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.
James Warburton.
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.
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.
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.
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.