Media Insider: NZR/All Blacks’ massive media move; ASB ad account – then there were three; Stuff loses two executives, staff eye PGs

Just what was that logo on the All Blacks-Wallabies field all about?; ASB ad agency battle – then there were three; Stuff loses two executives as staff eye PGs; Advertising pitches under scrutiny

The All
Blacks and Black Ferns will feature in fly-on-the-wall documentaries designed to supercharge the pending launch of New Zealand Rugby’s NZR+ digital channel – and the organisation’s bid to take rugby to the world.

The launch of NZR+ this month is a critical – and in many ways, delicate – business strategy for New Zealand Rugby as it looks to find new audiences and build revenue, while at the same time preserving its Golden Goose, the $100 million annual deal with Sky for live rights.

Hoping to replicate the success of the likes of Netflix’s Drive to Survive series – which has seen a huge boost in viewership of Formula One across the globe – the two documentaries will focus on the All Blacks’ and Black Ferns’ performances, and coaching dramas, in 2022.

Alongside those, Kiwi A-list Hollywood star Taika Waititi has been filming a series in France for the new platform, combining travel, culture, and rugby themes ahead of the Rugby World Cup.

A daily World Cup show, featuring James McOnie, Black Fern Stacey Fluhler and All Black George Bower is also understood to be planned.

NZR+ will launch this month, New Zealand Rugby’s biggest business move since Silverlake came on as an equity partner – and one which the organisation can ill-afford to muck-up from the start.

Eagle-eyed TV viewers will have seen the new NZR+ logo digitally embedded on the field of last weekend’s rugby test between the All Blacks and Australia in Dunedin.

The new platform is New Zealand Rugby’s bid to build and engage audiences here and overseas including non-rugby international markets such as many Asian and American countries.

The app and content will be free initially, as rugby executives build a marketable audience database. Silverlake has reportedly been astounded this hasn’t happened sooner.

In a business sense, the new platform will give New Zealand Rugby access to critical audience data and the opportunity to get advertisers on board.

Longer term will be a likely strategy to build a full- or part-subscription service, where customers pay to access exclusive content.

Herald rugby writer Gregor Paul revealed in June that New Zealand Rugby expects $20.4m from NZR+ over the next five years.

The Spinoff’s Duncan Greive revealed New Zealand Rugby had filed IP applications for “fan club services”, “streaming live sports events”, and “subscription broadcasting” alongside many other possible business options.

Sky TV and other international broadcasters have the rights to All Blacks test matches in New Zealand and other countries, so the app won’t initially feature any live games.

While Sky is likely to keep a firm grip on the New Zealand rights beyond the current contract – giving New Zealand Rugby a critical lifeline of revenue of hundreds of millions of dollars well past 2025 – NZR+ could conceivably feature live matches in international jurisdictions in future.

It is understood the new All Blacks documentary, which is being produced by Whisper TV, will heavily focus on the debate over All Blacks coach Ian Foster’s future, with raw footage of the players and the coach himself. It is likely to reveal just how close he came to losing his job last year.

The Black Ferns documentary, similarly, is likely to feature the arrival of coach Wayne Smith, and the revival of the side, which saw them claim the Rugby World Cup at Eden Park.

The Waititi six-part series will see the director and actor travelling through France, meeting the likes of All Black legends Jerome Kaino and Andrew Mehrtens.

The All Blacks have previously featured in a much-hyped but ultimately underwhelming Amazon series – it is understood those documentary-makers were heavily constrained by the team. Some scenes seemed contrived.

New Zealand Rugby and the All Blacks will need to adjust that approach considerably if the new series is to have any hope of being compared favourably with Drive to Survive.

During a wide-ranging interview, to be published on nzherald.co.nz and in the Weekend Herald tomorrow, former All Blacks captain David Kirk spoke of the new content, and the balance of giving viewers exclusive material, while protecting the players’ privacy.

“There are really capable people in there developing the content,” said Kirk, the president of the Rugby Players Association.

“They’re developing the right model and approach to how they engage with the team.

“You can’t be sitting there with the camera all the time. In certain circumstances, the team has to have privacy and focus on what it’s trying to do.”

New Zealand Rugby won’t comment on NZR+, other than to say work is under way on a “fan engagement platform” with more detail to be revealed in due course.

The new details of NZR+ come in the same week as Sky announces a content partnership with Stuff and 12 live games on free-to-air Prime for the Rugby World Cup.

Sky says it is well under way developing dedicated shows and stories to highlight the tournament – this is where it will come up against NZR+ content, as well as that developed by the likes of NZME (NZ Herald/Newstalk ZB) and Warner Bros. Discovery (Newshub).

A Sky spokeswoman said the organisation shared the same goal as New Zealand Rugby, “which is to engage with as many fans as possible and grow the game of rugby in Aotearoa New Zealand and beyond”.

“We know that NZR has a desire to engage and grow the All Blacks fan base outside of New Zealand, and creating a content hub like NZR+ is one way to achieve that.”

In an interview with BusinessDesk’s Trevor McKewen in June, the founder of RugbyPass, Tim Martin, said he would be surprised if NZR went down the track of becoming a broadcaster.

