Charlotte McEleny talks to Foxtel's Executive Director of Advanced Advertising about the power of programmatic for live sports, and the fine line between ad innovation and audience experience...

The start of March signals one of the biggest moments in Australia’s sporting calendar, as the Australian Football League (AFL) and National Rugby League (NRL) kick off and Melbourne plays host to the opening round of the Formula One. In this Q&A, John Matthews, executive director of advanced advertising at Foxtel Media, discusses the democratising power of programmatic for live sports.

Matthews, who brings buy-side experience to sell-side product development for streaming brands such as Kay Sports, BINGE, Foxtel Go, and Now, says video is showing strong momentum. Just last week, the IAB Australia’s spend figures for 2025 revealed an 18.3% year-on-year growth for VOD. Total spend on video advertising has now reached 29% of all digital ad spend in Australia, according to the IAB.

But despite this rise, the challenge for broadcasters is to ride a fine line between innovating for advertisers while retaining their passionate audiences, most notably seen in a huge recent backlash on social media over ITV’s decision to place ads before scrums in the recent Six Nations. Matthews discusses how Foxtel is approaching innovation, using A/B testing to ensure viewer experience remains a top priority alongside innovation and the development of its ad products.

What are the trends in terms of video-on-demand in Australia, and how has that evolved?

It's become mainstream. It's no longer a niche channel. The overall video market is obviously going through exponential growth, and a lot of that's being driven, obviously, by YouTube and social video. But the benefit we provide to the broader VOD and SVOD markets is the quality of the content. The content on our platforms is in super premium environments, and that’s where advertisers want to be.

We have also matured as an industry. If you look back three or four years, there actually weren't that many providers in the space. You had the BVOD providers (the digital products of the free-to-air networks), and then BINGE was one of the first SVOD entertainment services to run ads. And since then, you've now got Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Paramount+ doing ads. There's an explosion of providers out there, and that is great because it raises the level of the whole industry. But it does mean that there are a lot of mouths to feed, and it's highly fragmented. The market's only going to continue to grow, but the key is how we, as an industry, work together to support that growth.

What are the issues that, as a business or as an industry, we need to start tackling to continue this growth trajectory for video?

We really need to work as an industry to make it easy to buy. Because each individual product has its own platform. You know, you've got disparate measurement solutions. We haven't made it easy for buyers, and I think that's something we need to address as an industry. 

Rightly or wrongly, Google and Meta have set the benchmark for ease of use. You can go into the platform, punch in a credit card, get a campaign live in half an hour, and you've got outcomes-based measurement associated with that. If we're going to continue to compete with those guys, we need to be able to offer something as simple, or as close to it, as that. Otherwise, dollars will continue to flow to those platforms.

Another aspect of the ease of use is standardisation. We launched Pause Ads last year, and there's no industry-wide standardisation. Every single publisher has a different format with different specs. As a buyer, if you want to buy into that, you've got five different assets to build and five different things to traffic. As an industry, we need more standardisation.

From a live sports perspective, we need to educate buyers on how live sports work. It is not like a normal buy; you cannot plan it and expect a really nice, flat, smooth delivery over time. You will find that you'll have virtually no impressions throughout the week, and then you can burn through delivery in a few hours. You can't plan it like a normal BVOD or digital budget; that's down to us, as broadcasters, to educate buyers on that.

How do live TV and sports fit into Australia's evolved video environment?

Live sport is probably one of the only remaining places where you are guaranteed a large, scaled audience who are viewing the same piece of content at the same time. Entertainment, more broadly, is so fragmented that it's all video-on-demand now, so you've got large viewership numbers, but they're spread across platforms and across the time people are consuming content. We know from our own product that 90% of viewership on the Kayo Sports platform is live. That's great from an advertiser's perspective because it's one of the few places that still exists for that. 

But it also throws up a hell of a lot of technical challenges, especially in delivering an experience at scale. One of the challenges we face is location. We're in Australia, which is a long, long way away from everywhere. You're hitting so many different pieces of technology to stream and deliver the ad, which creates real technical challenges to make sure you can meet that demand. If you look at the last weekend for us on Kayo Sports, it's the first round of the AFL, it's the second round of the NRL, and we've got the Australian Grand Prix. Earlier in the week, we probably didn't have that many people on the platform, but as of Saturday, that's gone through the roof. The platform needs to effectively scale your technology to meet the demands of both customers and advertisers. Some weekends, we have over 300 live events on our platform, which is technically complex.

What trends are you seeing specifically around programmatic in live sport?

Historically, the only advertisers who could buy into these live sporting moments were the big, multi-million-dollar sponsors. It has democratised live sport. The smallest advertiser through programmatic can access this content and apply the smarts they use on other platforms. Previously, you'd have a finite number of large sponsors that you'd work really closely with and have real deep integrations. We still work really closely with those brands, and those relationships are still super important, but the number of advertisers we're now working with has grown exponentially. There is so much more inventory to tap into. 

Historically, it was one piece of content: a national broadcast signal. By its very definition, it's very closed off in terms of who can and can't buy into it. Whereas now you've got small regional advertisers that can geo-target to a game with well over half a million people watching. It's super exciting in terms of the opportunities that it offers, and it brings a huge number of new advertisers into TV that had historically not been there.

How do you rise to the technical challenge of layering this programmatic element into the service, and what’s on the horizon from an innovation perspective?

As I alluded to previously, programmatic advertising around live sport is super hard. You've basically got an ad tech stack that does next to nothing all week, and then all of a sudden you'll have over 500,000 people hitting an ad break simultaneously, with multiple DSPs, SSPs, ad verification tools and data platforms, which may be in Singapore, the west coast of the US, the east coast of the US and you're pinging ad requests all over the globe to serve an ad almost instantaneously.

I think the one thing that we've grappled with as a business is, quite rightly, that historically our guiding principle has been to be as close to the live edge as possible. Every streaming platform has a degree of latency, but we wanted to be as close as possible to the live edge. We realised that by doing so, we weren't giving ad tech enough time to work properly. If one thing breaks, the whole thing breaks. We work really closely with our technology team, our technology partners, our product team, and our ad tech team to answer the question: "How far back can we move from the live edge to give our advertising technology enough time to work, while not impacting the customer experience?" 

For every new product, every new advertising product, we run A/B tests before we even launch it. Our north star as a business is total hours viewed. The more people who are watching, that reduces churn, increases retention, and creates more advertising exposure. For every single product we launch now, we run an A/B test to measure the impact on total hours viewed. Everyone in the business has bought into that metric. 

We're always balancing the viewer experience versus the advertising experience, and as a subscription business, we probably need to be even more mindful of that than others. So, from an innovation perspective, we're looking for non-intrusive ad formats wherever possible. Sports rights are expensive, and broadcasters need to monetise them, but you also need to do so without being intrusive from a customer experience perspective. In terms of ITV’s backlash over its Rugby ads, it bought those rights, and it's a free-to-air business, so the only way it can monetise them is through advertising. I think you need to do a bit of education with the market. The saying goes, "if you're not paying for it, you are the product," yet that happens while knowing the customer experience is paramount.

As for what’s coming up for us, we were purchased by DAZN last year. I am excited about the innovations they can offer that we historically haven’t had access to in Australia. We've now got a world-class engineering team that can develop stuff at pace. So, we can test products in individual markets, learn from them, refine them, and then roll them out globally for the benefit of the whole group: that's going to be super exciting for us as we work more closely with them.

Charlotte McEleny is an award-winning marketing, communications, and content leader with over 15 years of experience spanning journalism, B2B marketing, and PR across Asia and Europe.