Initiative Media Week in Review: July 19 – 25

TELEVISION

PLUS…

• DIGITAL TV

• THE FUTURE FOR MOBILE PHONES

• GOOGLE THREAT

• CONSUMERS CONFIDENCE GROWS

• ONLINE MEASUREMENT

• MASTERCHEF SITE A HIT

• MICROSOFT, YAHOO! SEARCH DEAL

Top 5 Prime Time Programmes – People 18-39

1. Sunday    2100-2130    Masterchef – The Winner Announced    NEW-10    36.7

2. Sunday    1930-2100    Masterchef Australia – Finale Night    NEW-10    28.5

3. Sunday    2130-2230    Glee    NEW-10    15.0

4. Tuesday    1930-2030    Talkin’ ‘Bout your Generation    NEW-10    13.3

5. Thursday    2100-1230    TV Burp    TVW-7    12.9

1. Sunday    2100-2130    Masterchef – The Winner Announced    NEW-10    40.7

2. Sunday    1930-2100    Masterchef Australia – Finale Night    NEW-10    32.5

3. Sunday    2130-2230    Glee    NEW-10    17.0

4. Thursday    2100-2130    TV Burp    TVW-7    16.9

5. Sunday    1830-1930    Merlin    NEW-10    15.6

1. Sunday    2100-2130    Masterchef – The Winner Announced    NEW-10    35.2

2. Sunday    1930-2100    Masterchef Australia – Finale Night    NEW-10    29.2

3. Sunday    1830-1930    Merlin    NEW-10    15.0

4. Tuesday    1930-2030    Talkin’ ‘Bout Your Generation    NEW-10    13.8

5. Thursday    2100-2130    TV Burp    TVW-7    13.6

1. Sunday    2100-2130    Masterchef – The Winner Announced    NEW-10    32.1

2. Sunday    1930-2100    Masterchef Australia – Finale Night    NEW-10    26.5

3. Tuesday    2030-2130    Packed To The Rafters    TVW-7    15.6

4. Wednesday    1930-2030    World’s Strictest Parents    TVW-7    15.0

5. Tuesday    1930-2030    Talkin’ ‘Bout Your Generation    NEW-10    14.9

TVW-7 regained their top spot this week as a result of the season endof MasterChef, capturing a commercial share of 39.0% for Total Peopleoverall (0600-2400) followed by NEW-10 with 35.6% and STW-9 with 25.4%.

The top performing programmes on TVW-7 for Total People were SundayNews, taking the number three position with an average audience of229,000, followed by an additional eight in the top fifteen includingNews, Packed To The Rafters, Better Homes And Gardens, Air Ways,World’s Strictest Parents and Today Tonight. This was a week of newprogramme launches/return series across all three networks. TVW-7premiered a few new programmes with World’s Strictest Parents, DoubleTake and TV Burp, which averaged 197,000, 161,000 and 156,000 viewers respectively. The Amazing Race returned to our screens with an averageaudience of 157,000 viewers, an increase of 25.5% from the finale oflast season.

Sea Patrol continues to be STW-9’s  most watched programmewith 181,000 viewers, however, the station failed to have anyprogrammes in the top fifteen. STW-9 also premiered a couple ofprogrammes with Dance Your Ass Off and Australia’s Perfect Couple, butfailed to impress with average audiences of 79,000 and 94,000respectively.

NEW-10 had the remaining six shows in the top fifteen forTotal People with Sunday’s Masterchef Australia – The Winner Announcedtaking out the top position with an average audience of 454,000 peoplefollowed by Masterchef Australia – Finale Night with 378,000 viewers,Talkin’ ‘Bout your Generation with 210,000, NCIS with 189,000 viewers,Saturday’s Ten News At Five with 186,000 and Merlin with 186,000. Tenintroduced The 7PM Project as a strip programme Monday – Friday toreplace Masterchef (a big ask for any show) which started with a highof 151,000 viewers but dwindled to only 89,000 by Friday.

Speaking ofMasterChef, both the Seven and Nine Networks have announced that theyare looking at “food related programmes” to launch either later thisyear or, more likely, next year. Saturday’s Ten News At Five was thetop daytime programme for the week, followed closely by the Round 17AFL Match: Fremantle vs West Coast with 182,000 viewers.

Masterchef Australia – The Winner Announced, on Sunday night, is nowthe highest rating programme of all time on Australian televisiondelivering an audience of 3,476,862 million viewers. The programmepeaked at an unprecedented 4,094 million at 21.29 when Julie wasannounced as the winner. The final challenge programme also had amassive audience of 3,306 million helping Ten to a huge average peakshare of 43.3%. To put this into context, the Opening Ceremony of theSydney Olympics pulled 2.7 million people. Despite the record breakingaudiences though, it wasn’t enough to give Ten the win for the week -that went to Seven with a 27.5% share, Ten placing second with 25.6%and Nine in third with 23.1%.

OZTAM has announced that digital TV penetration for Quarter 2, 2009sat at 52.2% of households nationally which is substantially up fromQuarter 1 which was 43.4%. ONEHD delivered their best performance todate with the Hungarian Formula One race which broke the 200,000 viewermark nationally.

A Swedish software and design company, the Astonishing Tribe, arecurrently developing Augmented ID, an augmented reality concept formobile phones. This utilizes facial recognition software to visualizethe digital identities of those around you. By simply aiming yourmobile device at someone, you would be able to access that individual’spre-selected information through floating icons that would appeararound their image. These could contain anything from a phone numberand email address to links to their favourite content or socialnetworking platforms.

GOOGLE THREAT

Two of Google’s largest customers are threatening to pull theirsubstantial business as a result of the company’s decision to enter thereal estate listings market. Apparently both Fairfax and News Ltd areunhappy with
Google’s decision to list properties for sale on GoogleMaps. Source: The Age

The latest Roy Morgan Consumer Confidence Rating shows Australian’sare growing more confident, with the rating being up 3.4 points to117.8. This is the highest level since January 2008. More Australiansare saying it is now a good time to buy major household item, which iswhat has driven the latest rise in confidence. The increase is dampenedby the recent figure on unemployment or ‘under-employment’ which RoyMorgan estimates at 1.83 million either looking for work or more work.

The IAB is collaborating with Nielsen Online to produce a modelthat comprises both panel and tagging-based data which will provide theonline ad industry with a unifying standard measure. In order toimprove the existing panel, the launch has been delayed from mid 2009to the first quarter of 2010.

The Masterchef Australia official website recorded more than 35million page impressions and nearly 9 million total video views. Thesite provided the audience with catch-up TV, celebrity chef interviews,interactive food trivia quizzes, fan forums, a recipe section andonline cooking demonstrations with judge George Calombaris. Network Tenis planning to launch a version of Celebrity Masterchef in lateSeptember.

A 10 year search deal has been signed by Microsoft and Yahoo! in abid at taking on the dominance of Google. As part of the deal Microsoftwill get a 10 year license to Yahoo!’s core search technologies andwill be able to integrate these technologies into its existing searchplatforms. Yahoo! on the other hand will become the exclusive worldwiderelationship sales force for both companies’ search advertisers. It isnot understood how this will affect the local Yahoo!7 operations inAustralia, but is likely to take a few months to roll out.