It's been a record year for 7tennis streams, but what's really impressed digital bosses are the numbers of advertisers adopting a cross-platform approach.
Seven says streaming for the Rio Olympics will be even better and dual peak periods will provide extra value for advertisers and sponsors.
Australian Open advertisers, including Telstra and ANZ, have embraced digital advertising like never before, maximising their ROI, according to Seven's digital head Clive Dickens.
“Typically we've seen between 300,000 and 800,000 stream starts (not people) a day on 7Tennis,” he tells AdNews.
In total, there were 7.4 million streams for the 2016 Australian Open, up 77% on last year, although slightly below Seven's target to double streams. There was 46.4 million minutes of streamed content watched, up 125% on 2015.
“Equally successful has been the willingness for advertisers to follow the content across screens,” Dickens says. “Nearly all of our partners and sponsors are working with our digital product as well as our broadcast product, whereas last year only a much smaller percentage of our partners and sponsors chose to work with us digitally.”
The campaigns that impressed Dickens most include Telstra's broadcast creative work that encouraged viewers to use their phones to watch the action ANZ's digital campaign about the headband for good, starring this year's men's winner Novak Djokovic. Dickens says the cross-platform approach meant the advertisers could focus on the message rather than worrying about media fragmentation.
A digital Olympics
Building on the success of the tennis, Dickens says Seven's coverage of the Rio Olympic Games will have even more multi-streams over 30-plus channels. Seven will also introduce a premium subscription service that places high value content behind a paywall.
The Rio games will be more timezone friendly than London as Brazil is 11 hours behind Australian Eastern Standards Time, which means gold medal moments will be broadcast between 7am to 2pm.
“We see two peaks. Broadcast TV will dominate in the morning before 9am. Then we expect the online consumption when people are at their desks at work to massively spike between 9am and 2pm,” Dickens says.
“So if you've got two [viewing peaks] instead of just one, you can imagine we feel confident about our consumption and return on investment.”
Here are this year's Australian Open ads that caught AdNews' attention.
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