TORONTO – Journalists treated to a showcase of City's 2015-16 Upfront programming Tuesday morning were shown a 45-minute video about Rogers Media's varied media platforms that climaxed with a 10 minute-plus reel of Vice Media's digital content.
The takeaway: Rogers Media wants to offer ad agencies and brand marketers dazzled by Google and Facebook an equally effective way to target ad dollars to young audiences increasingly migrating from traditional TV to new digital platforms. "The longest video was from Vice Media, which is a good exclamation mark for how the industry is changing," Rogers Media president Keith Pelley told Cartt.ca. after viewing the 45-minute show reel.
Pelley isn't alone among top media execs worldwide heeding Vice Media's call that it has the secret sauce to reach elusive young audiences more likely to be viewing video games and Netflix Canada than Citytv. "It feels great to have that kind of relationship with our partners, that they believe in our vision and our cultural offering," Vice Media co-founder Suroosh Alvi said ahead of his New York City-based media empire shortly launching in partnership with Rogers Communications a Toronto production studio and a Canadianized Vice TV channel in winter 2016.
Scott Moore, president of Sportsnet and NHL at Rogers Media, explained the company’s new upfront advertising sales strategy where the company has replaced one splashy party for agencies and clients with a series of intimate presentations which aim to showcase all the varied Rogers brands and their premium content offerings, rather than just linear TV.
"We can customize what we're saying because all media is no longer about just linear TV," he said of the roadshow presentations.
Take Rogers' blockbuster $5.2 billion, 12-year NHL rights deal, which Moore insists turned a profit in its first year. "You can't judge that deal by what happens on one night and on one channel," he said of slumping Saturday night ratings for Hockey Night in Canada this past season.
"It's about delivering audiences across all our platforms and delivering them wherever consumers want them," Moore added.
For Alan Dark, senior vice president of media sales, that means treating agencies and brand marketers as partners, rather than mere advertisers needing a simple rate card for City, as Rogers Media continues to shift from transactional sales to offering diverse premium content like the NHL, FX and the upcoming Vice channel that require evermore complicated multiplatform ad deals.
"We can customize what we're saying because all media is no longer about just linear TV.” – Scott Moore, Rogers Media
Here flexibility from a "one Rogers" offering pushed from the top by Rogers Communications president and CEO Guy Laurence is the key for up close and personal discussions with agencies and brands now getting underway. "Sometimes we don't even come with anything. Sometimes we just sit down and discuss the problems they have and design a customized solution," Dark told Cartt.ca.
The balancing act for Rogers Media is preserving existing revenue streams, including conventional TV with its expensive American shows, while creating new revenue streams that invite inevitable disruption.
"The status quo is not sustainable. What we had to do was help advertisers find the audiences they want to reach," Colette Watson, vice president of television operations at Rogers Media, explained, as she pointed to linear plays like City and OMNI as only two of many platforms on offer to target viewers.
That's a different conversation than the one likely to come this week from rivals Shaw Media and Bell Media who will give pride of place during their own 2015-16 upfront presentations to their latest U.S. sci-fi and superhero procedurals in Canadian TV's top-20 league table primed to reach younger audiences coveted by agencies and advertisers.
Rogers, by contrast, played it safe at the LA Screenings with City, picking up a half-dozen new Fox shows via an extended supply deal with 20th Century Fox. That's after this past season from Sep 22, 2014 to May 17, 2015 in the 7 to 11 p.m. primetime period seeing City rise 2% with the A25-54 demo, but fall 5% with the younger A18-34 audience.
City also acquired new seasons of Fox's Bob's Burgers and Family Guy, after Shaw Media passed on renewing them for Sunday nights, to help fill a hole left as Rogers Hometown Hockey shifts from the conventional network to Sportsnet, starting in October 2015. "It (hockey) boosted our numbers. But outside of Saturday night, Sportsnet is really the home of NHL hockey," Hayden Mindell, vice president of TV programming and content at Rogers Media, explained.
The Canadian upfronts continue this week with presentations from Shaw Media and Bell Media. Watch Cartt.ca for continued coverage.
