diamond and current Australian assistant coach, will also join the on-air team.

Hosting all the action will be Clint Stanaway, Aislin Kriukelis and Julie Snook, joined by these expert commentators: netball legends Liz Ellis, Cath Cox, Annie Sargent and Sue Gaudion, plus Nine’s Seb Costello and Tom Rehn. Sideline reporters will include Paddy Sweeney and Jack Berketa.

This season there will be a four-week break between Round 9 and 10 as the competition’s best netballers travel to Liverpool in England for the Vitality Netball World Cup 2019. Nine will exclusively broadcast the World Cup live and free from Friday, July 12, on Nine, 9Gem and 9Now.

Nine’s head of netball Keeley Devery said: “After a thrilling Grand Final, an exciting trade period and a long pre-season, I couldn’t be more excited to see how the third season of Suncorp Super Netball plays out on Nine.”

Former Australian captain and Nine commentator, Liz Ellis, said: “Season three of Suncorp Super Netball is the most exciting yet. With some fantastic international players and emerging young guns taking to the court for the first time, I cannot wait to call all the action.”

Suncorp Super Netball will also be broadcast this year on 9Now, Telstra TV and the Netball Live app.

By James Manning

In Australia, Parrot Analytics calculated Game Of Thrones had over 18 million Demand Expressions* last week while the TV series at #2 on the Overall TV Chart, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, had just over 3 million Demand Expressions.

There was a similar dominance in New Zealand where Game Of Thrones had 2.3 million Demand Expressions with the #2 TV show sitting on 440,000.

Foxtel has reported that episode two of the final GoT season had an audience of over 1m again from linear TV viewing and on demand in Australia on Monday.

On the Digital Originals chart, Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina holds again that number one in Australia, while Star Trek: Discovery has taken top spot in New Zealand and moved to #2 in Australia. The Star Trek surge comes after the final episode of season two was made available.

The main mover on the Australian chart this week was the Twilight Zone, which chartered at number at #8. The series has already been charting in New Zealand for three weeks.

It will be interesting to watch next week the impact that Chris Lilley’s new series, Lunatics, which just launched on Netflix, has on the chart.

* Demand Expressions represent the total audience demand being expressed for a title, within a country, on any platform. The audience demand is a weighted, country-specific measure of demand. Television demand data captures what content people want in a particular country.

By James Manning

There was only one new release in the top five, which was again dominated by two superhero releases, which had the biggest Easter screen averages.

The total for the top 20 movies from Thursday to Sunday inclusive was $11.96m, which was down 8% on the previous weekend.

#1 Shazam! $2.52m

After three weekends of release Shazam! managed to again rank #1 with total takings now just short of $15 million. The movie remained on 315 screens over the weekend with a screen average of $8001.

#2 Dumbo $1.31m

Dumbo is one of the releases holding in the top five across April and it has quietly worked its way to $10m in that time. After four weekends in cinemas it is still on over 300 screens and had an Easter weekend screen average of $4081.

#3 Captain Marvel $1.22m

A strong performance again from Captain Marvel, but its audience will surely start to evaporate with the release of Avengers: Endgame. After seven weeks on the chart, Captain Marvel has racked up ticket sales of $40 million. It was on 241 screens across Easter with the second best screen average in the top five of $5092, which represented a week-on-week increase of 15%.

#4 Wonder Park $1.06m

The animated movie about an amusement park has held at #4 on the chart for a second week. It remained on just over 300 screens with takings actually up 7% week-on-week with a screen average was $3516.

#5 The Curse Of The Weeping Woman $909,000

Not long after the release of Us (still on the box office chart at #8 with takings of $8.91m after four weeks) comes another horror movie. This is the sixth instalment in The Conjuring Universe franchise and it opened on 218 screens with the screen average just over $4100.

Tuesday: Week 17 2019 (Easter week 2)

By James Manning

• Seven News 1,084,000/1,057,000
• Nine News 929,000/931,000
• A Current Affair 753,000
• ABC News 692,000
• 7.30 586,000
• The Project 271,000/491,000
• 10 News First 423,000
• SBS World News 149,000

Breakfast TV

• Sunrise 274,000
• Today 19,000

Seven

Seven’s early evening schedule with the penultimate episode of My Kitchen Rules for 2019 and the return of Andrew Denton has proven an unbeatable winning combo for the channel.

The primary share was on 23.0%, which was the channel’s second-best Tuesday share this year. The winning combined channel share was 31.2%, which was Seven’s best Tuesday share this year.

Home And Away had a good night with just under 700,000 at 7pm.

My Kitchen Rules was the place to be for good food and high scores last night. It was the strongest semifinal in MKR history, including the best dessert Pete Evan’s claimed to have had in 10 years of MKR from Matt and Luke and a caramel flan from Andy and Ruby that took Colin Fassnidge to heaven! Matt and Luke’s creative, confident, modern Australian cooking just edged out the Peruvians’ showcase of culinary heritage to earn themselves a place in the 2019 grand final opposite Ibby and Romel. After the first round of judging, Andy and Ruby looked like grand finalists with a score of 57out of 60. However they were blasted off the show with five scores of 10 from the six judges. The only thing between Matt and Luke and a perfect 60 was judge Colin who gave them a nine.

(Seven has not been revealing too much about their Sunday schedule. But the first all male MKR grand final in a decade will start at 8pm Sunday after the season premiere of House Rules with new judge Jamie Durie.)

A fascinating first episode of the second season of Andrew Denton: Interview followed MKR. Special guest was Angry Anderson and his daughter Roxanne. In a prelude to the episode, Denton revealed some of the guidelines for the interview. If you tuned in late and missed that you could have been wondering exactly what they were talking about as specifics of what happened in the guests lives were not discussed. The show returned winning its timeslot with 538,000. It proved to be a big day for Denton with news that his new Interview podcast had been ranked #1 on iTunes.

Nine

A Current Affair dropped from the 800,000s to the 700,000s with the episode winning its timeslot.

An hour of The Big Bang Theory followed with 544,000 for a new episode from the final season followed by a repeat on 455,000.

Another Indiana Jones movie followed with 415,000.

10

Share slipped a little from Monday and Tuesday week-on-week.

The Project at 7pm delivered the second-biggest audience with 491,000 watching Peter Helliar with Christopher Pyne. It started strangely, but finished strongly. With Pyne declining to answer some of the tougher questions, 10 might be hoping he is a little more forthcoming when he guests on their election night coverage next month.

Bachelor In Paradise had the biggest crowd of the night for the channel with 513,000. The program did its job as #1 Tuesday program under 50 and it helped 10 to rank #1 channel 16-39.

NCIS then did 284,000 followed by NCIS: Los Angeles on 176,000.

ABC

The second episode of The Recording Studio did 416,000 after launching with 341,000.

The final of the three-part Employable Me series was on 376,000 after 342,000 a week ago.

SBS

Michael Portillo was travelling through the homeland of his father, Spain, on an entertaining repeat episode of Great Continental Railway Journeys with 264,000 watching.

A repeat episode of Insight then did 238