Paramount Australia has started its 2025 Upfront schedule. It becomes the first of the FTA TV networks to outline its programming plans for the year ahead.
The company is holding a handful of intimate gatherings in Sydney and bigger events in Melbourne and Brisbane.
In addition to the programming schedule for Network 10, the broadcaster has also detailed key content coming to streaming platform Paramount+.
The key message to clients and media agencies it will be easy for them to access key Paramount ANZ content across all platforms in the future. And there is an enhanced product to help them sell stuff!
Paramount will also retire the 10 Play brand in 2025, simply calling both its live linear offering and the on-demand service 10.
To learn more, Mediaweek spoke with Beverley McGarvey, president of Network 10 & head of streaming and regional lead, Paramount Australia and New Zealand. Also Rod Prosser, chief sales officer, Paramount Australia & New Zealand.
Beverley McGarvey and Rod Prosser join Paramount Australia talent and executives at the first 2025 Upfront event
Business as usual during Paramount sale process
We started the interview asking McGarvey about the future of Paramount Global and how a change of ownership could impact Australia.
“It’s really business as usual for us,” she started. “We’re excited about the potential opportunities that change brings.
“We are still driving towards the same objectives, growing audiences on all platforms, growing revenue on all platforms.”
Otherwise, she said there wasn’t much she could add, but expects to be able to share more as the date of the 2025 expected handover to Skydance Media gets closer.
McGarvey added that the content 10’s FTA channels and streaming platform Paramount+ are getting from the parent company is “better than ever”.
She also noted it’s been tough for all players to some extent. “Locally and globally the media industry is having one of its moments of accelerated change. That’s true for every company. We’re just trying to keep our heads down, do our job, try and get people to watch our shows and buy our shows.”
Paramount’s Daniel Monaghan with Rod Prosser
How market conditions impacted planning
As to how the depressed state of the ad market might have impacted the Upfront with regard to future plans, McGarvey said: “It has been a challenging year market-wise. That has forced us to accelerate some things that we would have done anyway, in terms of moving more quickly into a converged model, and being more cognisant of ensuring that our premium video content is served to people everywhere in an easy fashion.”
Rod Prosser added: “We’ve always been cognisant of structural change. This is why we accelerated our converged positioning and offering. This year allowed us to recognise we are much broader than just a freeware brand or channel.
“It was important for us to put all those pieces in place. That’s why we’ve made a lot of noise around our converged, not just only our offering in terms of tech and what that means for advertisers, but also how we represent ourselves, how we show up in the ad market.”
Inside Paramount Connect
One of the key messages Prosser and his team will be taking to market is how Paramount Connect will make it easier to advertise in key content regardless of his and where people consume it.
“The reality is, we have to make it easy for advertisers and agencies and clients to trade our content and our audiences. So simply put, we’ve had the benefit of being part of, as you know, a significant global business.
“We’ve been able to access proprietary tools and tech that we wouldn’t normally have access to. It allowed us to launch some of that here in this market. That will form the basis of our converged ad tech offering. Off the back of that, we have restructured and realigned our teams into two groups.
Prosser’s two dual-team attack
“One is one is a generalist team, which will really own the relationship with the agencies and the clients. Then we’ll have a specialist team that will support that generalist team. And that might be specialists in digital, sport, etc.
“We’ve really set ourselves up to make it easy, first and foremost, for advertisers to trade with us and access our audiences and take that friction out of the transaction. But importantly, it’s what the markets wanted. We’ve had the great benefit of launching an ad tier on our SVOD, which just meant we had to join all those dots.”
The second half of 2025 is the complicated bit. “That’s when we will bring in our linear feeds into that connected environment. There’s a bit of complexity around that piece. It’s not easy.”
Paramount ANZ has kept its messages to market simple this year. One is the change in branding of Shoppable TV to Pause to Shop.
“We did a proof of concept this year within Survivor, and it went gangbusters.”
This is how Pause to Shop Works
Prosser explained: “Essentially a frame comes up, tiny little frame on the screen, when there’s a moment that’s potentially shoppable. For us, it was with the Survivor buffs [neckwear merchandise].
“You click on it, and it takes you into a shoppable environment, whether that’s a website or online shopping.
“We’re rolling that out globally now. The international business is super interested in it, not just for advertisers, but also for some of the products that we have around our own content. We also have a consumer product business.
“That’s the evolution of that product which will roll out more broadly and be within more shows. The important thing is that it’s not invasive. We really worked hard to ensure that we keep the eyeballs on the screen, knowing that people are multi-screening while they’re watching content. And we didn’t want it to be invasive.”
