Val Morgan taps category entry points, single audience and analytics platform across repackaged cinema, outdoor and digital publishing units.
(Originally published on Mi3)
Val Morgan has become the latest to eschew the silo, with the media company repackaging its cinema, outdoor and digital assets under a single banner with the tech to boot.
Alongside a new cross-media audience intelligence platform, the media company tapped Ehrenberg-Bass to create 10 category-based buys or entry points which run across the cinema, OOH and digital publishing units – the latter is a surprise digital publishing success story in which it has amassed 9 million users across licensed digital titles like Popsugar and BuzzFeed Cooking.
Val Morgan's 2025 overhaul comes as demand for cross-media activations and integrated briefs from agencies rose 23 per cent last year – 25 percent of agency briefs now seek to leverage more than one of Val Morgan’s channels.
In aggregate the company returned doubled digit growth of 14 per cent and group revenues now sitting north of $150 million.
Val Morgan Cinema boss Guy Burbridge says the group is “comfortably beating the market”, pointing to last year's figures.
Based on SMI data, 2024 growth rates for each of the divisions is as follows – Val Morgan Cinema up 8 per cent year on year, Val Morgan Outdoor (VMO) up 18.1 per cent and Val Morgan Digital up 35 per cent.
Cross-media view
After a horrific Covid, particularly for its cinema and OOH divisions, Val Morgan has spent 12 months on an overhaul bringing together existing channel data from CineTAM, Move 2.0 and Ipsos into a single group platform called Validate that will layer in consumer data sets from Visa, Nielsen IQ and Echo, along with location and movement data, to provide de-duped reach and tighter audience segment targeting.
Due out in the second half of 2025, the first iteration will wrap up cinema and outdoor data, with digital to follow later in the year. Additional data feeds are due for 2026 – including first party data from both Val Morgan and its clients.
The shift comes in response to what group strategy and marketing director Paul McGregor says was growing demand from the agency sect for Val Morgan to operate more cohesively as a group.
“We got to that stage where, although we were very successful in the individual verticals that we were operating in, as an overall business, suddenly we were very large, and we were playing in the same boat war game as some of the major media companies.”
The new market strategy would continue Val Morgan Group's double digit growth ambitions for this year, Cinema boss Guy Burbidge said. "We've got some reasonable targets and expectations," he said, later acknowledging they were in the double-digit range for the group.
For cinema, the absence of global sporting events in 2025 was seeing rapid advertiser demand increases for box releases like F1 with Brad Pitt and Mission Impossible 8 with Tom Cruise. 'They're zeitgeist moments, brands want in," Burbidge said. "We're 20 per cent ahead of forwards versus this time last year."
To keep up the momentum, Val Morgan has built the first 10 new audience Category Entry Point audience segments, borrowed from Ehrenberg-Bass Institute work, which will run across its three media divisions and facilitated by its new Validate audience and attribution platform.
"We’re moving beyond broad reach metrics," Burbidge said. "Validate answers the ‘why’ – showing how our assets drive market share, not just eyeballs. Validate isn’t off-the-shelf – we built it because our assets are unique. It’s about proving incremental reach ... clients need clarity on cross-asset performance – we’re future-proofing for that.”
Selling on science
Indeed, part of the new bundled market play is pushing beyond mass reach to the group-wide offering of these Category Entry Point "packs' which ultimately connect to commerce via VMO's retail screen network and Digital Publishing's commerce links.
“If you're not a category buyer, then you can't be converted,” says Burbidge, citing Ehrenberg-Bass principles. “Similarly, if a consumer can't make a category entry point to your brand, then likelihood of purchase drops to 4 per cent. That research shows that there is a correlation between the strength, depth and volume of category entry points and commercial success in driving outcomes.”
Val Morgan has put together prepackaged campaign packs for 10 of its biggest categories, and advertisers can build their own using Validate.
Burbridge said the business has been talking to the market about "high value audiences" – as opposed to reach based planning – for “two or three years now”.
It’s no longer proving an audience with data but “how do you go in and then go deep and through the line?," he said. “There's is definitely a lot of conversation and desire to move away from just the basic stuff like reach-based planning.”
Part of it, per McGregor, is also changing the way Val Morgan works with agencies and advertisers on how they’re planning media.
“It's trying to move us beyond just our sales guys talking to buyers, to actually having deep conversations with planners and strategists within agencies – and the language that they talk is around customer entry points.”
Quiet achievers
While cinema is the largest unit in the group, the retail-skewed Val Morgan Outdoor (VMO) and Val Morgan Publishing are growing faster. VMO is landing more screens and locations around shopping precincts as it taps the retail media surge and Val Morgan Publishing has emerged as a publishing dark horse – it has built an audience network of more than 9 million with licensed niche culture and tech titles that will be rolled into its new group audience and analytics platform.
Cinema has been the Hoyts-owned media company's core business since 2014, and it's in for another solid year with 5 per cent box office growth predicted for 2025. But outdoor and digital have also been coming in hot.
In the last year, VMO has grown its revenues by 20 per cent, lifted its screen network by 30 per cent as a result of Stockland and Viva Energy contracts. VMO sales director Geoff Cochrane, said VMO has seen strong programmatic growth "many times the industry average".
MD Paul Butler says VMO has "always been ahead" in driving programmatic adoption with agencies and clients, and "creating innovative solutions like DCOOH [Dynamic Creative for Out-Of-Home] to unlock its creative potential. With our entire network fully digital, we’ve ensured that 100 per cent of it can be traded programmatically—something that sets us apart from other outdoor publishers... This is why programmatic has been one of the fastest-growing parts of our business over the past three years."
Val Morgan Digital is the fastest growing channel of the three, diverging from the grim outlook facing much of the rest of the publishing market. Lesser known than some of its rivals, the publishing unit reaches 40 per cent of the population – titles include Buzzfeed, Tasty, Popsugar, The Latch and recent acquisition, Lad Bible – each tied into commerce with shoppable moments and full attribution.
"Our strategy is to bring leading publishing brands that complement our multi screen publishing approach, but what sets us apart as a modern digital publishing company versus local competitors is our investment in data, commerce tools, and partnerships in place to deliver measurable outcomes for our partners," said MD Brian Florido.
VMD's existing data ecosystem includes partnership with Lifesight for footfall measurement, as well as investment in Brand Metrics, shoppable ad formats, and global tech capabilities focused on brand safety. According to Florido, those capabilities give the business an "edge" that "legacy publishers can't compete with".
That sits alongside the publishing unit's diversified commercial model, which he says combines "programmatic, IO, activations, and content creation" to deliver tailored and "results-driven" solutions on every brief.
The idea is that Val Morgan's three units are now "future-proofed" for what comes next in media. "The market is tough," said Burbidge. "But we're confident."