This week for Seven and 7plus is central to the future of television, as Gereurd Roberts explained to Mediaweek.
The media merry-go-round that has been picking up and dropping off sports TV talent this month in Melbourne highlights what having streaming rights means to the overall business.
Gereurd Roberts has been a key player, albeit behind the scenes, as Seven engineers its product to be equally accessible for people watching via the big screen or on a mobile device.
The frontline troops in the reshaping of the product for digital audiences have included Seven’s new director of sport Chris Jones.
Gereurd Roberts is Seven’s group managing director, Seven Digital. Ahead of the start of the AFL and cricket streaming rights, his role was expanded recently to include oversight of digital marketing, audience intelligence and data, product technology and solutions, content strategy and scheduling, platform partnerships, and digital sales and operations. That’s a few meetings every week.
The Seven Digital boss has been with the group for over a decade and moved into the television side of Seven West Media from Pacific Magazines where he was chief executive officer.
Gereurd Roberts
Mediaweek spoke to Roberts as the What About Free promotion launched this week and ahead of the AFL Grand Final.
The discussion started with Roberts highlighting the strong year 7plus has been having.
“Live streaming is up 56% year-on-year on 7plus,” he said. “VOD is up 25% year on year. Across the board, we’ve got almost 40% growth in total consumption.”
Roberts also reminded Mediaweek the digital platform also streamed the AFL Grand Final in 2023. “If you take the AFL Grand Final as a proxy, we did a BVOD audience of just under 460,000 last year. We have been doing a lot of work this week on the platform to get ready for what we think is going to be an enormous audience.”
We also didn’t talk for long before he reminded us that the AFL coverage on 7plus is free! “I’m not sure if you’ve seen the campaign, Nolsey and ‘What About Free’, but it is quite incredible to consider that Australians have never been able to stream AFL or cricket for free and that this will be their first opportunity to do so on an ongoing basis. It’s a massive game changer for clients in Australia. But also for consumers in Australia.”
Why Seven has pursued digital sports rights
“Having 52 weeks of premium sport every single year is a huge shift for us,” said Roberts.
“Why we did it is not simply because it’s going to grow our audience and grow consumption, because that will happen.
“It’s who will grow it and how, and that’s really critical. We did an analysis on what we thought these rights would bring across both AFL and cricket. , What we saw was that they are going to bring a high-value audience into 7plus that previously we haven’t seen.
“Specifically younger males who are traditionally hard to find. That’s who streaming sport is going to bring to the platform. It’s not more of the same people watching more content (which is always good). This is a genuinely new and incremental audience.”
There will be cricket on offer soon as the football season finishes which will start the 7plus schedule of live cricket and football every weekend of the year.
“Our schedule is now giving them a reason to come back every single week. The message to clients and agencies is we can give you this audience across 52 weeks a year. They can literally plan to engage and own that audience across the next 52 weeks on 7plus.”
Roberts noted that includes the cricket with the Indian Tour, Big Bash League, and the AFL season all the way to next year’s AFL Grand Final.
Working on the 2024 AFL Grand Final on Seven and 7plus are Jude Bolton, Abbey Holmes, Brian Taylor and Luke Hodge
Shape of the bigger 7plus audience
“It’s not just about scale, it’s about scaling high-value audiences that we want to drive. That’s why the promotion this weekend is going to be geared around 7plus, because we do want to drive that high-value audience.
“It is a completely complementary audience to broadcast. If you have a look at the split between 7plus and broadcast, 70% of the 7plus audience is under 50.
“If you take a look at broadcast, over 60% of that audience is over 50.”
Matt Shirvington at the promo shoot with sports stars Tanya Kennedy and Ash Gardner
What About Free
The key Seven promo being shown across AFL Grand Final week is the What About Free spot. Seven has extensions of that running across all its platforms – short versions and the two-minute edit.
Seven is marketing What About Free on other mediums too including tram wraps and other media buys.
When asked about the specifics of the new promo, Roberts explained: “It’s the largest 7plus specific marketing campaign that we’ve ever done. That’s how important it is to Seven.
“The marketing team just did an unbelievable job to get that much talent together in the one place at the one time. Everyone understood the importance and everyone wanted to get involved and support it, make sure it is successful.
“But remember this weekend is day one. We’ve got these rights until 2032. There’s a long road ahead and starting it off well is critically important.”
Seven’s promo guru, creative director Graham Donald, and his team were out at Leichhardt filming What About Free for a full day and there was a lot to get through, explained Roberts.
“The turnaround time from the shoot to the finished spots was phenomenal. The Shannon Noll, song What About Me was already iconic. And there’s nothing more iconic than supporting getting free sport to Australians.”
Live sport on 7plus
Although the AFL and cricket live is only now coming to 7plus, Roberts noted existing live sports have been performing well.
“We’ve got LIV Golf plus NFL and World Surf League, Supercars, Horse Racing. We’ve also got state league football with the VFL, SANFL and WAFL.
“Across the last 90 days, we’ve had well over four million Australians on the platform and over a quarter of those have come for the existing sport content. From that you start to understand what that 7plus audience growth will look like.”
Seven’s new sports team
“I have spent a lot of time with Chris Jones and Kirsty Bradmore, who’s driving sport on 7plus. The amount of energy and the insight they bring to 7plus has been incredible.
“It’s all about the content. We can spend what we like on audience acquisition and platform experience. Something very important for when consumers come in. But if the content they want to see isn’t in front of them, then it’s not going to work.”
7Sport’s three-pillar strategy for 7plus
The first one is to drive new and younger audiences to complement the core. Roberts: “This is a young audience that sits perfectly alongside the broadcast audience.”
“The second pillar is creating daily habits and owning the ecosystem.” Part of that is building a suite of AFL programming across seven days of the week. Something that has been playing out in Melbourne media recently.
“The final one is the obvious one. It really is about maximising the value of our rights. That’s important to us and to our sporting partners.”
Mr Bates vs The Post Office
7plus home to much more in addition to sport
Much of the 7plus content is what is described as broadcast pull through. It goes into what Roberts called the platform’s premium library.
“That’s content from all of the partnerships that we’ve got with the biggest studios in the world including NBC.
“There are plenty of others who supply first-run programming. From here on in our target is to have one of those exclusive first runs every single month.”
At 7plus, around 70% of on-demand viewing comes from digital-only titles.
Roberts: “We have seen 7plus become a genuine destination for people who are looking for something new to watch. It’s standing out in what has become a cluttered space.
“We’ve got 50 new titles coming between September and December. And that’s inclusive of a lot of first runs. The majority of that on-demand consumption still comes from drama. But reality is also huge, as is true crime.”
The Power of Mr Bates vs The Post Office
Drama is an important drawcard, with one series in particular grabbing audiences this year.
“Mr Bates has been incredible,” said Roberts. “Its success really helped us understand what we can do on 7plus. Overall growth is important, but the huge spike that a first run like Mr Bates gives you is important.
“The other thing that Mr Bates did was remind everybody of the power of broadcast. We ran the first episode of Mr Bates on broadcast.
“At the end of the show, we said, if you want to binge the remaining three episodes of Mr Bates, go to 7plus right now. Around 70% of the people who watched on broadcast went to 7plus and watched all three of those episodes immediately afterwards.”
See also:Seven’s new sports boss: Chris Jones details AFL, cricket plans and a whole lot more