The term “overnight success” is something that we hear a lot, but if you look at anyone who has reached a certain level of success, you’ll always find it didn’t come overnight. Take for example an Olympic athlete striving for a gold medal. It takes years of hard work, determination and dedication to their sport and they rely heavily on a support team of coaches, mentors and technology to help them succeed.
For some athletes, such as surfers, skateboarders and climbers, this year’s Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 also had the additional tension - or perhaps excitement of being the first time their sport was included.
It was much the same for the Australian BVOD market and Seven West Media’s presentation of Tokyo 2020. While commercialising live sport was not new, the use of programmatic as a core trading tool was a significant, and very successful, first for an Australian broadcaster.
Officially the biggest live television and streaming event in Australian history, Tokyo 2020 reached 16.6 million people on television. Across more than 40 digital channels, the digital streaming audience was four times larger than the publisher had forecasted, with viewership fueled by Seven’s groundbreaking coverage, Team Australia’s gold-medal success and Australia’s COVID-19 lockdown.
But also key to the success was a gold medal collaboration between two organisations that began more than five years ago.
The first was the company that I work for - Magnite, the world’s largest independent sell side ad platform, with many years of experience delivering technological innovations that support its publishers around the globe.
The second was of course Seven West Media, which made the decision almost five years ago to team-up with Magnite for all its live sports events including the Commonwealth Games and Super Bowl. It was the time spent working with us across live sports events, honing their approach to using programmatic to monetise their inventory, that made Tokyo 2020 such a success. These learnings will be adopted and used for the upcoming 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.
Leveraging the Magnite CTV Platform, which has been built specifically to address the nuances and challenges of monetising live supply, Seven delivered a high-quality advertising and viewing experience that mimicked linear TV.
The event also marked an important turning point for BVOD in Australia, showcasing what is possible with programmatic trading for live sports, a critical marker as live sports audiences increasingly favour the digital streaming and on-demand experience.
Using Magnite’s platform, Seven enabled programmatic auctions to take advantage of increased audiences, allowing media buyers flexibility to trade on their own terms and target audiences at scale in those gold-medal moments. It also relied on Magnite to help monetise the unexpectedly large audience spikes, connecting the publisher to all of the programmatic demand in the market.
As a result, non-guaranteed biddable CPMs were traded, on average, higher than direct campaigns, comprehensively answering the old misconception that programmatic trading is for bargains.
But beyond the programmatic pipes, Magnite was able to support Seven in its quest for gold with its global insights and suite of content meta data and analytics, providing live insights into the bidding and buying patterns including revenue by ad source, device, sport code, advertiser category, as well as hourly supply, impression trends and deal insights. This allowed the broadcaster to strategically pivot its offerings on the fly, unearthing opportunities for optimisation and strategic prioritisation, and opening different deal types to maintain a robust advertising pipeline.
Magnite also enabled Seven to manage business and advertising requirements including delivering competitive separation and frequency capping, as well as providing on-ground tech ops to customise and test Seven’s set up in the CTV platform. Additionally, our demand team worked behind the scenes to educate buyers on the nuances of advertising in the live environment, ensuring they were primed and ready to bid, helping maximise revenues for Seven.
According to Nicole Bence, Seven West Media Network Digital Sales Director, trust and transparency were the two defining elements of their collaboration with Magnite.
“Working with a platform that is entirely focused on the supply-side makes a material difference. Magnite understands the complexities of generating revenue from live sports content and their technology helped us to manage these challenges to deliver a seamless audience experience and hit our revenue goals. In short, a gold medal performance.”
Hard work, the best support team and access to market leading technology is what helps Olympic athletes make the winners podium and this winning combination undoubtedly helped Seven to deliver one of the most successful live sports events in Australian TV history.
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