The state’s biggest media company just presented its last new season before the merger with RNZ. Duncan Greive analyses the presentation, with help from Sam Brooks.
TVNZ’s upfronts, where they announce new shows to advertisers, are always a fascinating window into where the network is at. This year’s edition might have been the most interesting in its history – but it was the unmissable subtext which was the star, rather than the content. Upfronts are highly choreographed parties, where a network gathers all its biggest advertising clients together to tell them a story about how big and bright its audience is, and what exciting new shows it’s bringing in next year.
Invariably there is an hour or two of hard sell presentation, followed by hours of free booze, fancy canapés and big celebrities wandering around like they’re real people. The goal is to get the advertisers sufficiently excited that they book millions of dollars in commercials well into the future, and thus allow those running the TV network to pay those on the content side of the business to make and buy shows.
You can always tell a lot by what’s going on at a network’s upfronts. The first I ever went to were in the first months of The Spinoff in 2014. John Campbell was nowhere to be seen at TV3’s big announcement, a predictor of the end of Campbell Live which was to follow in years to come. It was also the year the network announced the arrival of The Bachelor, ushering in the peak reality TV era in earnest.
While TVNZ’s upfronts always tell you a lot about the network, this year’s were particularly interesting, given the backdrop of the merger with RNZ, a nine-figure annual budget increase and a quite explicit reframing of purpose and audience. If that weren’t enough, the ad market is softening, with Herald publisher NZME downgrading its profit projections, and Bloomberg reporting that “the media business is on track for its worst year on Wall Street in at least three decades. Shares in the largest US media companies have dipped more than 50% in 2022, far worse than the broader market.”
With all that in mind, here are 10 takeaways from the event, which collectively speak to an important institution on the brink of enormous and likely irreversible change.
1. ‘A strong public media environment will not change our commercial focus’
TVNZ’s commercial director Jodi O’Donnell was last to the stage, but it was her show, her people. At the moment, it’s still the work of O’Donnell and her team that funds the operation of TVNZ, and in what is already a softening ad market, she was at pains to say that the merger “will not change our commercial focus”. That’s what the advertisers who rely on TVNZ to drive sales want to hear, but it’s not at all clear that it’s what those designing the new entity want.
There is an unavoidable tension in the mixed funding model, with a large chunk of direct government funding while still taking ad dollars. O’Donnell described TVNZ as “a home for businesses to build their brands”, which seems to directly contrast with what Tracey Martin, who is leading the merger’s establishment board, has said. She told the Herald that “this is not about mass eyeballs and ears as it was just when you had a commercial entity”. It’s ultimately a battle of wills between TVNZ’s best-in-class commercial operation and the intentions of the Labour government.
2. Willie Jackson was present, even after he left
Speaking of, broadcasting minister Willie Jackson was in the house, which hasn’t often been the case at this kind of event. He has worked for TVNZ in the past, as had his predecessor Kris Faafoi, but has had a much less cordial relationship with the broadcaster, perhaps driven by the fact it’s now led by an ex-National cabinet minister in Simon Power. In September Jackson said the merger was “going to require a change of culture, particularly from TVNZ”, while Power baldly decried risks of “Muldoon-era” media bias during select committee hearings on the bill to create the merger. Power acknowledged Jackson from the stage, and much of the early content seemed explicitly geared around showing off the public service orientation of TVNZ.
Until it wasn’t. Jackson left about halfway through the presentation, after the big emphasis on news but before the big “nothing’s going to change” commercial announcements. That’s not what Jackson, Martin or the freaked out private sector media wants to hear. There’s a tension there with incredibly high stakes in and out of the organisation – and it’s ultimately Jackson who decides how it resolves.
3. The parties, the flames, the drinks flowing
At the after-party there were women in dresses made of champagne flutes. The show was lit up by the same flame throwers which accompanied the Black Ferns a couple of nights later at Eden Park. The event was at Spark Arena, previously occupied by Dua Lipa. To put it mildly, this is not how the public service typically operates.
Partying in the public sector is more commonly some sandwiches and a bottle of water, and this is an underrated challenge to TVNZ’s commercial model post-merger. The state broadcaster throws the best parties in media, and it’s even not close. It’s an electric mix of stars, staging, magic venues and free-flowing booze, all justified by the fact these venues are full of people who direct millions of ad dollars into TVNZ, which keeps the machine humming. It’s hard to imagine that the new public media entity, one step closer to the core public service, will be able to operate in the same style. Will that impact the culture, and the ad spend? We’re likely to find out soon. / Duncan Greive
4. Whatever happened to Aotearoatanga?
TVNZ has been on a journey in recent years, adding Te Reo Tātaki to its name, boosting the diversity of its presenters, vastly expanding its use of te reo and general relationship with te ao Māori, along with a big, partly Covid-necessitated increase in local content. It called all this a commitment to Aotearoatanga, and it was both deeply felt within the organisation, and in tune with the zeitgeist of a new Labour government and a general societal feeling.
