BINGE is about to open up to more ad inventory, according to Mark Frain, CEO, Foxtel Media.
However, the watchability of the streaming service is still prime.
“We have learnt from the initial launch and are now ready to open up our advertising inventory further,” he told AdNews in an interview.
He also says Foxtel Media is looking to unshackle from traditional linear TV trading data metrics.
Here’s watch he said:
The advertising market is said to be slow and short. What are you seeing?
Depends which sector of the ad market you are competing in. From our perspective, there has not been a slowdown, though the flow has been unsurprisingly inconsistent and much shorter. We had nearly 300 new advertising partners join us this financial year, and the launch of advertising on BINGE has meant that we are seeing consistent new levels of digital investment from our brand partners and agencies.
One thing that has really stood out to me during this time is that the businesses are aware of consumers’ shift in priorities during the cost-of-living crisis but understanding that your brand still needs to be visible at this time. This is perhaps because we had to pivot drastically as an industry during COVID, so it’s coming to us much easier this time around. Whilst certain segments of the population have felt the pinch more than others, some have more amoney than they’ve ever had to spend so categories like luxury has been particularly strong.
How is progress to a streaming future at Foxtel?
Our progress towards our streaming future is steady and strong, as evidenced by our recent EOFY results.
Our streaming services are now bringing in 3.1 million subscribers- a 13% increase from 2022. This means that 66% of our customer base now comes from our streaming offerings. Kayo Sports now sits at 1.4 million subscribers, while BINGE has grown to over 1.5 million subscribers.
In line with our streaming subscriber growth, our digital advertising business grew by 49% as well. While we’re thrilled by this, we are not surprised, given that we launched advertising on BINGE earlier this year.
Additionally, we are consistently seeing audience dominance in weekly BVOD reporting. For example, from July 31- August 6, 2023, Foxtel took 18 out of the top 20 spots in terms of minutes viewed on BVOD across networks. All of these were sports-based programming and amounted to a total of 411 million minutes viewed across those 18 top spots. The biggest push from an advertising perspective will be around IP delivery of advertising through the Foxtel IQ box, where at a certain inflexion point we’ll be able to make the switch to a 100% Digital Video business.
And coming opportunities for brands?
When we launched advertising on BINGE, we did so with just 21 partners, even though there was a massive appetite for the product. And this was a very deliberate move on our part. The watchability of our content and ads still come first, so that’s why we’re continuing with our frequency cap of one per hour per user on TV series.
We have learnt from the initial launch and are now ready to open up our advertising inventory further. This is going to be a great opportunity for more brands to get in on the action, especially when considering that a typical BINGE subscriber aged 18 to 64 spends more money across categories than the average Australian, per a study we commissioned with Fonto. It found BINGE subscribers spent 36% more, including larger lifts in beauty (a 94% higher spend), meal delivery (76%), entertainment (72%) and travel (63%). There’s plenty more to come in terms of opportunities, most of which will be unveiled at our Upfronts on October 26.
Industry issues, including working from home. Should we all be back to the office now?
The Foxtel Media team recently made an office move from Pyrmont to the Fox Sports building at Artarmon so that more of the Foxtel Group in Sydney would be housed in one place. We are flexible about how many days and the times the teams are in the office, and we have found that the move has fostered a greater sense of camaraderie amongst the team without putting any hard and fast mandatories in place, the team are generally in the office 3-4 days a week. We’re in a business that thrives on creativity and entrepreneurial spirit which means the majority of staff tend to self-select to be in the office with their teams.
At Foxtel Media, we feel that this flexible approach to office attendance is key to employee satisfaction. We do not need to be back in the office all the time, but there is something to be said about seeing your team in person 2-3 times a week to aid company culture and team spirit.
Lots of headlines about measurement this year, where does Foxtel Media sit?
Measurement continues to be a strong focus for us this year and for the industry at large, I think we’ve seen a crisis in confidence in this area. We recently had Kayo Sports converting to OzTAM’s VPM services in June this year. This means we can finally report to market based on minutes viewed of our programming, rather than just average audience. We believe that this new metric will give our partners a more accurate view of audience engagement across our platforms and brings our reporting in line with modern video consumption success metrics.
While this is a step in the right direction, ultimately, Foxtel Media is looking to unshackle from traditional linear TV trading data metrics and on to new ones that are more reflective of streaming consumption. It’s an approach that Sky has taken in the UK, and in the US there are now multiple advertisers and agencies who are comfortable trading on different types of currencies. We’re asked by agencies and advertisers continually about making more of our data and insights available to the industry so at some stage we need to deliver on that customer request and evolve to overlay other metrics like attention and attribution across our media assets.
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