Seven Network doubles bet on Big Brother

The James Warburton-led Seven West Media is poised to renew the reincarnated Big Brother for a second season in 2021.

 

The James Warburton-led Seven West Media is poised to renew the reincarnated Big Brother for a second season in 2021, as the reality show spearheads what Seven hopes will be its re-emergence as the leader in the lucrative 25-54 age television demographic by the end of next year.

After a five-year hiatus, the return of the revamped reality format hosted by Sonya Kruger is doing well for the Kerry Stokes-controlled Seven, whose market value has slipped to $170m.

The Australian understands that Mr Warburton, who replaced Tim Worner in mid-August last year, is expected to provide a trading update to the market in mid-July as SWM shares trade at 12c each.

This is from their low this year of 6c a share in early April as the market came to grips with the COVID-19 economic downturn and its likely impact on revenue and earnings at Australia’s major media companies.

The media group is also believed to be close to finalising negotiations to refinance $541m in net debt at the end of the first half.

This figure has been assisted by the $40m sale of its magazine business to Bauer in the second half, which the German group has just onsold to private equity.

Seven chief marketing officer Charlotte Valente, who joined Mr Warburton’s executive team in October, told Media the key 25-54 demographic was up to 30 per cent more valuable than the 55-plus viewer group, which since 2017 had come to dominate Seven’s viewership.

“We were an older network, dominated by 55-plus over the past three years … with younger audiences diminishing,” Ms Valente said in her first interview since taking on the new CMO role at the group.

To help reinvigorate the Seven brand the network turned to design guru Hans Holfbosche to assist in the refresh project towards skewing the network to this younger audience, with the designer previously working with iconic brands including Woolworths and Qantas.

So far viewers will notice updated graphic elements on air, but shouldn’t expect any sweeping changes.

Longstanding industry watchers will recall the then Packer family-controlled Nine Network’s removal of the network’s dots from its branding in the early 2000s, only for the nine circles to eventually be reinstated amid brutal stakeholder feedback.

Ms Valente said the first fortnight of Big Brother, which began its life in 2001 on Network Ten and then moved to Nine in 2012 before being reprised this year by Seven, had delivered the network its biggest result in the past 10 years in terms of “reaching key audiences that we had lost our way with”.

The other key elements of what Mr Warburton is calling his “tent-pole strategy” that viewers will see towards the end of the calendar year will include a reboot of what was previously Nine’s Farmer Wants a Wife, extreme minigolf show Holey Moley, cooking show Plate of Origin featuring former MasterChef judges Matt Preston and Gary Mehigan, and Celebrity SAS, based on a format from Britain.

Ms Valente acknowledged that Seven won’t be No 1 in the 25-54 group this year, but made a bold prediction about next year.

“It’s not about total people anymore … next year we will go back to No 1 in 25-54 if we continue on this trajectory.”

Meanwhile, former Seven chief Mr Worner, who exited last August, has just eight weeks left to serve on his 12-month notice, after which he will be clear to rejoin the industry.

The market is still waiting to hear whether the Seven board, which is chaired by Mr Stokes, has allowed Mr Worner to exercise the management performance rights — worth about $400,000 — that he held when he left.