Seven’s Angus Ross and Gereurd Roberts detail 7plus-first strategy as the platform targets top spot and new audiences.
The three major FTA Upfront events couldn’t have been more different this year.
The 2025 showcase events at Nine and Seven in particular were at different ends of the spectrum. Just who took the correct path will depend on how 2025 unfolds.
Neither broadcaster unveiled a lot of new content – particularly not much in terms of new Australian productions.
Seven delivered the message it is the place to go for new content that will best engage with audiences.
Nine was all about the sell. It argued there’s not many holes in its schedule that need filling. Therefore, it focused on making it easier for buyers to transact – especially those who might have been lured away to promises that haven’t been fulfilled elsewhere.
The pitch from Paramount sits somewhere in the middle. There was a focus trading across all of 10’s multis and its renamed 10 Play offering. It was also spruiking what might become audience favourites like Sam Pang’s new show.
See also:
• Seven Degrees 2025: Stranded on Honeymoon Island and Dr Chris Brown lead Seven’s 2025 content slate
• Nine Upfront 2025: The sell takes over from the content – From Liana Dubois to Suzie Cardwell and Nick Young
• Paramount Upfront 2025: 10 kicking off the year with a Pang, + returning Big Brother and Your Gen
To better understand the Seven content pitch, Mediaweek spoke with Seven’s highest-ranked executives working at the coalface – group managing director, Seven Television, Angus Ross, and group managing director, Seven Digital, Gereurd Roberts.
It’s all about content
Gereurd Roberts: Content is the heart of our upfront presentation. If the theme of the upfronts is about connection and the fact that we still have a strong connection with audiences, that connection comes through content.
We are an audience company and content drives the audience and everything comes off the back of that. Content really is the bulk of the entire presentation as it should be.
Angus Ross: In this marketplace, it is only us and Nine that play meaningfully with investment in news, sport and entertainment.
A lot of the other platforms will only invest in one of those and Seven and Nine are the only people who invest meaningfully in the hyper-local spaces of news and sport and deliver audiences of scale. In terms of what Seven has – we are talking about the biggest shows, the biggest sports, the number one news service.
Gereurd Roberts: Alongside this, and I don’t think we’ve done a good enough job communicating this, we’ve seemed to allow this narrative to emerge that broadcast audiences are in decline and that’s just actually not true. Then you factor in the accelerating growth of streaming which now has an important and meaningful role not only for Australian viewers but also agencies and clients we work with.
Angus Ross: With my wider role where I’m also across advertising, we’ve brought sales and content closer together than they’ve ever been before. That enables us to make faster decision-making involving clients.
Next year you’re going to see more brand-funded programming at various points on the network than we’ve ever done before. That’s because we’re involving our content people at an earlier stage in ensuring the right types of brand-funded programming that’s going to get an audience.
Katie Finney [national television sales director] can pick up the phone to me and say, ‘Hey, what do you reckon about this?’ There’s no silos across sales and content. It’s always been good in that regard at Seven, but it’s better than it’s ever been before.
7plus first strategy
Angus Ross: The 7plus first strategy for all the new overseas content is about maximising the audience for those shows. It’s platform agnostic to a degree, but that’s what we’ve always done. We are recognising the shift towards streaming.
Do timeslots still matter in on-demand world?
Angus Ross: For those younger audiences that like to consume on 7plus it’s less important. But we’re seeing linear growth in a number of our key formats year-on-year. When you look at the last couple of years, Australian Idol grew year-on-year.
My Kitchen Rules grew year-on-year. The Logies have grown year-on-year. The Front Bar too.
This whole narrative about ever-declining TV audiences is lazy because when you look at the total television picture, for us and Nine, they’re not declining.
Gereurd Roberts: What we are seeing is that consumers want choice.
Home and Away is a great example. It has a massive live stream audience every single night. But we see those very same users, if they miss an episode, they come back to 7plus to watch it.
Strongly supported shows with passionate fans like Home and Away have an audience that probably prefers to watch live, but if they don’t have the opportunity or it suits them better, they can watch it on demand.
Angus Ross: There are shows that obviously do play more in favour of appointment viewing. Like the 6pm news of course, but also reality shows, which we know are like the equivalent of live sport.
Most of the audience tends to want to watch them when they’re on, but a growing number of them choose to stream that show.
Above and top image: Seven’s Angus Ross and Gereurd Roberts
What goes to 7plus first?
Angus Ross: It’s all about discoverability for our drama catalogue. The best thing about running a show on broadcast and dropping all the episodes at the same time is it’s basically a big advertisement for 7plus.
Mr Bates vs The Post Office is a great example. The first episode ran on broadcast and then we pushed people to 7plus to watch the remainder. We had 400,000 people stream the first episode on 7plus. Almost three-quarters of them binged multiple episodes on the same night.
Should Seven make more Australian drama?
Angus Ross: We invest a significant amount of money in producing Home and Away. I’d love to invest in more, but as we know at the moment, for everyone, budgets are tight.
We also have RFDS which should have been on this year, but because we couldn’t get all the cast back, it will now run in 2025.
For the the right ideas we’re always interested.
But we make 230 Home and Away episodes a year, Australia’s biggest drama on broadcast and on streaming. It’s still on the main channel at 7pm.
I don’t think there is any issue with our commitment to Australian drama.
Is there a perception that streaming is the home of Australian drama? If only they would be willing to be measured, we could test that.
7plus for us is so much more than BVOD, and maybe we’ve got to do a better job of marketing that.
Gereurd Roberts: About 45% of our daily active users come to 7plus only to watch premium library or first run exclusives. That’s more than 300,000 people every day. They treat us in exactly the same way as they would a Disney+ or Prime Video or Netflix.
From a daily scale perspective, we deliver and all of those users see our ads. 7plus had more than 3 million people on the platform in the last 30 days, and that’s without premium sports.
Angus Ross: We are delivering streaming at scale. That is a key difference.
Gereurd Roberts: All of those people are completely complimentary to broadcast. They are younger, 74% are under 54. It’s not cannibalising broadcast, it’s bringing new demos in and expanding our demographic reach.
Radical shift in streaming market
Angus Ross: Without sports streaming rights we’ve been fighting this battle with one hand tied behind our back. With the summer of cricket kicking in and AFL next year, with our 7plus first content strategy, our ever-growing library of VOD content from the major studios, this is going to be a radical shift in the free-to-air streaming market next year.
7plus will leapfrog Nine, leapfrog the ABC and become the biggest free-to-air streaming platform in Australia next year.
Seven won’t get involved in ‘silly bidding wars’
Angus Ross: I’d love to have the budgets that Stan and SBS have to randomly pick up content, but I’ve got to be a bit smarter than that. We do pick up some shows on the open market. The Rookie was one of those.
We still go to the screenings each year and look for programming on the open market. We’re not in a position to get into silly bidding wars, which is what a number of the streamers still do. We are a bit more sensible with our money.
We have a fabulous output agreement with NBC. Also with ITV where we have a first-look arrangement and people love their premium UK drama.