TORONTO – Post-Vice, Rogers Media is growing, diversifying — and in a better place than a year or two ago.
That's the word from Rogers Media president Rick Brace, who hailed his company's effort to turn around the media giant, especially on the traditional TV front as viewers increasingly migrate to Netflix, Facebook, Google and others. "As a television executive, you always want to be number one," Brace told Cartt.ca on Tuesday ahead of his company's Upfront presentation in Toronto.
"But, from the standpoint of City, we approach it with a practical attitude: what's the best we can do to ensure we have great programming and a cost base against a revenue base that presents a viable business model," Brace explained.
He added Rogers has aimed to diversify by bolstering its programming content — particularly for City in the 10 p.m. slot with pick-ups of Manifest and A Million Little Things rookie dramas, and online with new OTT products like CityNOW and FXNOW set to launch in September. The company has also picked up reboots of Twilight Zone and Murphy Brown and announced City will be home to The Simpsons on Sundays, come fall (click here for its full release).
Those moves have been enabled, Brace added, by Colette Watson, senior vice-president of television and broadcast operations, having cut operating costs and righted the ship at the OMNI TV brand.
Plus, the Rogers programming team – led by vice-president of TV programming Hayden Mindell and Janice Smith, VP of media sales – picked up new shows at the recent Los Angeles Screenings which aim to better resonate with audiences and advertisers.
"We have to manage the ad revenue decline with new revenue streams," Watson explained to Cartt.ca.
With City on a more solid financial footing, Watson added she has turned to introducing new content offerings: "So we revived the 10 o'clock time slot and we're growing in product with FX NOW and Citytv NOW."
The new OTT products will be subscriber authenticated, ad-supported and available on all digital platforms, Watson said.
Mindell added City having "adjusted" to traditional TV's new digital reality enabled bigger bets during last week's annual Hollywood shopping expedition. "We've done it well in advance of others, and so we have a stronger footing on which to do things like Citytv NOW and FX Now and the 10 o'clock shows," he argued.
Elsewhere, Sportsnet and Twitter have partnered on a new weekly streaming show, Sportsnet Ice Surfing, to underscore Rogers' desire to expand content offerings, and audiences, across multiple platforms. "It's an innovation, and if you're not a regular NHL watcher, it will hopefully get you more interested, and it's a great promotion for our direct to consumer products," Scott Moore, president, Sportsnet and NHL properties, explained.
Of course, all global media businesses are innovating and diversifying, or withering, in a fast-changing digital landscape, not just Rogers.
Here Brace points to Rogers refocusing programming resources away from its disbanded pact with Vice Media to now target younger audiences on other platforms. "We did put a lot of our eggs in that basket," he said of the partnership with Vice Canada, where Rogers ran the linear Viceland channel, and the bootstrapping media company focused on creating bite-sized online content.
"Once we got rolling, we felt the audience on the linear side wasn't growing the way we needed," Brace said of low viewership for the channel, while Rogers was also hobbled by Vice Canada launching content online before it migrated to the linear channel. The fact Bell Media owned the news show Vice News Tonight and aired it on HBO and Much also muddied things.
"We want to take the Vice money and diversify it," he added of Rogers' current growth strategy online. At the recent LA Screenings, that meant buying up, where possible, in-season stacking and downloading rights to all episodes of new and returning U.S. network series to better monetize on-demand, delayed viewing platforms like the Citytv NOW and FX NOW streaming apps.
Of course, negotiations in Hollywood to nab digital rights to have episodes on Rogers platforms varied from studio to studio. "We're competing against other forces and other interests, and every negotiation is unique," Mindell insisted.
Here he pointed to an escalating tug-of-war between U.S. networks and their studio suppliers as the latter want to retain rights to sell series to streaming platforms, while networks like Rogers and other Canadian broadcasters want series to live for as long as possible on their own traditional and emerging platforms.
On the advertising side, Rogers has also been innovating to ensure digital ad buying becomes increasingly automated and targeted so Canadian marketers have more control over where they place ads, and to whom. Al Dark, senior vice president of sales, told Cartt.ca the vertically integrated media player is sitting on a mountain of data mined from its mobile, cable and media subscribers.
That has enabled Rogers to create an audience targeting alliance across its varied platforms to show advertisers who is watching which shows, and how to effectively match those eyeballs to marketing messages. "The boundaries are breaking down and more and more, as we shift to an IP world, distribution and technology opens us up to new opportunities that we didn't have before," Dark explained.
The Canadian Upfronts continue this week with rival pitches to advertisers by Corus Entertainment and Bell Media.
