AUSSIE, AUSSIE, AUSSIE, cOIn, cOIn, cOIn !!

It’s no secret that Free to Air (FTA) broadcasters lose money on televising sport. Australian sporting bodies have continued to balloon the costs they charge the Television Networks for the rights to air them, reaching a level that has now perhaps become unsustainable.
The AFL signed a $418 million per season deal from 2017–2022 with Seven & Foxtel, which marked an increase of 80% on their previous broadcasting deal. Seven also paid a whopping 80% increase for the rights to air the Cricket compared to the previous Nine deal. While Channel Nine’s latest contract with the NRL has seen a 70% increase on the previous arrangement and their Tennis deal was up 50% on what Seven previously paid.
The networks have shown a willingness to pay top dollar for sports rights as they provide a platform to cross promote their upcoming programs to a large audience. Sport also delivers high and consistent ratings that few other programs can guarantee and are believed to deliver a ratings ‘halo’ effect. One such event that consistently draws massive audiences is Nine’s State of Origin. Rugby League’s annual State against State rivalry has upheld audiences reminiscent of prime time television thirty years ago. Last year, Origin Game One was the highest rating program of the year with a national audience of 3.45 million. The first Origin game this year had a national audience of 3.2 million.
All these sports rights for the FTA networks have been possible due to the Government’s anti-siphoning laws prohibiting Foxtel from certain sports unless the FTA networks have the right to televise the events. However, it seems unclear if these laws affect the major Telco’s and Internet giants such as Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Twitter and Netflix.  These companies pose a real threat to the FTA networks as they have tenfold the profit and can easily outbid them. This was evident when Optus outbid Fox Sports to secure the English Premier League for $60 million per season in 2016.
This threat is also apparent looking overseas as Amazon Prime outbid Sky Sports in the UK to secure the ATP Tennis broadcast rights and has now secured a small portion of the English Premier League with 20 matches per season. Australians love to watch their sport although it may become more costly for all of us in future years.

WHAT’S NEW IN THE MEDIA  – OUTDOOR

MOVE invests $1.3m into the first phase of its digital measurement project

In 2010, MOVE revolutionised out of home audience measurement in Australia – at last we were able to tell advertisers a reach & frequency on their outdoor media plans and deliver some accountability to them.
Most recently, MOVE have now announced a further $1.3 million investment through a neuroscience project assessing audience engagement with digital and traditional out of home across formats, environments and travel modes. This will look at the increased impact and engagement of Digital out of home formats in a hope to further drive accountability of the Outdoor media

DIGITAL UPDATE

Apple driving user experience …. at the expense of Advertisers

At Apple’s 2019 Worldwide Developers Conference, they announced the launch of their own ‘single-sign-on’ function. This function is already being used by Google and Facebook allowing users to register to new apps by simply signing into their existing Google/Facebook accounts. Whilst this is a convenient solution for users, it also allows Google and Facebook to extract data and track users across multiple apps.
So what is the core difference of Apple’s single-sign-on scheme? Instead of collecting and sharing users’ data to developers and advertisers, Apple adheres to their Privacy Policy. They will protect and safeguard their data and utilise it to create a seamless user experience across all Apple products (iPhone, Safari, Apple Music and Apple TV). Hence, as Apple allows users to utilise their Apple IDs through their single-sign-on solution, they are muscling out Google and Facebook.
With Apple’s integration of authentication offerings through Face ID and Touch ID, it’s only a matter of time before the 8.6 million Australian iPhone users move to their single-sign-on function. Moreover, Apple intends to restrict data for advertisers by hiding user’s email addresses from third parties. Ultimately, making these iPhone users harder to reach through their emails.
This is not the first time Apple has attempted to knock out advertisers but is part of a broader privacy push in the past few years. In September 2017, Apple introduced Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) on Safari internet browsers. The ITP blocks third parties from collecting information on users across the internet and has led to hundreds of millions of dollars lost for advertising firms.
Advertisers should stay on top of these privacy updates and the possible impacts it will have on their ability to communicate with potential customers. It has never been more vital for advertisers to continue to experiment in creative ways to produce useful, meaningful, and contextually relevant advertising messages. 

SMI UPDATE

SMI Graph

The April’19 SMI data makes it seven consecutive months of negative ad revenue and is down 10.3% compared to April’18.  However it is important to acknowledge April’18 was an unusually good month due to the Financial Services Royal Commission and Commonwealth Games. On the other hand, April’19 did have an extended Easter period as well as election advertising.    
The only two media to increase ad revenue this month were Newspapers and Radio. The increase in Newspapers (albeit small at 0.8%) is solely due to the Political Parties, Industry Associations and Unions category. While Radio (up 5.4%) can also thank the election for a decent month.  Interestingly, comparing the Political Categories Media from 2016 to now, the mix shifted away from TV (down 16%) and into Radio (16.9%+), Digital (9.8%+) and Press (a strong 79% increase).

FAST FACTS

  1. Aladdin ($5.74M in the past week, $15.71M total in just 2 weeks) survives Godzilla ($2.65M) & Rocketman ($4.52M) to remain No.1
  2. Seven is again the #1 network in combined Channel Share in the current survey year-to-date.
  3. 2GB’s Alan Jones has proved he was worth the $8M for 2 years after dominating the Sydney market with 17.6% breakfast share, with ARN’s Kyle & Jackie O trailing behind on 11.8%. In Melbourne, Macquarie Media (3AW) also took out the top overall spot, with Smoothfm back in second place.
  4. iTunes will be officially replaced by Apple Music as part of the next MacOS update, which also includes Apple Podcasts and the Apple TV app.
  5. In terms of the highest number of monthly active users, Facebook dominates the market with Facebook Messenger, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp Messenger all being the top 4 mobile apps
  6. However, the top ranking mobile app by revenue was Tinder followed by Neflix