WIN Television has claimed victory on the first night of its head-to-head Canberra news ratings battle with former feeder network Nine.
Actually, "dominated" and "trounced" was how billionaire Bruce Gordon's Wollongong-based broadcaster preferred to emphatically portray its win in a triumphant press release.
WIN's half-hour 6pm local news bulletin averaged 22,190 ACT viewers on Monday while the debut of Nine's new hour-long local, national and international news bulletin averaged just 11,355 viewers in its first 30 minutes.
Prime7's relay of Seven News from Sydney averaged 16,601 viewers in the same timeslot.
That's 37.9 per cent of the available commercial audience watching WIN News (which is presented out of WIN HQ in Wollongong), against 27.4 per cent watching Prime7's Seven News and 18.8 per cent watching the opening half of Nine's new Vanessa O'Hanlon-hosted, Sydney-based program.
More worrying for Nine was that, as WIN's media release helpfully highlighted, O'Hanlon's debut drew fewer viewers than Nine News had averaged over the previous two weeks, while WIN's audience was up.
After WIN's court battle with Nine last year over streaming in regional markets and its dumping by Nine after 27 years, WIN CEO Andrew Lancaster (also on the board of Ten by way of Mr Gordon's stake in the Family Feud network) offered what is already a frontrunner for understatement of the 2017 TV ratings year: "We are very happy ... to reach double the amount of viewers as Nine".
Night two of the 6pm battle was won by Prime, ahead of WIN and then Nine.
We can't help wondering, though, if there may be a bit of confusion among Canberra's free-to-air evening news viewers.Have you noticed how very similar the Nine News branding is to the WIN News branding?
Nine's decision to switch its programming across to WIN's regional TV rival Southern Cross Austereo last year was confusing enough (remember back in July when Offspring and MasterChef were suddenly on channel 8 on TV remotes in Canberra, not channel 5?).
But now their duelling nightly news branding looks identical.
Nine has gone all out on an advertising campaign in Canberra promoting O'Hanlon and its new bulletin - including buses - but its livery looks a lot like the existing WIN News livery.
Check out the logos and you will see a similar colour palette and almost identical design and layout.
The tubular lettering of WIN's corporate logo didn't seem to change after its bust-up with Nine (famous for its tubular numeral "9" and nine "balls"). So is the big splash of spending by Nine potentially beneficial to WIN?
Nine was reluctant to comment, other than to say "the branding for Nine News Canberra is consistent with the branding for Nine News across the rest of Australia".
"We think Canberra viewers are smart enough to work out what station they're watching and are confident that Nine News will soon be their favourite place to turn to for the very best local news," a spokesperson said.
Nine declined to disclose the amount of money they'd spent advertising O'Hanlon and the new bulletin, but a local ad executive described bus advertising alone as "expensive" and predicted a campaign spend of upward of $50,000.
WIN have hit back with their own advertising campaign - buying print and on their own channels with the tagline "27 Years of Trust".You can now add to that, one night of sweet, sweet trouncing!