BotW: TV networks fight like crabs in a pot; Accenture begs for a woman's touch; The ad wastage conundrum; Paramount upheaval
Welcome to Best of the Week, kicked off on Friday afternoon in Evandale whilst waiting for the nice man from Budget Direct to jumpstart the car, and wrapped up this morning to a beautiful sunrise over the Derwent. It’s been a week of waking up in hotel beds in Perth, Melbourne and now Hobart.
Today: Everyone’s talking about advertising wastage, but is anybody solving it? Also, as their business model changes, the TV networks foolishly fight among themselves. The winds of change blow more fiercely for Ten. And a wild job ad from Accenture.
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Ad wastage has been a problem for a century yet it’s only getting worse
One of the underlying themes of the week was advertising wastage.
I wish it were otherwise, but marketing journalists are required by law, whenever they talk about wastage, to quote John Wanamaker: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.” That quote was the best part of a century ago, but the problem has only got worse.
It emerged as a theme in research published on Wednesday by demand side platform The Trade Desk. Perhaps not surprising for a competitor to Facebook Ads and whatever Google calls DoubleClick these days, Trade Desk argues that dollars spent on ads inside the walled gardens of the platforms are not as effective as those in the open web.
The Trade Desk’s evidence comes from a survey of 2,000 Australian consumers who were asked about their behaviour both sides of the garden walls. It concluded that consumers were less engaged by media inside the platforms. The most focus, 39% apparently, takes place while reading newsletters (hurrah), playing mobile games (33%), on retail sites (32%), and watching streaming video services (29%). Only 21% of those surveyed said they were fully focused while consuming social media.
According to The Trade Desk’s report: “Forty percent of young Australians surveyed report spending more time on platforms like Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat. But time spent doesn’t translate to trust or engagement. In fact, the research shows that respondents are skeptical of ads on social media. They rank these platforms the lowest when it comes to trust.
“So where else should advertisers allocate budgets? Understanding what ads consumers do trust is a good way to answer this. For example, 19% of respondents said they were more likely to trust a brand that advertises on an open internet platform and found these ads less intrusive on their viewing experiences, while only 11% said they trust brand that advertises on social media.”
I suspect there was an element of push polling to the project. I did ask The Trade Desk to let me see the actual questions it asked for the survey, but it didn’t do so.
An additional caveat, of course, is relying on consumers to tell you what influences them. Their own perceptions and what actually works are often different. Most consumers believe that advertising does not work on them as an individual. The existence of a capitalist society suggests they are mistaken.
Nonetheless, given my own hypnotic state when consuming social media, it feels like there might be something it it.
Another attempt to solve the wastage puzzle comes from Melbourne-based marketing intelligence platform Prophet, which launched on Monday.
The press release was a masterpiece of hyperbole: “Founded by digital marketing heavyweights, the company is using Nobel-prize-winning math to solve the $1 trillion hole in marketing and advertising budgets caused by data blind spots and Google’s phasing out of cookies.” That’s great press release writing, isn’t it?
By “Nobel-prize-winning-math”, they mean that Prophet is analysing data using Bayesian probability technique. The use of Bayesian probability in developing game theory won the Nobel Prize in Economic Science in 1994.
During my day in Melbourne on Thursday I was able to get a quick demo from Prophet cofounder and CEO Jordan Taylor-Bartels.
Based on the press release (and an AFR article which misunderstood Prophet entirely, seeming to think it was a cookieless retargeting solution) my bullshit detector was pinging ahead of the meeting.
However, I came away thinking Prophet has built something tangible and interesting, which will likely be helpful for marketers trying to understand their media mix modelling. Prophet isn’t quite what Mutinex is doing. But it’s also not not what Mutinex is doing.
An hour wasn’t enough to fully understand the system. We’ll return to Prophet with a full The Unmakers podcast interview in a future week.
And I wrapped up my day in Melbourne at an event organised by the Sayers Group consultancy. Conducted under the Chatham House Rule so I won’t be able to share the whole thing, the focus of the conversation was an authoritative report on the programatic supply chain released late last year by the Association of National Advertisers in the US.
The central finding of the ANA report is that 64% of programmatic advertising dollars are wasted.
The biggest unanswered question was why on earth marketers are not asking far tougher questions of their media agencies.
TV’s former united front is, indeed, all over the shop
If I’d had to guess what would happen after this month’s bad tempered Future of TV Advertising conference, I’d have predicted that the CEO of Think TV Kim Portrate would take her three stakeholders and bang their heads together. With disruption in every direction, they need a united front to sell the strength of the medium.
In which case, I’d have been entirely wrong. The disunity between Seven and Nine in particular got worse this week. Gone is the united front Seven, Nine, Ten and Foxtel so effectively built after launching Think TV in 2016.
Bad enough that pay TV and subscription streaming player Foxtel has gone it alone on marketing and measurement, but the major three networks are still squabbling amongst themselves as their challengers get stronger and marketers shift their budgets elsewhere.
This week’s bomb throwing came - as it often does - from a “spokesman” for Seven who reached out to their trade press to inform them that Nine was “all over the shop”
Nine’s commentary on its first quarter performance was, Seven said, “inconsistent and confusing”.
The cause of the annoyance from Seven was a press release from Nine on Friday of last week claiming ratings victory for the first quarter.
At the time, I chose not to cover it. Since it’s Australia Day data massacre, audience numbers from OzTam are so limited that I tend to resist writing about the ratings because the information is only available cherrypicked from the networks.
