Pushing 'further than a TV screen', Seven open to more News Corp-style deals

Josh McDonnell
By Josh McDonnell | 29 October 2018
 
Kurt Burnette

Seven West Media's (SWM) chief revenue officer Kurt Burnette says the new deal between the network and News Corp to launch a targeted car marketing platform, Navigate Auto, was "certainly encouraged" by the recent Nine/Fairfax mega-merger.

Speaking to AdNews following SWM's Allfronts event, on Friday, where the platform was revealed, Burnette says the pending merger between rival network Nine and Fairfax has influenced the market to think more about "effective partnerships" as a greater focus is placed on "industry collaboration".

"It's about collaboration and partnerships which are now coming together more often than not, which is what you can see here with our announcement of Navigate Auto," Burnette says.

"The real reason behind these things is usually financially-focused, however, for us that's not the case, as it's about finding like-minded partners who can bring together a complimentary audience to extend reach, to make an easy path to our customer and our customer to us, with those being our advertisers."

Burnette says that while the "easy conclusion" would be to see this partnership as a direct response to the Nine/Fairfax merger, SWM won't limit it's partners just to News Corp, as it looks to make further strategic alignment deals in 2019.

He says there is still "plenty more" News and Seven can work together on.

"If our customers, clients, advertisers and agencies like it, then we'll do more but we'll be doing more partnerships with other companies as well," Burnette says.

"There's lots more Seven West and News can do together and if you think about what we just launched with 7Food, our newest multichannel, News has a lot of food assets which is something we can easily tap into and use to spread our reach further than just TV screen," he says.

"This idea of collaboration through the industry to become stronger is alive and well and our recent partnership with News is proof of how quickly it's growing."

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