By James Manning

See highlights of the interview on Mediaweek TV on Your Money at 2.30pm Thursday.

Revenues: “Sometimes the planets don’t line up”

Tim Worner: It is a good result in what are difficult circumstances. The advertising market has been softer, particularly in that second quarter. We are seeing that softness continue to a certain extent in the third quarter.

The good news is we are seeing stronger responses.

We had an excellent ratings result in 2018 and we could not have hoped for better. It was our best ratings performance ever and our best shares in each of the key demographics ever. We also had the leading revenue share.

But sometime all the planets don’t line up for you and the softer advertising market has hit the profit. Not by much, but nonetheless it is a factor.

Seven’s focus on combined channel share

Our focus is on our total audience across all our channels because that is what we are selling. That strategy has been very successful for us ever since we started multichannels.

We have been very clear about going after certain demographics with the multichannels and I think probably at least one of the others has moved to follow us now.

We want to be able to provide our [advertisers] with whatever audience they are after.

Not only was Seven #1 channel last year, 7mate was the #1 multichannel for the year.

Does FTA TV need more big spenders like Clive Palmer?

Clive Palmer has been a very welcome addition and he started the ball rolling in a pretty spectacular way. We are looking forward to other [political] parties matching [his spend].

I hope the political parties recognise the power of FTA television.

The last time around, particularly the coalition, [parties] lent very strongly on things like Facebook and it nearly cost them the election.

There is nothing like FTA television for building a brand. In a sense that is what these parties are faced with now. 

Seven’s global production plans

Seven Studios is predicting another year of EBIT growth, which will be the seventh year in a row this independent production business that we have been expanding will grow.

In the UK in particular we have just announced the establishment of Seven Studios UK. That is our third production company in the UK. We have Slim Film + Television, which is a drama production company which is about to start on a very big international coproduction. We had Seven Wonder we sold to Banijay.

Seven Studios UK is about exploiting the enormous amount of IP that we have that is not being offered in that market. It is an area of huge potential for us.

Why a hit MKR is worth more than a hit MAFS

[Worner noted Seven owns and produces MKR, while Endemol Shine Australia produces MAFS for Nine]

When we look at overnight ratings we are looking at one aspect of a show’s performance. For a show like My Kitchen Rules, the overnight rating is one small part of the story in terms of the exploitation of that IP. It is going to be watched on BVOD, and the MKR audience on BVOD is close to 80% up this year. It will also be watched in over 100 territories because we are selling the finished version of the Australian show. Also local versions of the format are being made in 12 different territories.

Cutting costs without cutting quality

I would venture to suggest we haven’t affected the quality of our content and that has been the aim. As to how long we can keep [cutting costs], I don’t know. We can keep going in the foreseeable future and we are going to have to. That is part of the art of managing a traditional media business in 2019. Businesses evolve because they have to. We are managing costs by outsourcing certain activities, we are joint venturing with our frenemies when in the past we would have duplicated.

We are challenging ourselves to make a show like MKR far smarter and more efficiently than we did last season.

It is business as usual for us to keep reducing costs.

Digital revenue breakout

We are coming out of a very long term JV with Yahoo! and for the first time we will have a full year of 7plus operation under our belt [to report on later this year]. We will also have 7news.com.au launched by then. For the first time we will have 100% control of all our content online and that is not something we have ever had before.

It will be appropriate at our next results to break out that digital EBIT and we expect it to be better than a material percentage of our earnings.

Sports performance: Seven will do better

There is a perception that Seven did swap tennis for cricket and that is totally incorrect. We got 10’s cricket and Nine’s cricket and that amounts to three months, or 500 hours, of live television across the summer. That was a key factor in us being able to record 39 days with a 40% share and our best performance across summer ever. We are backing ourselves to do even better next year. We didn’t have much of a run up (pardon the pun) with cricket.

This year we will be coming off the long run and will have a better result in terms of audience and revenue.

Breakfast TV battles: Sunrise in a groove

They are pretty big audiences. 2.7m people is how many Sunrise reaches every week. It is a huge amount of television and we do have the edge. I will pay tribute to that production team and on camera team. If you look at Sunrise at the moment on weekends and on weekdays you will see a show that is right in its groove. They know what they are doing and coming up with great ideas every day and executing them superbly.

Outlook: BVOD the one to watch

We are seeing very aggressive growth in terms of BVOD audiences. In our case it is not one or two titles, but we have established a very deep catalogue and about a quarter of the viewing is for content that didn’t start its life in primetime on Seven. It is an important part of what we are doing and it will become more important.

By James Manning

A new series, from by Sydney production company The Full Box, is about to launch, but not on Sundays. Nine has given the series a new slot on Thursday nights.

Australian Crime Stories started life as Tough Nuts on Foxtel for Crime + Investigation. Nine bought the first two seasons and then rebranded it and the third season launches this week on February 21.