Own the ad moment
“The second product is around contextual advertising. We look at our shows and find relevant moments for brands or advertisers. As that moment happens and we roll into a break, we can feed an ad or sponsor message that sits adjacent to that contextual moment within the content.
“That’s also something the viewer can react to when it’s on the screen.”
10’s 7.30 franchises
The biggest audiences and therefore the biggest ad spends come after 7.30pm for 10. We asked McGarvey for a 7.30pm report card.
“There are certain big brands that have done great jobs for us this year and will continue to build – I’m a Celebrity, Survivor, MasterChef, The Amazing Race. But what I would say is we are not complacent about the lineup.
“The audience can move so quickly. We work very hard to make sure of two things that audience like with those big franchises. We want them to be both familiar and different. For example, next year, the main series of MasterChef will be Back to Win.
“We haven’t done that for five years. Viewers will get some familiar faces and Gordon Ramsay is going to be there at the beginning.
“We work really hard to make sure there’s a reason to come back to MasterChef. Same with Survivor. In 2025 it is Brains v Brawn and then later in the year Australia Versus the World.
‘While our audience loves them, and our clients love them, we work super hard to keep pushing them and make them different and engaging while keeping the core format that people love.
What’s the ideal number of episodes per week?
McGarvey: “Every show’s different. Very few shows hold up beyond three episodes a week now. The big legacy brands like MasterChef and The Block, you can still get away with four.”
10 is breaking those rules with two significant programs in 2025 – I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here on five nights a week and then the return of Big Brother across six nights.
“Audiences love those brands and they’re familiar with that cadence.”
McGarvey also noted a large proportion of the audience is not watching their shows at 7.30 on a Monday night or Tuesday night. “They’re watching it whenever it suits them. And we are fine with that. We just want to make sure that we get it to them wherever they want it in a timely fashion.”
10’s hottest new property is one the audience already loves
That would be the untitled Sam Pang project which is still in development. All we know is its unscripted and not from the Working Dog stable.
Pang will be producing. “We trust him,” said McGarvey. There are not many stars you could take to market for a project without a name or format. Pang is one of them.
“The thing that we’ve learned with comedy is that you’ve got to let the people who are making comedy do it.
“And we do really trust Sam. And honestly, he just won’t tell us. But we’re okay with that.” [Laughs]
“He’ll have a network EP, but we really want to let Sam make the show that he wants to make because we think it will be better.”
The return of Big Brother…Live! 6 days a week!
McGarvey: “It’s a brilliant structure. Audiences love live content. And they love being able to interact with content on TV.
“There’s not that much live stuff anymore outside of news. It will be back to basics. It will be cast from a range of regular Australians. There’ll be all sorts of people, not just young, pretty people. Although of course, there will be young, pretty people.”
Sharing content between Paramount+ and 10
10 has been letting people who pay for Paramount+ get a look at content that’s screened on the FTA channels.
Not all traffic flows the other way though.
“There are certain things like Fake and Last King of the Cross that are absolutely streaming originals,” said McGarvey.
“Fake was phenomenally successful and Last King of the Cross has gone really well.”
The price point for Paramount+ remains super competitive. “Don’t forget the ad tier. In a cost of living crisis, you can get access for one year to all the content on the ad tier for $62.”
Future of drama commissions on FTA
The future of drama is mostly SVOD. Although McGarvey pointed to the commissioning of the Christmas movie Staycation coming to 10 in 2025.
“In the future we will premiere some stuff on 10, but when we drop it on 10, we’ll also drop it on Paramount+ so that those consumers get it.”
Paramount Australia’s sporting chance
McGarvey: “We love having the football, the mix of the consistency of the A-Leagues, and then the event content that you get from the Socceroos and Matildas. It works well for us across all platforms. Obviously, it’s a very tactical sport investment, but I think it’s important for us to have a full suite of assets.
“We have news, we have sport, we have drama, we have great comedy, we have great international content. We see ourselves as a full-service premium video provider. So, it is important that we have that sport vertical.
“We’re probably not in the business of having massive loss-making sport. Although, as those new arrangements might become available, we will tactically look at other sports opportunities. We will absolutely examine them as they come up.
“For the moment, having the football, the NBL, and the AGP. We have a good tactical suite of sport.”
See also:
• Paramount Upfront 2025: 10 kicking of the year with a Pang, + returning Big Brother and Your Gen
• Paramount innovates in advertising with expanded Contextual CTV Ads + new data proposition
• Paramount Australia announces Converged Advertising Technology – Paramount Connect
• Network 10 and Paramount+ commission BBC Studios for local version of comedy series Ghosts
• Paramount+ in 2025: Big stars, big drama, big live sport and a mountain of entertainment