He thought NZR+ would be more of a database-building tool based on archived matches.

Referring to New Zealand Rugby’s previous comments that Silverlake had identified a potential 60 million All Blacks fans in the US alone – a huge market apparently ready to engage with new content – Martin told McKewen: “Good luck finding them because I couldn’t.”

Sky bought RugbyPass for $US40m in 2019; it is now owned by World Rugby, and is essentially the international version of what NZR+ hopes to be for the All Blacks and other New Zealand teams.

Stuff loses two execs …

Stuff is losing two of its executive team in a structural change announced by chief executive Laura Maxwell.

Maxwell told staff in an internal Slack message, obtained by Media Insider, that she had been considering the best way to deliver the functions of data and insights and IT, “to set us up to best take on the economic challenges in the market”.

As a result, she said, she had made the “difficult decision” to remove the roles of chief technology officer and chief data and insights officer. “As a result Andrew McPherson and Dina Hay will be finishing their roles with Stuff.”

The pair have been members of the leadership team for the past two years.

Hay introduced Stuff’s sentiment tracker, a digital device at the end of some news articles which asks readers how they feel after reading the story. There are six emojis readers can choose from. McPherson helped set up Stuff’s tech stack, said Maxwell. She praised both him and Hay for their work.

The departures mean Stuff now has 11 execs – exec chair Sinead Boucher, Maxwell, managing directors Nadia Tolich, Joanna Norris, and Matt Headland, people and culture director Annamarie Jamieson, chief product officer Ben Haywood, CFO Dale Bridle, corporate affairs director Genevieve O’Halloran, executive strategic adviser Fei Bian Goh and Pou Tiaki Matua Carmen Parahi.

… as staff eye personal grievances

Media Insider revealed earlier this week that a group of Stuff staff were eyeing legal action as the company looks to reduce 28 roles to 20.

The affected roles are a mix of editorial jobs, including journalists in the national correspondents team and digital production.

The journalists’ union, E tū, has accused Stuff of breaching its legal and employment obligations, including by failing to give staff details such as new job descriptions and proposed hours of work. Stuff says it is acting within legal responsibilities.

The union wrote to Stuff on Monday, seeking to halt the proposals until the company “complies with its legal obligations”. It is understood the company has agreed to extend the week-long feedback period, but is sticking to its guns on the restructure.

Media Insider has been told by several sources that about half a dozen staff are now eyeing personal grievance cases as a result of the way they have been treated. One staff member said yesterday it was a “total clusterf***”.

“Lots of unhappy staff,” they said.

Stuff would not comment further yesterday.

Earlier this week, a spokesperson said: “There are several inaccuracies in the information you’ve been given. We are continuing the transformation process of organising ourselves into three distinct businesses. We are consulting with our staff in good faith and according to our legal responsibilities. This process is confidential to the staff involved.”

The Herald asked Stuff to outline the inaccuracies earlier this week, but it did not respond.

ASB account – crunch time

ASB has reduced to three the number of agencies it has shortlisted for its lucrative advertising work.

The bank is set to announce very shortly the successful bidder, with the race down to OMD’s Dynamo, FCB and incumbent Dentsu. Several industry sources believe Dynamo and FCB have the inside running, but ASB insists it is still completing due diligence.

The contract is a massive deal in the advertising industry as the bank consolidates all its media services – strategy, planning, buying, analysis and reporting – into one contract, dealing with tens of millions of dollars of advertising spend. For ad agencies it’s a big deal: the successful bidder would likely need to bring in dozens of new staff.

“We are not in a position to comment at this stage, other than to say that we have not been informed of any outcome of the process at this point in time,” said Dentsu boss Rob Harvey.

ASB chief marketing officer Helen Fitzsimons said: “We currently have a shortlist of three agencies and we are completing our normal due diligence processes.

“As the process is not yet complete, a final decision has not been made and we therefore have not informed any of the shortlisted agencies of an outcome at this stage.

“As you will appreciate this process is confidential and commercially sensitive and we are not in a position to share details of the shortlisted agencies.”

Which leads us to our next item…

Life’s a pitch – but for how much longer?

Life in an ad agency can be a lot of fun – a mix of creative wizardry, white sneakers, and very sociable workforces.

Life in an ad agency can also be very stressful – especially when it comes to pitching for new work or saving an existing account.

The practice of pitching to clients is coming under new scrutiny, in particular the cost, time and impact it’s having on agencies and, in many cases, the client as well.

“The traditional pitch approach that our industry seems to fall into is that clients will ultimately arrive at a shortlist of agencies and then ask them to perform a creative or strategic task,” says Commercial Communications Council chief executive Simon Lendrum.

“That’s in many ways akin to asking three architects to design your house and agreeing that you will probably appoint one of them if you like one of the designs, and pay for that design only after you’ve seen three alternatives.

“We simply do not get treated in the appointment process like any other industry on earth.

“In a very trite way, you don’t go to a restaurant and eat their food and then tell them whether you’re going to pay for it.”

