Australia’s commercial TV sector has seen a surge of audience tuning into sports via live streaming, which is democratising the opportunity for brands to advertise on large sporting events.
Around 100 media advertising executives joined sales and programmatic leaders from Nine, Seven West Media, Foxtel Media and Kinesso for ‘Leaders in Live’ – a B&T Breakfast Club presented by Magnite.
The panel all agree that the rapid migration of sports audiences from linear TV and into live streaming is opening up new opportunities for brands – particularly SMEs – to advertise on big ticket sports.
Audiences watching sport via Nine’s app 9Now have grown substantially in the past year. The State of Origin series streaming audience is up by 53 per cent, including a huge 83 per cent year on year rise of viewers for the game Origin III decider.
The first weekend of Nine’s Olympic’s coverage has drawn huge audiences, with about half of the whole country – 13.4 million – tuning in to watch the action. 9Now has provided incremental growth of 20 per cent from the linear TV audience. The 9Network’s Sunday broadcast of the Olympic Games (up until 2.00am Monday AEST) secured a national total TV reach of 10.7 million across Channel 9, 9Gem and 9Now, giving the network its highest reaching day in VOZ history.
“You’ve just got this momentum from the audience consuming more live stream sport and that comes down to convenience and a whole lot of things. We are fully expecting the Olympics is going to produce some of the biggest numbers ever seen in Australia,” said Jordan King, Nine’s director of programmatic and digital sales.
“Any time that you bring in programmatic into something like this, you allow smaller, mid-sized advertisers to be able to advertise into these big keystone events like the State of Origin.
“If you’re a business like for example Jordan’s Carpets from Adelaide, that was not something that was probably realistic when there was just one terrestrial signal. The democratisation that streaming provides live TV is a really positive thing.”
Seven has also noticed a rise in audiences watching live sports events via its 7plus app. This year, Seven will be showing its summer of international cricket via 7plus for the first time after winning the digital streaming rights.
Seven’s national sales director of digital Rachel Page said that streaming is bringing new and different audiences to watch live sport, providing the network’s schedule with momentum.
“All the data says that we will pick up new audience’s because of it being free for the first time and therefore accessing these new audiences coming into the platform,” Page said. “There will be a slight migration from linear TV, which is just happening anyway but the data is telling us that this is only a few percentage points of the overall audience. We are expecting new audience’s in under 40s, predominantly, coming into 7plus for those sports.
“In a world of content and fragmentation, it’s more and more about how do you cut through that clutter. When you attach your brand to something like sports that is an emotional and cultural moment, it does bring a mass audience experience that is really engaged.”
A platform that has also seen huge growth in audiences is Foxtel’s Kayo Sports, which launched in late 2018 and now has about 1.5 million subscribers. During the footy season, numbers can swell to around 2 million subscribers.
Foxtel Media chief sales officer Nev Hasan said that there has been a shift in viewers away from liner and to the Kayo Sports platform.
On average, Kayo Sports subscribers watch 3.6 sports and spent an average of eight hours a week watching sport.
“These are passionate fans, we’ve got a highly, highly engaged audience. But at the same point, engaged audiences mean, we’ve got to treat them well,” Hasan said. “We’ve got to give them an experience that’s different. I think the highlight for us was the start of the NRL season, the Vegas opening weekend was phenomenal, we couldn’t have dreamed of better audiences for that first round game exclusive.
“Sixty-two per cent of our audience are now streaming live sports. We have definitely seen a shift away from our linear. Linear is still important for a certain age groups and demos, but we are now a majority led sports streaming platform, which is a huge shift from four years ago,” Hasan said.
A recent study by News Corp’s The Growth Distillery found that 59 per cent of Gen Z and millennials claim to have a strong affinity to brands that support their favourite sports, and that 69 per cent of fans claim to act on ads within sports content.
New fans are also creating new opportunities for brands to connect with potential customers. Six in ten Gen Z aged have started following a new sport in the past two years, with 2 million new sports fans in Australia in total. AFL, Basketball and F1 have gained the most new fans, while football has had the highest percentage of new female fans, the study found.
Citing the study, Kinesso chief media activations officer Michael Whiteside said that what makes the live sports audience attractive to advertisers is that it is passionate and highly engaged.
“We are seeing an evolution of audiences switching from linear rapidly into streaming. I think that’s based on user preference in terms of their preferred mode of consumption and device consumption. But going forward, that migration will only accelerate because of accessibility.
“So, as Rachel mentioned, 34 per cent of Australians don’t have access to an aerial, so streaming is their only mode of TV consumption. That’ll make digital rights become far more competitive, and as a result that’ll fracture consumption more broadly across streaming platforms.
“A byproduct of that is we’ve gone from like a planning of holistic sponsorships, which was fantastic and really effective, but they can be cost prohibitive, to a world where there’s diversification of demand and diversification of audience. It is democratising access to brands because of the reduced investment barriers to entry.
“That’s where we’re seeing significant growth in digital investment and the opportunity is massive.”
