What you need to know:

• Seven this week kicked off a series of intimate 2025 upfronts sessions in Sydney, before hitting Melbourne via a dialled back pitch intended to underline a new era at the restructured broadcaster.
• The 2025 content slate dominated airtime, with expanded cricket and AFL, news plus new and returning tentpole titles.
• Efforts to build out digital audiences have put 7plus centre stage, with Seven eschewing the BVOD label and aligning itself more closely with the global streaming cohort, just without the subscription component.
• Meanwhile converged trading platform Phoenix is set to launch on 2 March, and advertisers will also gain direct access to more data firepower via REDiQFORU.
• Seven claimed the new self-service data platform can predict audience behaviour 28 days in advance with 95 per cent accuracy.
• Tacked right on the end of pitch was a $10 million commitment to a total TV effectiveness study in a move that appears to take cue from Seven's biggest rival. 

Seven debuted a new format for this year’s upfront, and with it, a dialled back tone.

No longer is the network “obsessed” with outflanking the competition, or being “number one and threatening Nine” as CEO Jeff Howard put it.

“Don't get me wrong, we still love winning ... we're still obsessed, but we're obsessed with being better partners,” he told yesterday’s midday gathering.

The network’s new boss and restructured team laid out a proposition that went heavy on “high value audiences” and put content centre stage – with a bolstered slate on 7plus the big-ticket item.

It was the network’s first upfront without longtime sales frontman Kurt Burnette and the post-restructure etched edges were palpable. The new sales leadership is still “working to become a team” per Omnicom Media Group chief investor Kristiaan Kroon.

None-the-less, the more restrained and targeted pitch was well received by buyers that had seen the pitch by Wednesday afternoon – Omnicom, Publicis and Dentsu teams were amongst the first out of the gate in Sydney this week.

“I felt that Seven read the room about what partners were looking for and delivered it,” attested Atomic 212’s Sydney GM Ashleigh Carter. “The format was smaller, more intimate and delivered their vision for the next 12 months in a short, concise manner.”

Another fan of the intimate setting, iProspect’s national managing director Marcelle Gomez appreciated that the network didn’t shy away from addressing the cultural issues that had come to light in the last 12-months. “I thought they did that in a really authentic way,” she told Mi3.

In his opening address, Howard assured clients that Seven has made the necessary changes “to address our shortcomings”. “We hold ourselves to account, and we expect our peers to do the same."

The slate

The 2025 slate enjoyed the biggest spot on the agenda, accounting for 50 of the 70-minute presentation that Seven will be taking to agencies and partners across Sydney and Melbourne over the next fortnight.

“The best content always attracts the most viewers no matter what the platform always has, always will,” said managing director of television Angus Ross of the network’s $700 million investment across its three content pillars – news, sport and entertainment.

Seven will push its expanded AFL and cricket rights in full, complementing new digital coverage on 7plus with a package of new programs and commentary streams across the codes.

“We've never had a better offering and better again, with the digital rights, now every Australian can access it,” per head of sport digital Kirsty Bradmore.

For AFL, that amounts to seven-day-a-week coverage during the 2025 season in what director of sport Chris Jones says is a bid to become “the home of footy”. Key to that strategy, he said, was securing AFL personality Kane Cornes – formerly with Nine – for Seven’s commentary team.

The upcoming summer of cricket will kick off with the men’s Australia vs India test series, follow by men’s and women’s big bash league (BBL) and a standalone women’s Ashes series. It will be supported by introducing an alternative Hindi commentary for all Australia vs India matches, and a new BBL alternative commentary from comedy duo The Grade Cricketer.

The entertainment slate remains largely unchanged, with the likes of Farmer Wants A Wife, Australian Idol, My Kitchen Rules, The Voice, Dancing With The Stars and The 1% Club among returning tentpoles. New additions include a new reality series, Stranded On Honeymoon Island, from the makers of Married At First Sight, and Once In A Lifetime, hosted by former Paramount alum Dr Chris Brown. Meanwhile, news content is expanding its grip on day-time programming with director of news and current affairs and Seven West Media editor-in-chief Anthony De Ceglie extending the run time of The Morning until 12pm, followed by a new hour long 12pm news bulletin.

Bonfires, fireworks

Eschewing the BVOD badge in favour of ‘premium video on demand’, Seven Group managing director of digital Gereurd Roberts argued 7plus is no longer just the digital shadow of Seven’s broadcast programming but edging closer to becoming a “genuine SVOD competitor”.

The platform is built on four content pillars – broadcast programming, FAST channels, the premium VOD library and first round exclusives – and it’s the latter two elements that make up a content strategy inspired by the global streamers, per Roberts.

The ‘bonfires and fireworks’ strategy, he explained, fuels day-to-day consumption with a library of premium content – the ‘bonfire’ – with zeitgeisty titles and first-run originals acting as the ‘fireworks’ to drive viewership spikes and reach new audiences.

The strategy will be underpinned by major investment in ‘first round exclusives’ for the platform – i.e. new international programming that will premiere on 7plus.

