News Ltd, Foxtel-MCN super sales group floated

Market speculation has been building for months that News Limited has been flirting with the idea of forming a super advertising sales group, combining its pay TV, newspaper, magazine and online assets.

Today’s announcement, which saw News Limited unveil its paywall model for the Herald Sun and The Daily Telegraph, points to much closer alignments of News Corps units in Australia – the mastheads are bundling a Fox Sports service in their digital subscription packages for the news titles.

News Limited chief executive Kim Williams is said to have at least explored the idea of an all-encompassing sales group, which some media buyers said could be headed by MCN chief executive Anthony Fitzgerald. However, an official News Limited statement toAdNews downplayed the likelihood of the initiative.

“We are always looking at ways of better providing our customers with audience-led solutions and indeed we already do deliver integrated campaigns that include broadcast,” a News Limited spokesman said. “But there are no plans to form such a ‘supergroup’.”