Seven’s James Warburton: ‘The challenge I put to my TV peers is, let’s get rid of overnights’
Seven West Media’s managing director and chief executive officer, James Warburton has re-pitched the idea of culling overnight OzTAM ratings.
During a Committee for Economic Development of Australia presentation on the current state and future of the Australian free-to-air television industry, Warburton said Seven has been “leading the charge on change” when it comes to the way audiences are and should be measured.
“For 22 years, the industry has owned and published the OzTAM ratings data daily. It’s been robust and world best practice,” said Warburton. “But, for 22 years, we’ve shown our decline year after year after year. So, despite the changes to viewing and the inclusion of digital, as an industry we’ve been complacent and continued to do the same thing.”
“At Seven, we’ve been leading the charge on changing the way our audiences are measured and reported. The industry’s new measurement platform, called Virtual Oz or VOZ, will report true viewing numbers for our content from the start of calendar year 2023,” he said.
Warburton said when total TV is measured correctly, you can see that on an overnight basis Seven reaches over 14 million people.
“That grows 21% four days later and another 29% in 28 days,” explained Warburton. “Now, given we trade and negotiate and post-analyse campaigns on a 28-day basis, that’s a 57% increase from overnight audience numbers.”
“The challenge I put to my TV peers is, let’s get rid of overnights, even for just a month, and start to tell the real story. That’s what happens in the UK and the US where they focus on three days and seven days.
However, Nine’s chief sales officer, Michael Stephenson, told Mumbrella the overnight OzTAM ratings are still a critical data point for the industry.
“I have said this many times before. Overnight ratings through a total television lens are a critically important data point for our industry,” he noted. “Understanding how a show performed across all platforms, live linear, live streaming, and on-demand, on the night that it was broadcast, will continue to be an important data point.”
“The way in which people consumer content has changed, and people do consume content over a longer period of time, so it’s important that we continue to measure the consumption of that content over, for instance, a seven-day period. My view and Nine’s view, is that both of those things should exist.
“The overnight ratings should come out through a total television lens every morning, and at the same time we should be able to understand how the content was consumed in the seven days prior. Our view on that has never changed,” Stephenson added.
Last year, reports emerged that Seven and Ten had been pushing to get rid of overnight ratings altogether, however Nine knocked it back.
In 2019, former Network 10 CEO, Paul Anderson, told Mumbrella: “Overnight TV audience numbers do not tell the whole story. It’s hard to think of another industry where incomplete data is given such attention and is reported on so widely. And, yet, we keep sending those numbers to media and boasting about our overnight successes.”
He said: “We’re going to start changing that. Network Ten will place a much greater focus on total seven day audience data (the combination of overnight viewing data and data over the following week). While we will continue to report overnight data, it will no longer be our main focus, and nor should it be.”
Mumbrella has reached out to Network 10 for a comment, but has yet to receive a response.
In a world that is getting faster and faster each year, what a stroke of genius to do the opposite and get rid of the overnights.
Every advertiser I’ve ever worked with craves, nay, demands, slower audience data because that way they can address the campaign long after the horse has bolted.
Prioritising “the big number” to bolster PR in a vain attempt to look bigger than a campaign can actually deliver is fools gold.
Don’t get me wrong – seven-day and 28-day are VERY important – but NOT at the cost of banning overnights.
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The overnight data shapes the rest of the ratings data – yes, the catch-up viewers is important, and audiences are shifting the way they watch TV but especially with live, appointment viewing TV – sport I argue falls in this category – its good to see how the overnight figures shape up. The Total TV number is a good way to do this, no one is advocating TV industry to not measure its BVOD audience, and getting a picture of how something rates three days and seven days on is also helpful.
Don’t be like the newspaper industry and ditch a core metric like circulation and expect the industry to just accept a measurement that is harder to understand and verify without that core baseline.
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Overnights are critical to see how inventory has performed in the spots it has been booked. Yes, the BVOD 7/28 help reflect total audience of a program, but this is in 99% of instances irrelevant to the purpose of performance of ad inventory as rarely is one spot in the one slot across all formats.
Removing them is ludicrous. Luckily for James most marketers and agencies have invested in calculators over the past decade, and are in a position to add these different figures (metro/regional/bvod) together quite quickly to get a full understanding of a program if that is important to measuring the efficacy of the buy.
You can’t just hide data you don’t like. A huge part of why people buy TV is to reach large volumes of people at one time of day. Overnights provide this.
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Surely Mr Warburton has more to worry about than this?
Overnight ratings may not tell the whole story, but they critically contribute to the bigger picture.
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