Advertising agencies can easily spend six-figure sums on major pitches – Media Insider is aware of one case in recent times where an agency estimated it invested close to $1m on a major contract.

“The creative and strategic solutions take enormous amounts of time and talent,” says Lendrum.

“When you’re asking for multiple IP solutions without expecting that you should pay for that IP, something’s not right.”

There have been occasions where agencies believe their ideas have been taken and used.

“Often, [it’s] probably without malicious intent in that if you’re exposed to multiple ideas in multiple presentations and then four months later, an idea comes to you, out of nowhere, you might well forget that you’ve actually been presented with that solution by an agency.”

Lendrum and the council – which represents agencies – believe there’s a better and more cost-effective way for clients and agencies to work together and, in some cases, avoid a full-on pitch process altogether.

He’s laid it out in a step-by-step recommended process for clients:

1. Spend time internally articulating the nature of your challenge and problem to be solved;

2. Identify agencies that you think fit with your brand/team – perhaps through their other work and recommendations;

3. Have a 90-minute conversation with each of them about the nature of the problem;

4. Identify, from those conversations, the most likely partner.

“I haven’t seen any empirical evidence that doing that has any lesser outcomes than putting agencies through a four-month creative IP-based pitch, which is hugely interruptive, disruptive and costly on both sides,” says Lendrum.

A recent American report said the average cost of a pitch, for an individual agency, was $US200,000 ($330,000). For an incumbent agency, it was $US400,000 ($660,000).

“In effect, you have to probably work twice as hard to try and retain the business as you are to try and win it,” says Lendrum.

If clients go through the recommended process and still think it needs to go a pitch, then he believes agencies should be remunerated for their work.

“Because if they’ve done step one correctly, this is a process that, if the outcome is correct, is going to have a material, positive benefit on their business.”

“To think that it’s a fair value exchange to have a token $2000-$3000 for pitches that are costing, in many cases, six figures is, ridiculous. Ultimately from a commercial point of view, it’s two or three years of implied income for that initial investment to get payback.”

A consultant in the UK recently referred to pitch fees being intended as “pizza and beer” money.

“That got the response you would expect it to get, which is agencies don’t survive on beer and pizza money,” says Lendrum.

He acknowledged there would be critics who said if agencies were willing to get into a creative pitch process and understand the rules of the game, why wouldn’t clients go ahead?

“And my answer to that would be just because you can, doesn’t mean you should, it’s ultimately unhelpful to the prosperity of the industry.”

One Good Text

This week, we correspond with senior political correspondent Audrey Young, who celebrates 35 years at the NZ Herald.

Breaking Breakers news …

The Breakers have a new naming rights sponsor.

BNZ’s logo will now adorn the basketball team’s singlets, replacing Sky Sport, which had been the team’s main sponsor since 2019. Prior to that, Sky City had been the team’s sponsor for eight years.

BNZ chief executive Dan Huggins said the bank was thrilled to be backing the Breakers. The bank was also joining forces with Kiwi Hoops, Basketball New Zealand’s junior basketball programme, to help grow the sport at the grassroots level. These partnerships follow the bank’s naming rights sponsorship of the Northern Kāhu women’s team.

“Our support is generational,” said Huggins. “We want to inspire the next generation and provide resources and opportunities that will help grow the sport, promote physical health, and foster a sense of community.”

Matt Walsh, majority owner of the Breakers, welcomed the new partnership.

“Our captain Tom Abercrombie is a shining example of how the Breakers is a pathway for local players to create a career out of basketball. Tom went to school less than four kilometres from our club headquarters on Auckland’s North Shore and has travelled the world playing across the globe.

“Next month he will play his record 400th game for the Breakers in our opening game of the season against the Cairns Taipans at Spark Arena.”

Media Insider and The Fold

A small indulgence. My apologies in advance.

I enjoyed catching up with The Spinoff’s Duncan Greive for his weekly podcast The Fold. We chewed the fat on a number of modern-day media issues, and the background leading up to my role as managing editor and now editor-at-large of NZME.

It’s 20 years next year since we launched the Herald on Sunday; a fair bit of feedback I’ve had since the podcast was released is around the almost unbelievable budget of finding 40 staff to look after one newspaper a week. We didn’t even have to worry about online – there was a separate team in those days.

The media landscape has undergone a huge upheaval in 20 years, largely in part to another start-up in 2004: Facebook.

As I told Duncan, the Herald on Sunday was a hugely exciting project, and I’m very proud of the team we pulled together over the years – many of the journalists who worked at the HOS still feature strongly at the Herald today.

We also talked about the rise of the gossip pages – back then it was the likes of Bridget Saunders and Rachel Glucina going head to head, and that baton has been picked up by Ricardo Simich more recently. Rachel then, and Ricardo today, played an important part in the news mix, and as I told Greive and Jane Phare in 2012, it was my responsibility to set the tone for the pages, not Rachel’s. At times, I didn’t get that right.

I’ve made my fair share of mistakes over the past 30-odd years, but always with the view of learning from them. That’s something I remain very mindful of as I tackle this column each week, both in terms of the content and the people and issues I’m covering. I appreciate the feedback I receive each week.