The promotion of Beverley McGarvey at Paramount saw her take on the role of president of Network 10, head of streaming and regional lead for Australia and New Zealand,
Now with both commercial and creative leadership of Paramount’s multi-platform business in Australia, with oversight of Network 10 and its portfolio of brands including 10 Play, McGarvey said that Paramount is focusing on driving audience growth and with the linear overnight audiences stabilising and plateauing, there is "massive growth" on BVOD.
"This is probably the true for Seven and Nine as well, but every week we're seeing strong numbers on BVOD - 10 Play had its best week ever last week, it was up 61% before we even got to Sunday," she said.
"Those audiences shifting between platforms is something that's really important. The VOZ data is really critical in that too so the market can get that combined view of what that audience looks like."
On the content front, McGarvey said that serving up content that offers utility across all of Paramount's different platforms is "really important".
"We've just had a great launch of I'm A Celebrity, we're coming up to MasterChef and then we get into the back of the year with our big franchises. We've had great stabilisation and our early evening growth too at 6PM with Deal or No Deal," she told AdNews.
"We also have some of the content coming on 10 this year that's previously been on Paramount+, such as NCIS Sydney. From a template point of view, we've got over 50 FAST channels, and you'll see that offering to continue to expand this year, which fits really well into the SVOD ad-tier play where we will have increased reach through our BVOD platforms.
McGarvey will also maintain her current responsibilities as part of the new role, overseeing all original content out of Australia in alignment with Paramount’s global studio organisation and the businesses’ commercial capabilities. She will also continue to lead Paramount+ in Australia.
She said that strategically utilising content to grow audiences, continuing to accelerate growth in streaming and then utilising the Paramount ecosystem so brands fit together and audiences are moving across the environment in a way that works for them is a strategy that Paramount will lean even more into this year.
"Monetising our content across all platforms is a key goal; the reason that's important is because it allows us to invest in brilliant content, and that brilliant content allows us to grow our audience and grow revenue," she said.
Looking at the ad market overall to start the year, McGarvey said that given the macro economic environment so far, it's been a relatively challenging period for the ad market.
"As we get deeper into the year, for a variety of reasons, we certainly see green shoots in terms of that improving," she told AdNews.
"The audiences have been pretty good this year, and the linear market’s been pretty stable, so I think although last year was relatively challenging year, we're hoping that we will get some growth into the second half of this calendar year."
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