It was not absent last week, far from it – the event commenced with Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei opening the space and a multi-part kapa haka. But the first big shows announced were US imports, and there was a distinct void where new big name local productions would normally be. This is largely due to the awkward in-between phase of the merger. NZ on Air has, quite understandably said it won’t fund any more new shows, given that a bunch of its funding is being taken away and gifted to ANZPM, the working title of the merger. But because the new entity doesn’t actually have that money yet, it couldn’t tell you much about what will come next year – largely because no one really knows. / DG
5. ‘We are keen to get young males into our TVNZ+ ecosystem’
Duke is a bit of a lame duck of a channel. It was announced in 2016, during the peak commercial era of TVNZ. It was unambiguously targeted at younger men, so that it could sell them Lynx Africa and big cans of Monster energy drink. Which would be fine, except that TVNZ is also our national broadcaster, and there’s no channel for women, Māori or any other under-served demographic. Just the demo which seems like the entire world was made for it? OK.
It does not seem plausible that Duke survives the merger, but there is still a lingering emphasis on finding those elusive lads, as evidenced by an emphasis on fight sports and a new show featuring UFC star Kai Kara France, and there was an explicit emphasis on onboarding young men into TVNZ’s ecosystem. Honestly, the Kara France show looks good and he’s a complex character, but this thread at TVNZ seems like it cannot survive contact with the new holy mission of ANZPM. / DG
6. 6.7m streams a week is a lot! Is it enough?
There are always big numbers at these events. 4.2m, 2.1m, 1.2m – it all starts to blur. One which stood out: 6.7m streams per week. That’s the number of shows or movies which TVNZ+ viewers push play on each week. It’s a hugely impressive figure to have built out in a highly competitive market. But elsewhere they bragged about the low ad load, and it remains to be seen whether the still fast-shrinking audiences for linear can be financially made up for by growth in streaming. / DG
7. Data, data everywhere
Part of the answer is meant to be in targeting. Back in the day, if you sold animal drench you advertised during Country Calendar, to reach farmers. If you sold Clearasil, you advertised during Shortland Street, to reach teens. It wasn’t much more complex than that.
Now we live in the era of big ad tech, where a number of the biggest companies in the world – Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Apple – have a huge business selling highly targeted ads. That’s partly what has decimated media companies, as the Silicon Valley giants have taken that part of the value chain. TVNZ has worked hard on its tech stack, and is rightly proud of an increasingly sophisticated targeting ability on TVNZ+. Yet offering to combine its user profiles “with your [meaning advertisers’] first-party data” made me wonder how that kind of targeting will survive the political environment. When the public is paying hundreds of millions of dollars for this machine, the conversation around data sovereignty will get significantly more complex. / DG
8. Does TVNZ know what the best of their content actually is?
TVNZ spent a lot of time on shows they know will sell well – Celebrity Treasure Island, namely – but they also pushed more than a few that made my eyes squint. One of the stranger shows I saw the network promote during the showcase was the punnily titled So Help Me Todd, a legal comedy starring Marcia Gay Harden and Skylar Daniels as a mother-and-son duo. Haven’t heard of it? I’m not surprised, it premiered at the end of September in the US to middling reviews and barely decent ratings. Yet it was one of the shows that the network chose to show us, as opposed to say, the bizarrely successful Halo, the buzzy sounding Crossfire or any of literally the dozens shows they have on offer.
TVNZ has more shows and movies than it maybe knows what to do with, but pushing that show – as well as another upcoming series based entirely around wildfires – makes me wonder if they know where their hits are. / Sam Brooks
9. It was all a bit much
The showcase ran for over 90 minutes, without an interval. If it was a play, the audience would be rioting. It obviously wasn’t a play, because no New Zealand play has the budget for three teleprompters and four flame projectors. Also, nobody appreciates an ad break like an advertiser, and what is an interval if not a real-life ad break?
But when you see how much TVNZ has to offer, you can see why it ran for so long. Our national broadcaster has a lot of content to show off – dozens of returning shows, a handful of new shows, approximately 30,000 movies based on the several trailer clips we were shown. They also had to stress, repeatedly, how many New Zealanders watch TVNZ (4.2 million, burned into my brain). But when your showcase is so long that even the broadcasting minister has to duck out halfway through, the commercial director is pitching specific shows for ad buyers to check out (Snackmasters, Celebrity Treasure Island) and the judges of My Kitchen Rules are doing improv, maybe your showcase is too long. / SB
10. This might be the last time
We should not be too hard on TVNZ. It put on a good show under incredibly trying circumstances. The merger is hurtling at us – TVNZ and RNZ as we know them are scheduled to cease to exist on March 1. That’s less than four months away, two of which are the notoriously low productivity holiday season. While rumours continue to circulate in the private sector media that the merger might be altered or delayed, I spoke with Tracey Martin last week and she was adamant that it is full steam ahead, as envisaged. Given that it’s an election year, a delay likely means death, given National’s antipathy toward it.
That means this was the last upfronts of the TVNZ era, the last of linear TV as the north star of state media, and TV commercials as the dominant income stream. You could feel that in the air – there was a desire to present a confident face despite the enormous uncertainty in the backdrop. ANZPM has every chance of being a raging success – but it will unavoidably change this beloved and very important organisation. There’s a sadness to that, and it was palpable on Thursday night. But this remains one of the most vibrant and vital media organisations in the country. It has changed many times before. And while this one shapes as one of the biggest in its history, don’t bet against it emerging different, but still the most powerful and impactful media organisation in Aotearoa.