Seven’s Clive Dickens discusses X Factor and last night’s ratings win

The return of The X Factor helped the Seven Network win the night on free-to-air.

Top line results saw the show top Sunday ratings with 1.506 million metro viewers overnightand significantly over 2 million overall. It was the most-watched show in the 25-54 age group with stronger figures than last year’s debut (of1.226 million) and the 2014 grand final, when 1.316 million tuned in.

Speaking to TMN this morning Seven West Media’s Chief Digital Officer Clive Dickenssaid the win sees the show maintain its 20% year-on-year ratings growth.

Dickens partly attributes the win to a refreshed marketing and promotional approach by Fremantle Media, with a focus on the stories of the contestants and mobile consumption from millennials.

“The whole approach is a much refreshed approach and that’s the theme of the series," he told TMN. "[…] So much additional effort has gone into the production, the judges, the promos and the tactic that gave us a sense that we should think about doing digital marketing in a different way.”

In a world-first, Seven West Media trialled the concept of allowing Facebook users to watch the season premiere in full on Thursday. The concept had been first taken on by US network HBO eight weeks ago, but the paid TV station offered Facebook users an early sneak peek of full episodes. One of the sneak peeks was Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson’s new series, Ballers. However a full stream of an entire episode had never been done natively inside Facebookbefore.

“The campaign reached over a couple of million Facebook users,” Dickens told TMN. “Then we had 100,000 views of the episode within three-and-a-half hours on Thursday night.

“We were expecting it to take a lot longer than that because obviously we have a lot of intelligence around video on demand consumption. So clearly there was a very, very high propensity to stream it in advance.”

The experiment saw Seven work with Facebook Australia to target the over 800,000 fans of the X Factor Australia brand on the social network as well as specific subgroups decided by the marketing team. Dickens told TMN the stream had a 90-95% positive feedback rate. “To be honest, it could have been higher than that but we stopped counting when we knew it was that high,” he said.

While Dickens told TMN is was unlikely Seven would conductsocial video targeting again for this series of The X Factor –especially since the shows move to a live format in a few weeks –the media company may consider doing it for other shows on the channel.

“I think the real answer to that question probably comes in a couple of months time when we see how the whole video on social approach is received throughout the series,” Dickens said.

The Seven Network’s successful Sunday was also boosted with the first episode airing ofthe Peter Allen mini-series, which drew in 1.333 million metro viewers and was the third most popular TV show last night.

Seven’s Director of Production Brad Lyons said in a statement: “This is an extraordinary response from fans eager to taste what this series has to offer. Thank you to all the fans of The X Factor who have overwhelmed Facebook to catch the first episode of X. You have broken records.”

Despite the ratings win, there has been early criticism about some of the contestants having already turned up in past TV shows. News.com.au reported the entrants included Seven Network’sSunrisehouse band member Natalie Conway, I Will Survive contestant Adrian Espulso, and The Voice Kids’ Ethan Karpathy, Chris Lanzon and Maddison Milewski.