In an attempt to end the news stories about fading audiences, the networks had agreed behind closed doors that everyone would stick to a national story, and focus on reach.
Seven would say that Nine broke the deal, offering a mixture of metro and national data to support its claims. When that sort of cherrypicking happens, it’s no longer possible for those writing about the sector to independently verify the data.
Things were already tense because Nine diverged from the FreeTV lobbying efforts in Canberra in February to argue for special treatment for its paid streaming platform Stan.
So Seven would argue that Nine had it coming. The neural pathways of outgoing CEO James Warburton, who came up through the TV wars of the last couple of decades when free to air television was still the most important medium, have developed as they’ve developed.
It’s hard not see the anger as one of the stages of grief Dentsu boss Danny Bass described the networks are experiencing for their challenged business model.
This week, Seven West Media’s market capitalisation finally fell below $300m.
The spats help nobody. The casual observer will trust everyone’s ratings claims even less.
The sales team at Amazon Prime Video must be chuckling as they prepare to launch into this market in the coming weeks.
Very few idiots make it to the top of media companies. But that doesn’t prevent them from occasionally idiotic behaviour.
Paramount manoeuvres
There were developments home and away for Paramount this week.
On Monday Beverly McGarvey was announced as president of Network Ten, head of streaming and ANZ lead. That was no major surprise - previously she had been in a dual leadership role with Jarrod Villani who departed last month in what looked to be a cost cutting move.
Unusually for a TV network though, chief sales officer Rod Prosser will not be reporting to McGarvey. His boss is the UK-based Paramount executive Lee Sears. Sears stepped up into the new role of President of Ad Sales International Markets earlier this month.
That arrangement says a lot about Paramount’s current (and I stress current) local priorities. The growth of Paramount+ comes first, ahead of Network Ten.
It may also say something about McGarvey’s own background - she came up through programming, not the sales team.
Not that Paramount will remain in its current state for much longer.
This week Apollo formally launched a $US11bn bid for parts of Paramount including its film studio arm. There’s already a seperate conversation going on with Skydance Media which might see a takeover of the whole business.
The dualling bids suggest an acceleration of the process, which will then trickle down to Australia.
It’s impossible to know yet what it means locally. Some outcomes would see the loss making Paramount+ service closed, which would include Australia. But others might see Paramount+ merged into somebody else’s service - for instance Warner Bros Discovery’s Max or NBCU’s Peacock. If that was a service not yet in the Australian market, then it might merely mean a rebadging locally.
Then comes the possibility of a split of the studios arm from the TV networks.
If that occurred, much of the logic of Paramount owning Ten disappears. The fee Ten pays to Paramount for content was the reason the company, back when it was known as CBS, bought the network out of administration in 2017. There could then be no appetite to own an Australian TV network from the new owner, in which case we might see Ten back on the block.
Unmade Index back down
The Unmade Index saw a downbeat finish to the week. After rising by 3% on Thursday, our tracker of locally listed media and marketing companies last 2.17% yesterday.
The biggest fall came from Ooh Media which lost 3.61%.
Next was Seven West Media, which lost another 2.63%, dropping to a market capitalisation of $285m. The company is down by 20% for the month and 55% for the year.
Dr Spin: Accenture really, really craves the feminine touch
Dr Spin writes:
Dr Spin is no HR expert, but he has the distinct impression that it’s illegal to advertise roles targeted at a particular gender. Like, for instance, Accenture’s ad (now removed) seeking to hire a technology strategy manager in Melbourne or Sydney.
They want somebody who can “analyze current issues with a woman’s perspective”. A woman, perhaps?
This person will need to offer “comprehensive technology strategies with a feminine touch”. Whatever the fuck that is.
And they also need to “craft detailed and actionable business cases” also while - you’ve guessed it “embracing the feminine touch”.
Oh yes, and they’re seeking someone with “business case experience with a feminine perspective”.
Yet, somehow, the entire ad, reads as if it has been written by somebody who has never actually met a woman.
And all that from an organisation that seeks to advise others on their workforce strategies.
COTW: Cornelius the rooster returns
In each edition of BOTW, our friends at Little Black Book Online highlight their Campaign of the Week
LBB’s APAC reporter Casey Martin writes:
Bastion has brought the wonderful rooster Cornelius to life in their campaign for Kellogg's Corn Flakes.
Playing with the simplicity of the brand, Bastion has celebrated Corn Flakes’ 100 year anniversary without the bells and whistles, but rather a charming story of Cornelius overseeing the production of his treasured Corn Flakes.
In case you missed it:
On Monday we discussed what shaped up to be a key week in ARN Media’s takeover bid for Southern Cross Austereo
On Tuesday we crunched the numbers to rank the eight listed communications holding companies operating in Australia
On Wednesday we celebrated the marketing strategy behind the successful launch of the Tasmania Devils AFL team
On Thursday we talked to Sam Buchanan, founding CEO of the fast growing industry body Independent Media Agencies Australia
And on Friday we revealed more of our lineup for HumAIn, and explored what happens when teams don’t get support from above to adopt new technologies
Time to leave you to your Saturday.
Abe Udy and I will be back on Monday with Start the Week. We’re both in Hobart tonight for the Diemans Awards. More on that in Monday’s podcast..
Have a great weekend
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade
tim@unmade.media
I’ve noticed a few tech jobs advertised recently looking for someone with a “bubbly” personality. I don’t believe I’ve ever heard that word used to describe a man; maybe Accenture can pop it in when they rework their advert.