Seven West Media chief sales and digital officer Kurt Burnette is fresh back from a super MBA at Stanford University, where high-flying execs are usually sent before being booted into the top job.
Widely tipped to become Seven Network chief executive following Tim Worner's elevation to the top job at Seven West Media, Burnette told AdNews that the next few weeks will prove whether those tips are on the money and outline the shape of potential structural changes flagged by Worner.
“Tim's been pretty open with his comments [in full-year results presentations] that he is looking at the way the business is structured and the way it might look in the next three to five years,” he said. “The question that remains is the divisional structure and the way we go forward. I guess that will be answered in the next few weeks. That is up to him.”
But the key take-outs from Stanford, he said, were the pace of change across all industries and the need “get set up for change or get left behind – in day-to-day business or future structure”. He said Stanford provided “fantastic learnings” with projects focusing on “organisational change, cultural change and innovation. Incredibly useful stuff that you could apply here very easily”.
Burnette was speaking as the company presented its wares at mLab, the GroupM future technology showcase. It showed marketers its vision for personalised news, HBBTV (with potential for subscription and ad-free models), geo-targeted advertising integration and real-time cross-platform targeting platforms.
The aim, he said, was not to create a bigger panel (as MCN is doing) but to capture all of the data. “We're not stopping at 100,000 people. We reach 15 million people. We want to get all of it.” He added the subscription model was “interesting” – while not committing to a launch date, he said Seven was “building the ability to do it” but warned it was tough nut to crack.
“Netflix has been going 16 years, it writes a billion-dollar revenue and has just turned a $2 million profit. A pure pay-per-view model is an expensive business to get into. It's something that everyone is looking at and talking about. But how soon, and if, we do it is all being considered.”
He said the company would watch the newspaper industry closely. “They are doing a lot of trialling around freemium models and paywalls. There will be a lot of learnings over the next few years to see what is working and what isn't. But what we absolutely need to have is the ability to do [subscriptions] and everything else [shown at mLab]. That is critical.”
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