Amanda Laing, Beverley McGarvey & Patrick Delany on Australian Shifts

Foxtel’s Patrick Delany, Nine’s Amanda Laing and Paramount’s Beverley McGarvey weighed in on how their businesses are navigating the industry shifts in the Australian media landscape at APOS.

Each of the executives took part in keynote conversations with Media Partners Asia’s Vivek Couto at APOS in Bali this week.

Laing, managing director of broadcast and streaming at Nine, discussed how that business has been evolving its approach to serving the needs of Australian consumers across multiple platforms, free and paid.

“I talk to my team about what I consider to be half jokingly our unfair advantage,” said Laing in her keynote session. “What do we have that others don’t have?” That secret sauce, she said, is a breadth of platforms, from free-to-air broadcaster Nine to AVOD service 9Now to SVOD streamer Stan and more.

“Success is in executing on that and activating across all of those parts of our business to optimize every dollar of content spend…. That does require a mindset shift and a cultural shift from where we’ve been.”

Laing recently unveiled a restructure of her team across streaming and broadcast.

“The anatomy of my restructure was to have more people focused on multiple products and taking that great subject matter expertise, whether you’re the head of sports or news or entertainment or commissioning, and having that across all of our products. We’re one audience-led business as opposed to separate products. Each product will have things that are particular to it. But more and more we’ll be moving content around between the products to make sure we’re optimizing that spend and giving content to our consumers when and where they want it.”

Addressing the state of data analytics available to Nine, Laing noted, “Having a consolidated standard set of metrics is good for the industry because it gives us credibility and makes it easier to tell our story. It was absolutely a big step in the right direction. It should be finessed. When you’re selling something to someone, you’d like to offer more than just the demos and the reach. We’re trying to have a deeper relationship with the advertisers. Whether it’s business-specific or it’s done more industry-wide, having ways to measure what happens after the person sees the ad, that’s what advertisers value. We can bring value because we’ve got so many touchpoints.”

Laing discussed the content strategy at Stan and how its sister platforms are being used to cross-promote. “Just before the launch of the second season of one of our Stan originals, we put the first season on free-to-air linear television and a free streaming platform,” helping to drive subscriptions. “You’ll see much more of that in the way we are optimizing our content spend.”

Nine’s free streaming service, meanwhile, has grown its audience by almost 40 percent year on year, Laing said. “We will be looking at what can we do so that it’s not just free being a companion to pay, it’s pay being a companion to free.”

Laing also weighed in on shifts in the ad market amid a raft of new competitors.

“The ad market in Australia, as everywhere, is notoriously difficult to predict. You have to have that faith that great content will find an audience, and revenue will be attached to that audience. Our focus is on creating the right content, obviously at the right price. Because of the breadth of our offering, our local knowledge is part of what we can leverage and uniquely offer.”

McGarvey, president of Network 10 and head of streaming and regional lead for Australia and New Zealand at Paramount, similarly weighed in on shifts across free to air and streaming.

Paramount+ spent several years as Australia’s fastest-growing streamer, McGarvey noted, driven by a efficient price point, a mix of U.S. and locally resonant content, a “tactical” sports offering and a deep library. Plus, McGarvey said, “we use Network 10 to promote Paramount+.”

On what’s next for the platform as it continues to scale its presence in the competitive Australian market, growing subs, minimizing churn and boosting engagement are key, alongside driving gains in its ad tier. “The Paramount+ ad tier is important for Paramount+, but it’s important for the Paramount business in Australia. We now sell across all platforms. We’re trying to make it easy for our clients and partners to transact across Paramount+, our 10 streaming service and 10; they can get those eyeballs across whatever platform they want. For that reason, the ad tier punches above its weight in value.”

Couto asked McGarvey about opportunities for collaboration within the Australian media evosystem. “Traditionally Australia has been quite an aggressive and competitive market. The players have changed, there is more competition, audiences have changed. We compete on content and we’re going to collaborate on virtually anything else: what the transmission looks like, what the technology looks like, all of those areas that we need to do that cost us lots of money. If we can make all of that more efficient, we can all invest in more content, which drives our businesses.”

On the programming strategy across commissioned and acquired, McGarvey noted that it’s about “getting the content in the right window at the time to maximize monetization. Certain content launches on Paramount+ and it’s exclusive. Certain content launches on 10 and it’s exclusive. We have a comedy show that plays weekly on 10, but it binge drops on Paramount+. Every single time an episode drops on 10, the subs jump on Paramount+, so it effectively acts as a promotional channel. It’s about being open to the idea that the audience can tell us where that window needs to be.”

DAZN’s transformative takeover of Foxtel Group was a key theme of the session with Delany, CEO of the Foxtel Group. “They remind me very much of the News Corp of 30 years ago; they’re aggressively entrepreneurial,” he said. “They have said, keep running the company as an Australian company. We want to help you with the synergy, mainly in the technology. We will transfer all the platforms over to the DAZN platforms. By March or April, there’ll be upward of A$200 million of full-year runway out of the business. We can pay down debt quickly, we have room to invest, and the time to market in terms of innovations” will be accelerated, he noted.

Foxtel continues to operate a pay-TV service reaching some 1.3 million subs and has rolled out two streaming services, Binge for entertainment and Kayo for sports. “Segmenting the market out to young families with the two streaming services has enabled us to backfill any loss [to pay-TV subs].”