Market speculation has been building for months that News Limited has been flirting with the idea of forming a super advertising sales group, combining its pay TV, newspaper, magazine and online assets.
Today’s announcement, which saw News Limited unveil its paywall model for the Herald Sun and The Daily Telegraph, points to much closer alignments of News Corps units in Australia – the mastheads are bundling a Fox Sports service in their digital subscription packages for the news titles.
News Limited chief executive Kim Williams is said to have at least explored the idea of an all-encompassing sales group, which some media buyers said could be headed by MCN chief executive Anthony Fitzgerald. However, an official News Limited statement to AdNews downplayed the likelihood of the initiative.
“We are always looking at ways of better providing our customers with audience-led solutions and indeed we already do deliver integrated campaigns that include broadcast,” a News Limited spokesman said. “But there are no plans to form such a ‘supergroup’.”
One News Limited observer said: “Maybe scenarios were considered but then considered to be unviable. Just bolting on an online business together with a newspaper business and TV doesn’t really work. It’s just people putting two and two together to get 10.”
News Limited and MCN, along with Ten Network, already have a loose alliance for cross-platform ad deals. Although a single structure for News Corp assets has been rejected for the time, there remains the probability that after the structural break-up of News Corp globally into separately listed TV and print units that a bigger-resourced cross-platform division will operate in Australia.
“In six months time an integration unit might make some sense but it’s just way too early,” said another industry executive with some knowledge of the company.
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