Seven West Media (Brisbane and Regional QLD) says that success for partners comes from a commitment to collaboration and ingenuity. AdNews speaks to Todd Dickinson, Brisbane Sales Director, about what it is that makes SWM Brisbane so successful.
What makes SWM different in the Brisbane and QLD markets?
We have a unique set up in the Brisbane market, in that our commercial partners can buy across all SWM’s assets from the one sales team. So, that includes all of our brands including Seven and SWM WA covering linear broadcast, BVOD, digital, print, social, radio and podcast. We are truly a one-stop shop, certainly the only of its kind within SWM and, as far as we know, the only one in Australia at the scale we have. Our Brisbane team has had little to no turnover for many years, which means our clients are working with experienced and established sales people who are passionate about the local market, local agencies and clients, and most of all, passionate about the amazing brands they represent.
What does a partnership mean for SWM and how do you do things differently?
The word partnership is too loosely used in many sectors of the media market, but in a relationship-driven market like Brisbane, it actually carries the merit it should. A true partnership carries serious weight in any market. However in a market that has as much spirit and comradery as ours does, a partnership means that much more. A partnership to us means true two-way sharing. It’s a joint effort to achieve mutual success. And, sometimes, it means facing challenges together. A catch cry within our team is ‘we care’. If we genuinely care about doing our own roles to the best of our ability and we genuinely care about our partners’ success, we will succeed.
How does SWM Brisbane drive innovation within the team and for partners?
Looking at innovation within the team, first of all I’d say we are unique and innovative in the way we encourage our more entrepreneurial staff members to take on certain projects around passion points. Recently, one of our more creative and strategic executives came to me sniffing around for some extra project work. I had just come out of a meeting where we had talked about the importance of keeping our 7NEWS appeal relevant to as wide an audience as possible and to appeal to the younger audiences. Armed with the simplest of messages and the barest of parameters, our staff member went away and explored some ideas around another of his passion points – music. What ensued was a series of meetings with all station departments including 7NEWS, production, marketing and PR as well as a plucky approach to the Exec Committee of Q-Music who put together the Bigsound Festival. Long story short, the outcome is a partnership between 7NEWS and Bigsound that’s grown to a full Network partnership. 7NEWS will cross to the festival for the weather every night, and there’ll be extended news coverage throughout. A Watch’n’Win promotion has also run within 7NEWS throughout the lead in. Finally, local production The Great Day Out will feature an episode dedicated to the festival. In turn, Seven Sales have worked closely with specially-introduced sponsors of the event as well as conducted several market engagement functions for clientele, positioning the Network and brand as supporting the local music scene thus lifting demographic appeal. Our biggest innovation though, is having an entire team armed to sell cross-platform. The advent of this arrangement had us literally knocking down walls in the office to open up one big happy department.
We are also very innovative in both our local short and long-term sales incentives. As with any sales outfit, we regularly come up against short and long-term challenges and invariably we like to introduce a ‘fun’ incentive around what we are trying to get done. ‘Tickets in the Meat tray’ is one favourite, whereby every spot sold gets the salesperson a raffle ticket and we draw a meat tray (oddly enough it often seems to get won by our resident vegan). We are also lucky enough to sell across a raft of great events so tickets to music festivals, sports events etc. are always up for grabs for a bit of short-term sales success. It’s simple, fun, and keeps things fresh and interesting for our team.
When it comes to innovating for our partners, we have ideated, sold and executed many innovative campaigns with our partners that we are incredibly proud of. One of our recent favourites was Cricket to Coast. This was a project that answered two briefs – most importantly for our client SRG, but also our local programming unit 7QLD productions. SRG has been a long-term partner of our local program Creek to Coast and off the back of a brief to help SRG with exposure across summer, we felt this was the perfect platform to merge summer passions of the great outdoors (particularly boating, campaign and fishing) and, of course, cricket. So, we proposed that we take Creek To Coast national, rebrand it with a distinct ‘cricket’ flavor and search the country for cricket personalities who had a passion for getting off the beaten track. We recorded a notable cricket personality in every state, and joined them in their favourite pursuit on and off shore. These pieces appeared in breaks in play within the corresponding test match in that state, content was sliced and diced and was strategically placed across the SWM and SRG’s social sites, and a standalone Creek To Coast episode appeared highlighting all the recorded segments. A great result was achieved for our client, and Creek To Coast got national exposure – a long-term key goal for our local programming colleagues.
What makes the SWM team so successful?
The team has enjoyed success in recent times and we certainly don’t take it for granted. We know and understand we have to keep working hard and maintain levels of service excellence and thought leadership in order to ensure our clients want to keep working with us. We want to be regarded as easy to work with and always have our client’s success at the heart of what we are doing. Essentially it’s simple, our end goal is to understand our clients and co-create ways to help them solve business challenges.
As everyone knows, our world is changing at a rapid rate and every day is different from the day previous. Representing the entire suite of SWM assets means we need to be consistently upskilling ourselves and our teams. It can be challenging at times and that’s a good thing. If those challenges are taken on with the right attitude, they become a source of motivation and inspiration. Beneath SWM’s Group company values, we also did some work on establishing our own as a team and through a very democratic process we identified four key values that hold ourselves and each other accountable – Courage, Agility, Integrity and Excellence. Overall we really do work hard at what we do and above all else, we care about our business and our clients. And we make sure we have a bit of fun and retain a sense of humour along the way.
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