Page 21 - Adnews magazine Sep-Oct 2022

Agenda
But of course, everyone in TV is always looking over their shoulder. “The announcement that’s sent a ripple through our industry is the idea of services such as Netflix and Disney+ turning on ads on their platforms soon,” Dewar says.
“Advertising is now considered entertainment as well, and we will see the market embracing this concept more fully. We already started this at Foxtel Media some time ago as we constantly work with clients to evolve their ad messages beyond a ‘sell’.”
For example, Foxtel creates competitions around sports drinks and emotive campaigns around female athletes.
“With an ongoing premium catalogue of both new and trusted local programming slated for H2, we expect to see continued demand and pricing to be reflective of that.”
Money talks
Nine’s director of sales for Total Television, Richard Hunwick: “It’s been difficult to drive ‘cheap’ short term deals in a demand market, but we have seen advertisers and agencies develop longer term strategies, and leverage network commitments to lock in price and mitigate demand driven inflation,” he says.
Media agencies favour blockbusters, news and sport programming.
TV remains crucial over at Publicis Media Exchange. Married At First Sight averaged one million viewers this season, with The Voice at around 800,000 and Lego Masters at 700,000.
“These are significant numbers and demonstrate Australians’ ongoing engagement with locally produced content,” says the media analytics director at Publicis Media Exchange, Natasha Pelly.
“There are few other places where you’ll find more than a million people watching the same live content at the same time. These moments may be fewer then they were five years ago, but they still exist across sport and general entertainment,” Pelly says.
At the moment, there’s no visibility over Netflix or Disney+ audi- ences or demographic splits by content pillar, nor clarity on buying models, she points out.
“The pandemic, and recent world events, have reminded advertisers how important TV is.” Kim Portrate, ThinkTV
House Of The Dragon
fragmentation could be quite extreme. If that’s the case, it may end up being used strategically, with buyers cherry-picking content that over-indexes to parts of their audience that cannot be reached via other mass media,” Pelly says.
Pushing for more
Post-COVID lockdowns, Australian audiences are taking advantage of rediscovered freedoms, points out Craig Cooper, head of investment, Carat Australia.
And the downward trend of linear TV audiences is likely to continue.
“There are some behaviours that have fundamentally changed during this significant lifetime event, and will continue to evolve in the future. All media vendors have had to inno- vate and adapt to new technology to maintain or grow their shares, and television is no exception,” he says.
“TV pricing, however, has been a rollercoaster over the last few years driven by COVID-19 impacts.
“We saw a large deflation in Q2 2020, which was followed by nearly two years of inflationary linear TV pricing. This has been caused by the supply and demand model the TV industry works within.”
Adding in 2022’s political elec- tions, the Winter Olympics, Commonwealth Games and World Cup sporting events means that the networks find themselves in somewhat of a perfect storm, Cooper says.
“This demand has resulted in increases in CPA and premiums to access quality programming. We are, however, seeing demand start- ing to slow for linear TV, mainly driven by clients who wish to rely less on the stability of the tradi- tional media channels and rebal- ance the diversification of their media activities,” he says.
“With the maturity of dynamic trading within the linear TV space, there’s less reliance on specific spot-based buying as automation will buy and optimise to a particular target audience. Linear TV sponsorships, how- ever, still offer clients a unique opportunity to integrate and cut through clutter and engage con- sumers on a much deeper level,” Cooper says.
“It’s feasible that, due to the vast breadth of content, viewer
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