Seven West Media confirms major leadership changes under ‘new operating model’
Seven West Media (SWM) Group has confirmed a wave of major leadership changes under a “new operating model”.
On Wednesday, the media giant also confirmed the departures of chief marketing officer Melissa Hopkins, chief revenue officer Kurt Burnette and Seven Melbourne’s head of sport and managing director Lewis Martin, as a result of a restructuring with the new model “designed to deliver on the strategy that includes optimising its television business and delivering on the digital future”.
Under the new model, SWM will have three divisions: Television, Digital and Western Australia.
Yep, yet again, when the Sales and Marketing staff can’t sell ads in the crap on the TV … get rid of them seems to be the only ‘solution’ the big wigs can come up with.
Three ‘divisions’ that read like silos when advertisers will be demanding more integration, not less must be self serving because it sure isn’t oriented outwards.
The rationale behind those silo seems pretty random from the outside. It’s hard to identify a strategy other than one that panders to specific people internally. To illustrate: WA is a geography and a division with digital, digital is a channel/platform not a geography. So who owns what bits of digital in the arbitrary place called WA?
Elevating a content person while axing sales people when the sales people have been doing an incredible job selling the absolute tosh that passes for content on Seven is hard to understand. How can another desperate reboot of Farmer Wants a Wife get you promoted while managing to sell a wildly over-priced and under-delivering Cricket offering year after year gets you fired.
Not quite integrated, not properly diversified, Seven seems stuck in a purgatory of their own making. Maybe if the Seven board paid as much attention to audiences and technology as they did crash pads and cocaine for cheque-book journalism and legal bills from Afghanistan they might not quite be in this deep of a hole.
I cant speak for the other 2 executives but I know Kurt Burnette is highly regarded in the media and ad market. This is not any revelation they consistently need to re model when the going gets tough, so start with the big $ earners and work your way down.
Seems divergence is the new convergence
haha….Television, Digital and WA? Am I the only person that finds this funny.
Hmmmm … “designed to deliver on the strategy that includes optimising its television business and delivering on the digital future”.
I think ‘the future’ arrived quite some years ago. The top of the tree didn’t realise it. Probably didn’t listen to the capable people that will no longer be there,
It seems that the FTA top-dogs prefer to operate on the basis that their only model is 100% driven by the bottom-line so they slash their staff, their stars and their content and buy third-rate overseas ‘entertainment’ … and then they wonder why their ratings plummet and their advertising income. Maybe their motto in the digital era is ‘if at first you don’t succeed … just repeat again what you have been doing and let everyone else zoom past you.”
Confused marketers in these comments that haven’t spent enough time working on WA clients…WA is it’s own strategy. The demo there is totally different to the rest of Aus, and they don’t really like East Coasters. They used to like QLDers but that stopped when southern states were moving up in droves. WA cut themselves off more and more from the rest of the country and none of their public holidays, apart from religious ones, align with the rest of the country either.