The network this year saw early successes with that approach during when it secured local rights to four-part British drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office.

“More than 400,000 people watched the first episode, [and] more than 70 per cent of those went on to binge multiple episodes. Straight up, over 30 per cent of those users were new on the day watching only that content, and the majority were under 54 – that's completely complimentary to broadcast on night one,” said Roberts.

The program, one of only two first round exclusives offered on 7plus in the last year, boosted average minutes consumed on the platform by 38 per cent on the first night, and peaked on the premiere night of the final episode with 500,000 viewers.

The plan for 2025 is to run 12 first round exclusives – one for every month, starting with Suits LA.

Roberts claimed the strategy is already working. “Almost 45 per cent of 7plus active users every day watch only 7plus exclusives, premium library or first run on demand – no broadcast content. That's more than 315,000 Australians every day who treat 7plus in exactly the same way they treat Disney+, Prime Video or Netflix," added Roberts.

A bold claim, but it resonated with Atomic 212’s Carter.“I loved that their content strategy not only continues to lean in on local content, something Seven has always done well, but they focused a lot on how they have strategised on curated global content to help deliver consistent audiences across total television,” she told Mi3.  “The visibility they provided on their vision really landed with those in the room.”

Adtech add-ons

Seven’s data and adtech announcements might have been light on compared to others in its competitive set, but the network did have a few new pieces up its sleeve.

The first was a launch date for its long-awaited unified trading platform, Phoenix, slated to land on 2 March 2025 after its upfronts debut last year.

It brings the network on par with Nine, which rolled out its converged Galaxy solution three years back, with Paramount having committed to a Q1 launch for its converged TV trading tech.

“[Phoenix] provides a single view of brands and audiences across our ecosystem, shifting us to trading audiences, not channels, and that is revolutionary. Whether metro, regional or digital, we can deliver these audiences wherever they land,” per Seven’s national TV sales director, Katie Finney. For now, the tech will only be on the sell-side.

Part of the Phoenix rollout will be the inclusion of real-time effectiveness reports for every total TV campaign, enabling advertisers to measure their campaign's success.

Seven’s expanded partnership with data and AI company Databricks will also be key to the Phoenix roadmap, powering projects like new audience predictions modelling across 7plus.

That capability comes part of the latest update to Seven’s data platform, 7REDiQ, with clients and agencies getting direct access via REDiQFORU. Via Databricks and a new partnership with Ticketek analytics arm Ovation Seven claims the updated tech can predict audience behaviour up to 28 days in advance with 95 per cent accuracy and includes live and on-demand content.

For both Atomic's Carter and iProspect's Gomez, it’s the biggest get of Seven’s 2025 pitch.

“I really enjoyed the smarts that are going into how they are utilising modelling to predict audiences … When you combine this with Phoenix becoming live, it gives me comfort for our teams that are day in day out buying television and chasing audiences – this is going to become a lot more accurate and efficient as we head into 2025,” said Carter.

Per director of data and growth Andrew Brain, REDiQFORU moves Seven’s data capability beyond “traditional audience analysis” and into “actionable foresight” by overlaying circa 3,000 data points spanning consumer behaviour, life stage, and purchase intent, as well as demographics over 14 million verified and consented Australians. Ticketek, Coles360, CarExpert, Raiz, Equifax, LandmarksID and Weatherzone have been named as key data partners, along with an exclusive partnership with Visa.

Brain told upfront audience it would be the first of many major innovations to come from the Seven AI Factory project with Databricks.

“We're also rolling out AI-driven churn models that predict when through the week audiences might leave 7plus, but also then predicts the content that's going to bring them back, or we can just identify users who are slowing down their consumption, and having done so, the prototype uses AI to deliver them automated on platform messages to keep them in 7plus,” explained Brain.

Next year, Seven will open up the AI collaboration more broadly, with plans to host quarterly updates on the latest pilots underway at the AI Factory, with an open-invite for clients and partners to propose ideas for new use cases.

$10m effectiveness inventive

Seven rounded off this season’s upfront presentation by putting $10 million in inventory on the table for new or low spend clients willing to take part in a total TV effectiveness study in a move that appears to have drawn heavy inspiration from the $30 million Nine put on the line in the name of advertising effectiveness at its own upfront last month.

CEO Howard, who credited Nine for its “important piece of work” on total TV effectiveness, said Seven has partnered with Melbourne-based market mix modelling outfit Prophet six months ago to “predict and optimise the performance of our own marketing spend”.

Per Finney, the next phase of the project will create an opportunity for five advertisers to receive $2 million worth of inventory across Seven to measure the impact of total TV across their marketing mix and business outcomes. Prophet will be the default provider, though clients and their agencies will also have the option to use other MMM partners.

At face value, the move makes “a compelling counter to Nine's partnership with Mutinex and Analytics Partners”, said Atomic 212’s Carter. But she also thought it felt rushed and light on details – she wants to hear more. 

“MMM is a huge topic for all our clients at the moment, and proving media effectiveness at both a media channel but also at partner level will continue to be important for all our partners heading into 2025.”