“Last year we were talking to Nine’s Hugh Marks and he said, ‘We want more of your stuff’,” recalled The Full Box co-founder Bryan Cockerill about the casual recommission. “Previously we did eight separate criminal biographies in each season. We wanted to broaden the palette this season and look at really interesting crimes – both famous ones and others people may not know about.”

He explained the new season of eight episodes covers everything from rather nasty and dark stories through to crime capers.

Cockerill said he and longtime collaborator Adam Shand got together to make a list of the great stories they had always wanted to tell. “I think we have managed to come up with eight great episodes – every one of them is an absolute corker.”

The Full Box’s other co-founder Gerri Coy reminded Mediaweek they had the pleasure of also working with Shand on their production The Kangaroo Gang for BBC Worldwide (now BBC Studios).

“Adam also worked on both Tough Nuts/Australian Crime Stories seasons one and two,” added Coy.

Shand told Mediaweek: “Since we first started Australian Crime Stories the genre has matured. Series three for me is the best of breed – great journalism, great narrative and it doesn’t get hung up on itself in terms of sensationalism or over-dramatising things.”

The first episode in season three of Australian Crime Stories is an investigation into the case of Lucille Butterworth, a 20-year-old Miss Tasmania aspirant who disappeared from a bus stop in 1969.

Police thought Butterworth had run away to the mainland, and it would be weeks before they officially started a murder investigation. Seven years later, Geoffrey Charles Hunt was arrested and questioned over the rape and murder of a 24-year-old woman from Hobart, a crime he would ultimately serve 22 years in prison for. During his questioning, Hunt confessed to killing Lucille Butterworth, but senior police did not take his confession seriously.

In 2016, the Tasmanian Coroner named Hunt as the likely killer, but despite damning evidence the police did not lay charges. Hunt is now walking free as a result.

Shand has previously covered the case in one of his true crime podcasts for PodcastOne.

Without wanting to give away any episode spoilers, Shand did tell us: “It hasn’t come to any resolution yet. The thing about going from the podcast to TV is being able to amplify the things we did in the podcast and to take the story forward.

“I am all about getting cases solved now. I am not happy with just telling the story. I want to take it forward to try and resolve it.”

As to the TV crime wave, Cockerill and Coy said as producers they need to keep an eye on what else is out there.

Cockerill: “The worst case scenario would be to find out you were treading the same ground as someone else with a similar program. You also need to know your own stories very well and being confident no one else is doing a story you have uncovered. A lot of our episodes are either stories no one else had done, or no one has examined from the angle we are covering.”

Shand: “A good example is our forthcoming episode on Kerry Packer’s gold. [Episode two, season three.] In 1995 Kerry’s gold was stolen from his office and it was an unsolved crime.”

Shand and Cockerill together delivered the tagline for the Packer episode: “It’s about loyalty, betrayal and revenge.”

Don’t miss Mediaweek’s The Full Box podcast which look at the TV crime wave. It will be published by PodcastOne on Thursday February 21.

 —

Top Photo: The Full Box team: Co-founders Bryan Cockerill and Gerri Coy with Adam Shand

Tuesday: Week 8 2019

By James Manning

FTA TV news/current affairs

• Seven News 898,000/878,000
• Nine News 853,000/880,000
• A Current Affair 859,000
• ABC News 700,000
• 7.30 553,000
• The Project 233,000/429,000
• 10 News First 358,000
• SBS World News 106,000

Breakfast TV

• Sunrise 273,000
• Today 188,000

Seven

After an ordinary audience just over 700,000 on Monday, My Kitchen Rules recovered to 774,000. South Australian friends Lyn and Sal were cooking last night and it was only their dessert that let them down. Their first two courses saw three 10 out of 10s and a nine from the judges.

The Good Doctor followed with 518,000 after 579,000 last week. This time last year the US medical drama had an audience of 950,000.

Nine

A Current Affair featured a dodgy hire car driver and then slumlords last night as the audience has returned to the program after MKR vacated its 7pm slot on Seven. The first two episodes last week did 770,000 and 755,000. This week the program has started the week with 873,000 and 859,000.

Nine’s primetime was also shining bright at 7.30pm where Married At First Sight attracted a new series record audience of 1.349m, which included season highs for Melbourne and Adelaide.

The ratings records continued later in the evening too when Travel Guides recorded a best for 2019 and a second best ever with 734,000.

10

Share dipped to just 8.1% after 11.6% last week when the channel had the last live episode of Celebrity for the season.

Gyton Grantley was talking about Harry Potter on The Project after 7pm with 429,000 watching.

A repeat of Ambulance Australia then did 259,000.

Hughesy, We Have A Problem then did 261,000, down from 338,000 a week ago with a much stronger lead-in.

ABC

Foreign Correspondent as on 393,000 at 8pm.

Catalyst did 332,000 at 8.30pm.

SBS

Michael Portillo’s Abandoned Britain was again the channel’s best with 212,000 after 7.30pm.