The Isuzu UTE 2023 A-League Grand Final will kick off in just over 24 hours, with Melbourne City taking on the Central Coast Mariners live from 7.00pm AEST on Saturday night.
Broadcast on 10 in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide, 10 Bold in Perth, and 10 Play and Paramount+, Nick Bower, Paramount’s GM of ad sales, said that the network made some changes to its broadcast schedule this year by shifting the regular season games to 10 Bold, but having two games a week.
“That's proven to be really successful with audiences strong across both those matches, and also our commercial partners really seeing some strong audience delivery across the year for their campaigns,” said Bower.
“We've also had really strong broadcast integration into our football across Isuzu, Hungry Jack's, Harvey Norman, Ned's, Industry Super and even Nike.
“It's great to see the support that we've got so far this season and I think we're going to have a pretty awesome game tomorrow night.”
Bower said that the A-League has a “really unique” offering that puts it in a strong position for commercial partnership - it’s one of the youngest mainstream football codes, it’s a sport that is centred around diversity and inclusion, and it authentically heroes women in sport.
“It's a sport that we know has the highest participation rate in the country and continues to dominate that space versus some other codes,” Bower told AdNews.
“We feel the broadcasts this year have gone from strength to strength and we've had a really strong delivery of audiences across 10 Bold, 10 Play and Paramount+. For the Finals alone, we're up on audiences year on year pretty significantly.
“Stream starts on Paramount+ are up 11%, streams on 10 Play are up 65% and we've got our broadcast audiences up between 34% or 76% depending on the week of the Finals, so more Australians are watching more football on Paramount than ever.”
Paramount made the decision this year to remove commercial breaks throughout play, going ad-break free, whistle to whistle, which Bower said drives “incredible engagement and audiences”.
“Our commercial partners get the ability to communicate and talk to audiences during that time via things like our squeezebacks, which are a fantastic way to make an impact into that live audience.”
Squeezebacks involve temporarily reducing the match vision and creating advertising real estate around each side of the screen, usually running for about 10 seconds and utilising either a static or moving message. Bower says such tactics are “highly impactful for advertisers, yet non-intrusive for viewers as nothing goes over the vision of the match".
Bower said the decision to remove commercial breaks from play has been “a big change” and an opportunity that Paramount had to talk advertisers through.
“What we did is we invoked something called the ‘golden break’ - a break in the broadcast between when the players walk out but before the first whistle. It's like an in-program, 60-second commercial break, which our partners absolutely love,” said Bower.
“We've rotated our partners through those commercial breaks this year and it’s been a real benefit. Because we went ad-break free, we added a second ‘golden break’ into the second half this year, which enabled advertisers something like that in-program commercial break feeling within both halves.
“Our commercial partners not only get access to commercial breaks pre-game, halftime and post-game, but also access to those ‘golden break’ areas – which are really highly sought after and just for our partners – as well as broadcast integration features throughout, whether that be in squeezebacks or things such as the Harvey Norman replay, which is a feature of the game itself.”
The football coverage will continue after the A-League Grand Final as following the post-match celebrations, viewers can stay tuned on Paramount+ for the Emirates FA Cup Final from 11.00pm AEST, as Manchester United take on cross town rivals Manchester City for the first time ever in a FA Cup Final.
“For our partners on Paramount+ that are buying football audiences, it's a wonderful way for them to buy audiences, because it's all premium and it's all live,” said Bower.
“All the partners rotate through the football leagues that we have across Paramount+, including the FA Cup, the A-League, the Socceroos and the Matildas.”
Looking at the performance of the overall ad sales market, Bower said that while it’s been a little bit of a softer start to the year, Paramount has a “really strong” programming slate in the back half.
“We know some of our competitors have perhaps shot some of their best shots with their programming slate earlier this year - we've got some of the best programming yet to come,” said Bower.
“We have Hunted, the biggest program on any network last year, which is coming back into the schedule which we're really excited about; Dessert Masters, the spinoff from MasterChef; and of course Thank God You're Here, which is going to be just amazing.
“So far the market sentiment of feedback around our comedy programming has been sensational as it always is with things like Have You Been Paying Attention? and The Cheap Seats. Our comedies have provided us a chance to dominate that 8:30 time slot proving a winner for audiences.”
Bower said there’s high demand for Paramount’s audiences across the board and that anywhere where there's big, key programming – the likes of MasterChef, for example - there's going to be higher demand, certainly in the back half, but the network does have “opportunities across the board” to share with its partners.
“We're seeing an increase in demand in sponsorships because you can do a little bit more with some of the big programming that we have. There's opportunities for that and we're looking forward to bringing some more exciting programs into the slate towards the back half which will hopefully provide more sponsorship opportunities as well,” Bower told AdNews.
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